How or why did government workers start being regarded as "the enemy?"?

It’s just a way of saying that many middle class taxpayers feel like they can’t afford any more government.

I don’t think it’s personal, any more than I think politicians in Washington actually think that the rich are heartless and greedy when they start talking cynically about making them “pay their fair share”.
Anyway, as you know, corporations do not pay taxes anyway. They simply pass them through as increased prices to the consumer. There really is not a “thing” that pays taxes called a corporation. It is only a collection of people (workers, execs, stockholders). When they have to pay more, they simply raise the price in order to make up for the shortfall.

It is all just grist for the political mill.

You’ll know how the debate went after an election.

Actually, there IS a thing called a corporation that pays taxes to the government. In a sole proprietorship or limited liability company, the owner of the company is liable for taxes as well as potentially being sued for any damages that the business is responsible for. When a business “incorporates” (becomes a corporation), the business becomes an entity unto itself that is treated as a separate person (see corporate personhood) with the responsibility to pay taxes. If the corporation is sued, it is not the same thing as suing the owner. And corporations, viewed as their own “person,” now have increased freedom of speech, too.

Ronald Regan started it when he said “The worst thing you can hear is ‘I’m from the government and I’m here to help”
He also said “Government can’t solve the problem, government IS the problem .”
Thanks a lot Ronnie. See what you created?

The only way for the conservative agenda to work is if there is a war or enemy to rally against.

Since they can’t start a real war, they have to find another group (preferably people that vote Democrat) that are “obviously” enemies of a free corporate America.

Last election cycle it was Arabs and “illegal aliens”. Well the Hispanics were getting tired of it and some of them could be persuaded to vote republican and Middle Easterners are keeping their head down; hence “greedy government employees” are this year’s scape goat. The neocon strategists obviously forgot that there were other government employees than Washington bureaucrats. Many firefighters, police, teachers and nurses are government employees.

This strategy may work. Many of the public workers may be jobless by the next election and they’ll be so busy trying to find a job and to make ends meet, they’ll forget or won’t have time to vote.

This has two advantages, it gets a great deal of liberal and progressives out of the voting booth, apparently lowers local budgets and shifts the burden to charity and volunteers. It also makes it easier to manipulate the voting machines to assure the “proper” election results.

Karl Rove is really smart; evil but smart.

@laureth My answer stands. The same rules apply. I am a corporation. I am also me. If my taxes go up, I either fire somebody or raise my price.

@josie It is amazing; corporations don’t pay taxes, they have the same rights as real people, they can shirk responsibility because the only way to punish their misdeeds is to fine them and that money gets eaten up by legal fees.

I guess supply and demand no longer applies and they can just pass along their tax burden indiscriminately. I know that applies to really big corporations but us little guys have to play by real world rules.

@josie – Taxes come out of profits (which is the stuff left after you get done paying people, rent, buying raw materials, etc.) so if you, as a “corporation,” want to avoid higher taxes, hire more people, or pay them more. ;)

Anyway, to answer the original question, the reversal had its roots in the “Reagan Revolution.”

@laureth Reagen was the reason that I changed form Republican to Democrat. It wasn’t that the Democrats were so good, it was that the Republican party turned so bad!

Before “The Three Great Lies” became popular
Of course I’ll respect you in the morning.
Your check is in the mail,
I’m from the government and I am here to help you.

Three great lies goes back to 60s at least.

Because on the surface (all that most people really have time for) taxation doesn’t add up right. When you buy lightbulbs from GE, you have lightbulbs where your money used to be. When you are taxed, you don’t get lightbulbs; rather, the money goes to a collection of people far away who don’t really care about you and probably won’t listen to you (or even do what they said that they would do), and who might not make a difference in your life at all, except to leave you poorer.

Intellectually, we know that taxes fund much of what keeps our society intact. But Man is as much about his gut as he is about his head, and his gut is telling him that it smells a rat.

As for government workers, people have never really liked them. Bureaucrats in particular, because it seems like all they do is warm chairs, block access to real power, and misplace one’s applications, records, and other documents.

In response to where taxes go – and the things we don’t see – I present an oldie but a goodie. I didn’t write this, but it fits here.

Day in the Life of Joe Middle-Class Republican

Comment from one of my colleagues:

“What I find interesting is that the same people are calling me both a greedy, overpaid teacher and a greedy welfare queen. Apparently, they think I make so much money that I qualify for food stamps?”

I understand why people dislike DMV employees, but they are not the only government workers. Teachers, firefighters, and soldiers are also from the government—and we are here to help. Or is the Army a socialist stronghold now?

Because doing anything through official channels from requesting a legal name change to obtaining a temporary liquor license for a picnic in a public park, involves trudging from office to office. You acquire a new piece of paper at each one from a succession of surly drones who can’t or won’t give you an outline of the whole procedure. At the end of the day you are frustrated that your taxes are paying for this inefficient system.

@Blueroses But again, bureaucrats aren’t the only government workers. Moreover, bureaucracy is actually very efficient given the tasks that it is meant to accomplish. We just don’t realize it because we haven’t had to deal with the alternatives. This isn’t to say that there aren’t problems within our own system that could be fixed, but only to say that the system—annoying as it may be us as individuals—is quite useful to us as a society.

Reagan was the reason I left the US. (well, not entirely.. but I saw where things were going…)
I’ve been lucky enough to live in other countries with other methods.
I think what burdens the US is it’s size and apathy. Those two ingredients are dynamite when it comes to waves of fickle decisions and swift pendulum swings of public opinion. All fanned by corporations that steer the commercial interests of the media.

@cazzie Reagen wasn’t as evil as he was stupid. He let his advisers make decisions and run programs. He let Bernanke talk him into raiding Social Security to pay for tax breaks for the rich assuming that the money would trickle down to us peons. Bush Sr. recognized this as voodoo economics but Tea Party and neocons believe it to be a fact. It is also one of the main reasons we are having our current economic issues.

I have been interested in emigrating to Canada because I am too old to participate in a revolution.

Well, perhaps I should have put it more clearly. Reagan´s second term was one of the reasons I was OK with leaving the US.

@cazzie I understood and agreed with you. All I did was leave the Republican party, you went full bore and jumped ship completely. I wanted to emigrate to Australia and had a pretty good offer but couldn’t talk my wife into it.

@Ron_C ah.. I was 19 and on my own and got an offer from New Zealand and ended up making it my home. There was no comparison. I lived a freer, more independent, self sufficient life in New Zealand than I ever could have in the US. I left a pretty good job in the US to go, it was a very small, family own business with not much room for promotion and no healthcare and a very limited space for salary increase, and as it was tech based, the equipment I was working on had a limited life anyway and it was time to look further afield. I just took it to extremes.

But for everyone: I think THIS deserves a look again….

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R7K-VZ4PjR8