Nobody has reduced the size of government since Calvin Coolidge. Even the sainted Ronald Reagan grew the government. Slowing its growth is the only option.
Repealing or even defunding Obamacare cannot happen when the repealers occupy one House of Congress. That's the way our government works.
This quixotic mission to defund was always doomed. But, it will increase the coffers of Freedom Works, Heritage Action, and one Theodore Cruz.
Back in Reagan's day (and I know because I was there), the government and our debt were still small enough that GDP growth could conceivably outpace both, given a program of reduced taxes and regulation. That government spending expanded at all was a function of the need to replenish a threadbare military force facing a dangerous Soviet expansionism.
We're in a different world now. Federal spending in 1984 was $851.81 billion. In 2013 it is projected to be $3.685
Trillion. Our gross public debt in 1984 was $1.564 trillion. Now it is $17.249 trillion. Our unfunded public liabilities now exceed $125 trillion, with a shrinking workforce, a zero birth rate, millions of illegal aliens about to be added to the Federal Hammock, and ObamaCare about to add to the already impossible mathematics that spells "doom". We've passed the last exit on the Road to Disaster.
The forces standing up and admitting to this unfolding nightmare do not include the Republican Party leadership, its head firmly in the sand, up its own posterior, or else enjoying the cocktails your money continues to buy them before they jet off to wherever they plan to go with their offshore accounts before this whole mother blows up, which, in point of fact and with absolute mathematical certitude, it will.