Every year, the United States government provides Medicare benefits to over 55 million elderly and disabled beneficiaries, and Medicaid or Children's Health Insurance Program benefits to over 73 million low-income and disabled beneficiaries. It offers an economic boost to almost 26 million low-income working American families (via the Earned Income Tax Credit), helps over 32 million American families pay their mortgages (via the mortgage interest tax deduction), and subsidizes health insurance for the approximately 155 million Americans who get health insurance through their employers. Despite all this, trust in the U.S. government has never been lower.
This paradox is at the center of The Government-Citizen Disconnect, the fascinating new book by Cornell University political scientist Suzanne Mettler. Mettler's goal in writing the book was to explore one simple question: "How can government do so much, yet be so despised?"
"The distrust is part of a long-term trend. After 9/11, there was a brief period where people had more positive attitudes about government, but then the levels went back to where they'd been," Mettler tells Pacific Standard. "And there are reasonable reasons for the distrust—it's harder to get congress to act because of polarization, things like that—the puzzle is how can it be that that is happening at the same time as people are relying so much on the government for income and education and health care and support for housing."
[For more on this story by DWYER GUNN, go to https://psmag.com/economics/wh...t-at-an-all-time-low]
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