When I put government in scare-quotes, I was alluding to - quoting! - what this country's hard-right has always actually meant when they've used the word for said 70 years: they mean services! Human services, social services, the safety net, welfare assistance, and above all any shred of help for the poor, the uneducated, or the disabled.
Every American knows what the word means in the context of the project I'm talking about.
The expansion you're talking about is true, of course. It's just true of, say, the Pentagon, or the "intelligence community", or subsidies to [insert rapacious economic interest groups], or bailing out Wall Street, or the airlines, or the car companies, etc.
In the early 60s military spending was half the federal budget, today it is around 16%.
Social security was 13% of the budget in 1962, today it is 23%. Medicare did't exist in 1962, today it is 17% of the budget. Medicaid didn't exist in 1962, today it is 9% of the budget. Other safety net programs that did not exist in 1962 include CHIP, the ACA, the Earned Income Tax Credit, and the Child Tax Credit.
If there is a 70-year project to gut government it has been a massive failure, government spending has grown at the same rate as the economy. 70 years ago, the majority of the federal budget was military spending. About half the budget today is Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, without taking into account the dozens of other social service programs.
> The expansion you're talking about is true, of course. It's just true of, say, ...
It's also true of the welfare state, contrary to what you're dishonestly insinuating.
> any shred of help for the poor, the uneducated, or the disabled
You're dishonestly implying that government programs are the only form of aid, whereas the empirical evidence shows that private charity is much more cost effective.
And yet the government continues to expand in money, scope, and power at an incredible rate.