Kevin McCarthy shows why the era of small government is over - The Washington Post

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House Speaker Kevin McCarthy went to Wall Street on Monday to reiterate the Republican Party’s threat to wreck the U.S. economy by engineering a default on the country’s debts unless its vague demands for spending cuts are met. McCarthy (Calif.) wants this presented as a debate between advocates of “big government” and “small government,” which is how it is commonly understood.

In fact, this debate is really between two different brands of “big” government. It’s true that Democrats generally want government to spend more money, while Republicans want it to spend less — at least on social services. (They’re happy, though, to spend enormous amounts on certain things, including the military.) But Republicans also want government to be much more intrusive and involved in Americans’ lives, watching them for questionable behavior and limiting the choices they make.

Let’s take one example that McCarthy and Republicans are getting ready to propose: the imposition of “work requirements” for the tens of millions of Americans who rely on Medicaid for health insurance or food stamps to feed their families. If you’re looking for big government, work requirements are it.

The idea has intuitive appeal: It’s good for people to work, right? But in practice, requiring “work” means forcing people to continually document their work hours to the government. Imagine getting your boss to sign time sheets once a month to prove you were working, then uploading them to the state using a buggy website. Now, imagine you didn’t have a computer at home. And if you didn’t follow all the complicated instructions, you could lose health coverage, a constant threat keeping you up at night.

You might feel as though the government was looming awfully large in your life even as it was being stingy with benefits. Which is happening now around the country; just read this article about how Iowa is spending millions to create a new bureaucratic maze for food-stamp recipients to navigate. If they fail to jump over all the hurdles, they’ll lose their benefits.

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That is how work requirements have always functioned: They’re a tool to kick lots of people off their health coverage or their food assistance, but what they don’t do is get anyone working in a way that benefits them. And they’re the opposite of small government; they create more bureaucracy as a means of making the lives of poor people, who have less of a voice to begin with, even more difficult.

This is just one way that the push to have government spend less money can wind up making government more punitive and intrusive in people’s lives. Now, let’s consider some of the other things Republicans have been doing lately:

In most of these cases, there isn’t much question of how much money the government is going to spend, at least not directly. After all, banning books costs almost nothing; it’s certainly cheaper than educating children. But a party that actually believes in “limited government” doesn’t tell you what you can read, what you can say, what clothes you can wear or what medical care you can get.

There’s a good case to be made that the GOP never really favored limited government; it has always been an idea Republicans apply only to goals and purposes they don’t like in the first place, just as they only begin complaining about the deficit and debt when Democrats are in power.

During his Wall Street remarks, McCarthy used the word “spending” more than 25 times, often modified with words such as “reckless,” “excessive” and “out-of-control.” That’s how he would like to portray government when it’s trying to provide things such as health coverage or food: a gigantic, lumbering beast, squashing your freedom under its massive weight.

But spending money isn’t the only thing that makes government “big.” Today’s Republicans have a vision of a government that provides fewer social services but is vastly more invasive in everyone’s lives. You can call it many things; just don’t be fooled into thinking it’s small.