A smaller government, in the eyes of those who keep proposing one, would be better and more efficient in producing the products that only government can produce, like national security. That would be nice but these anti-government folks never seem to be able to make do with the four hundred billion or so already dedicated to that effort in our defense budget. Then there are the massive subsidies paid out to the friends of every administration in BIG agriculture. These subsidies are always talked about as a boondoggle, but no one ever seems to find time to propose an end to them. I am willing to predict none of the antis will ever really take these funds away from their friends in the huge corporations that dominate much of our agricultural production today.

There are subsidies for schools that can't teach children to be civil. There are subsidies for a space program that can't fly. There are subsidies for nursing homes that can't provide comfort for the dying, much less adequate care, but are highly profitable. There are massive subsidies for the health care industry which is as sick as its sickest patients. None of these will end any time soon. There are subsidies for the police needed to keep putting our addicts in prison. This is the chosen course in a war on our own people that we call a war on drugs. There are subsidies for the prisons that we have chosen instead of treatment centers, for those who falter in their pursuit of success. I predict that none of these will end any time soon, regardless of the ascendance of the antis.

There are subsidies for building highways big enough to drive all of the cars we buy every year. There are tax breaks for buying gas hog SUV's. There are smaller tax breaks for buying fuel efficient vehicles. There are subsidies for the mass transit that never seems to improve our access to places that we want to go. There are even subsidies for the tobacco industry, which we have sued as a source of revenue for bigger government. Yes this is a really big government. A lot of rich people profit from its size without paying the true costs of keeping it big. I predict it will stay at least big enough to help them concentrate much of the wealth of this nation in their hands.

Not many of the poor profit from big government nearly as much as the wealthy. The voices of the poor are seldom heard in the halls of congress where lobbyists for the corporate interests and their owners would drown them out. One of the reasons that the statement "the poor are always with us" remains true is how governments like ours treat poverty. The poor are always the red haired stepchild of government. The big government is not the parent of any homeless child. There are no highly paid lobbyists working to help bring the impoverished children and their parents in off of the streets. The poor have no child care, no health care and little educational opportunity today. I predict there will be few rich children running the streets in street gangs, risking their life every day to go to schools where learning is not often possible.

This is a really big, BIG, BIG Government, and it is likely to stay that way. At least it will be big as long as it can borrow enough money to put the burden of its size on our grandchildren. Big Government is the price we pay for transferring a lot of the wealth of this nation upwards toward the wealthy. It is not the price we pay for transferring that wealth downwards into the hands of the poor. The total budgets of all the government programs that transfer money downward are miniscule compared to those that transfer wealth upwards. Just the interest on the national debt alone, which is a vast transfer of wealth upwards, is bigger than all of the poverty programs combined. I predict that the national debt and the interest we pay on it will continue to grow. I also predict that the anti-big government folks will eventually succeed in impoverishing this government. Won't they be surprised when their wealth is worth less in a nation where the big government is too broke to subsidize them? God bless and keep you all safe in these times of big government and bigger poverty in our nation.