{"id":866,"date":"2008-10-22T07:00:00","date_gmt":"2008-10-22T12:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/nicholsclan.com\/tinblog\/2008\/10\/cognitive-dissonance.html"},"modified":"2008-10-22T07:00:00","modified_gmt":"2008-10-22T12:00:00","slug":"cognitive-dissonance","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/timscogitorium.com\/tinblog\/2008\/10\/cognitive-dissonance.html","title":{"rendered":"Cognitive Dissonance"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>This morning&#8217;s <a href=\"http:\/\/www.democratandchronicle.com\/article\/20081022\/NEWS01\/810220324\/1003\">paper contains a picture on the front of the Local section<\/a> showing a family standing behind their McCain-Palin lawn poster.  The picture is captioned, &#8220;Ron Frear, with wife Karen, Ron Jr. and Shannon, believes in small government.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s hard to argue with that sentiment.  I too, believe that government should be no bigger than it absolutely needs to be.  The G.O.P. has always hung their hat on smaller government as a fundamental party tenet.  They sell this as something they will deliver to their supporters, and conversely position the Democrats as champions of pseudo-Socialism who will usher in a bloated government with excessive and wasteful spending.  This is a Republican sales strategy which is clearly resonating with people like Mr. Frear.<\/p>\n<p>The only trouble is, it doesn&#8217;t match with reality.  Witness a <a href=\"http:\/\/www.brookings.edu\/gs\/cps\/light20030905.pdf\">Brookings Institute paper<\/a> which looks at the number of direct and indirect federal employees from 1990-2002.  Look at the table on page 4.  It clearly shows that government shrunk under Clinton while expanding under both Bush Sr. and Jr.  It&#8217;s continued to grow since then.<\/p>\n<p>So Mr. Frear is right that smaller is better when it comes to government, and I encourage him to vote this year for the party that is most likely to bring that to fruition.  It&#8217;s just that the data would strongly suggest that he&#8217;s standing behind the wrong sign.<\/p>\n<div class=\"blogger-post-footer\">\n<h6><span style=\"font-weight: bold; font-style: italic;\">Brought to you by Tim&#8230;<br \/>\n<a href=\"http:\/\/www.timscogitorium.com\/tinblog\/\">-Read the whole blog here-<\/a><\/span><\/h6>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>This morning&#8217;s paper contains a picture on the front of the Local section showing a family standing behind their McCain-Palin<\/p>\n<p class=\"readmore\"><a href=\"https:\/\/timscogitorium.com\/tinblog\/2008\/10\/cognitive-dissonance.html\" title=\"Read Cognitive Dissonance\">Read more &raquo;<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-866","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/timscogitorium.com\/tinblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/866","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/timscogitorium.com\/tinblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/timscogitorium.com\/tinblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timscogitorium.com\/tinblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timscogitorium.com\/tinblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=866"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/timscogitorium.com\/tinblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/866\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/timscogitorium.com\/tinblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=866"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timscogitorium.com\/tinblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=866"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timscogitorium.com\/tinblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=866"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}