Surprise, surprise. The radical right cuts safety budgets to the bone and Americans get sick. Letting such bad ideas become law was bad enough but allowing it to continue is even worse. For the ten millionth time, business self-regulation does not work. Americans are still expecting to receive a certain level of consumer protections but the Republicans gutted the system long ago, which is why we continue to have so many health problems:
Historian Rick Perlstein, author of "Nixonland," calls it "E. coli conservatism" -- government shrinks and shrinks until people get sick.
"Government is not the solution to our problem," President Reagan famously declared in his inaugural address in 1981. "Government is the problem."
Many conservatives have gone far beyond that. Their traditional embrace of small government has been replaced with outright disdain for it. Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform, doesn't just want to shrink government. To use his words, he wants government "down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub."
Once in power, E. coli conservatives shrink government by hamstringing it. They weaken rules that protect people, slash the budgets of consumer agencies and appoint industry friends to oversight commissions. The result: Some government regulatory agencies that we trust to protect us have shrunk to insignificance or serve private industry rather than consumers.
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