What is a Government?

This isn't related to literature or arts, or anything else in the Lit Department wheelhouse, but dear lord, I am so angry that I can't see straight.

Check out this post at Shakesville with an excerpt from Ezra Klein's latest installment of dribble in the Washington Post.

I'll excerpt both here.

Ezra:

In order to get less Medicaid and teacher funding than we actually need, we're cutting food stamps by $6.7 billion (and closing some foreign tax loopholes, rescinding some spending decisions and changing Medicaid's drug pricing)
....
And here we are. Democrats needed to offset spending on two worthy, important programs. So they're cutting another important, worthy program. But you really can't think of a worse program to cut than SNAP. SNAP is an extraordinarily well-targeted stimulus. It goes to poor households, for something they need to buy. According to Mark Zandi's numbers, it's literally the most stimulative way to spend a dollar: Better than state and local aid, or unemployment insurance. You get more than $1.70 of economic activity for each buck you put in.
....
But this is also a question of priorities, of what gets cut. Bernie Sanders put up an amendment last month to cut about $35 billion in oil and gas subsidies. It failed. Republicans are arguing to extend Bush's tax cuts for the rich with no offsets, and they may well succeed. But food assistance for poor families? You can get the votes to slash those.

And Melissa @ Shakesville:

Current Department of Defense budget, including spending on "overseas contingency operations" for Fiscal Year 2010: $663.8 billion.

If defense-related expenditures budgeted by departments other than Defense are included, the US will spend, in total, between $800 billion and $1 trillion in FY2010 on defense.

And we're slashing the budget for food stamps.

And this right here is the part where my brain near exploded. Because, in my mind, this is just so blatantly and obviously backwards. But it's not backwards to many people in this country... well, assuming they've even troubled their brain to think about it. And I think for the first time I realized that the clusterfuck is happening because Democrats and Republicans will never really agree, fundamentally, what the purpose of a state is. What is the purpose of government. What do we want it to be? I don't think most citizens can agree either.

Is the government there to support and protect citizens by providing things like education and medicine and social services, and a cushion (provided by taxes we as citizens paid into) for harder times? And to provide and maintain infrastructures like roads and highways and dams so that we as citizens can live with a reasonable level of efficiency and comfort in order to go about our daily lives?

Or is it there to support industry? To put forth a foreign policy agenda? To wage wars in order to protect that industry and that foreign policy agenda? For a political party that cries all the time about Dems ruining their "free-market" economy, we sure put a FUCKING lot of resources into protecting and aiding and abetting that fucking economy.... well, at least the major players in it.

And to my mind, none of these wars (and therefore defense spending) are about protecting or supporting U.S. citizens. None of them are about protecting and supporting foreign citizens anymore either (we are so not protecting Iraqis and Afghans at this point, if we ever were). And yet..... $1 TRILLION on defense. But sorry folks, no way to pay you that $80 in food stamps.

I hear Canada is nice this time of year.

(BTW, the definition of Government on wikipedia is woefully flawed and just about the most unhelpful thing I've ever read, so, just don't.)