It's a much bigger one, and yes. As Alex Tocqueville once said, America will endure until the day Congress discovers it can bribe us with our own money. And besides, the fact that I wouldn't want Trump to babysit my family won't ever justify robbing those who work hard to pay for the takers and gimmes of this world.
Tocqueville didn't actually say this. It's not really something that could have even come up in 1835: the US didn't even have an income tax at the time and primarily relied on tariffs for revenue. Federal government programs aimed at popular needs weren't even really an idea that existed in the 1830s outside of the Whig push for building roads and bridges and ports and lighthouses and such, which are far from anything we'd think of as welfare today.
Yeah, it immediately struck me as BS, but such is the intellectual level of the modern right. And this thread is a perfect encapsulation of why we can't possibly get along and just need to separate. Conservatives are divorced from empirical reality, and imagine that the rest of us will just continue to tolerate their undemocratic, authoritarian, minority rule from the Presidency, the Senate, and the Judiciary. I'm afraid not. But I hope they keep pushing, because there are parts of this country that I would absolutely love to jettison.
