WHY WE NEED "BIG GOVERNMENT"

The right wing has been going on for a couple of decades about how "the government is the problem," about how horrible "big government" is, and whenever they have the opportunity, that is, whenever they're in office, they do everything they can to make the government smaller. Actually, that's not entirely true. In actual practice Republicans tend to only shrink the parts of government they don't like, usually in favor of large campaign donors, and grow the parts they like, usually in favor of large campaign donors, or of programs that they believe help them in campaigns, like the military.

But years of their "small government" rhetoric have their effect. The conventional wisdom is that the federal government is generally bloated, wasteful, and a huge hindrance to regular people like you and me.

Here are a couple of case studies in why "big government," when applied in very specific ways, is not only helpful, but absolutely necessary.

From the AP via the Houston Chronicle:

Agency knew of Utah mine's problems years before disaster

Bureau of Land Management inspectors noted serious structural problems at Utah's Crandall Canyon Mine at least three years before two roof collapses killed nine people in August, Congress was told today.

Yet the government's mine safety agency in another agency — the Labor Department — didn't know of the concerns about Crandall Canyon until after the accident, Kevin Stricklin, a coal mine safety and health administrator for Labor, told a Senate hearing on the accident.

The Labor Department had approved a plan to mine there.

"This is like the CIA not getting information from the FBI when we're getting attacked by terrorists," said Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., whose committee also is investigating the oversight by the Labor Department's Mine Safety and Health Administration of the mine and the accident response.

More here.

As liberal as Kennedy is, bless his corrupt little black heart, he's still mired in old school thinking: this wasn't simply a miscommunication. BLM has been under Republican control since Bush stole the White House in 2001. Since then, he's gone a very long way toward taking apart regulation enforcement--that is, the laws mandating the exposing of such unsafe conditions are still on the books; Bush just doesn't enforce them, presumably because this kind of "big government" interference is bad for business, that is, bad for his wealthy campaign donors.

But make no mistake about it. Nine men are dead, too poor to donate to the GOP, and Bush's White House could have prevented it.

And again from the AP via the Houston Chronicle:

Accidents rise at labs handling deadliest germs

Likewise, the number of labs approved by the government to handle the deadliest substances has nearly doubled to 409 since 2004, and there are now 15 of the highest-security labs. Labs are routinely inspected by federal regulators just once every three years, but accidents trigger interim inspections.

In a new report by congressional investigators, the Government Accountability Office said little is known about labs that aren't federally funded or don't work with any of 72 dangerous substances the government monitors most closely.

"No single federal agency ... has the mission to track the overall number of these labs in the United States," said the GAO's report, expected to be released later this week. "Consequently, no agency is responsible for determining the risks associated with the proliferation of these labs."

More here.

Right, but any of these agencies could become responsible with a stroke from the President's pen, an executive order. But inspections are "bad for business," imposing on the profits of wealthy campaign donors. See? "Big government" is bad. It hurts the economy. On the other hand, large epidemics of weird science fiction bugs hurt the economy, too. Not to mention all the death.

In the end, the whole big/small government debate is bullshit. We have a big country, with a big economy, and we deal with big issues: of course, we need "big government." The real debate ought to be about wasteful spending, whether regulations actually do what they're supposed to do, whether they really do impose too much on the economy, and about where and how we need more government regulation. That's how it all was, actually, before conservatives started all this "big government" nonsense back in the late 70s.

It's time to end the bogus and pointless debate about vague governmental size issues and return to the hard work of balancing the needs of individual citizens with the overall needs of the nation and its economy. Not easy, but vital.

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