Michael Knowles

don't actually need the help of Medicaid.

Because again, depending on where you are, you're talking about people who are many times over the actual poverty line who are receiving aid from the federal government.

If you don't have a program on the Republican side to actually go small, this is why big government conservatism is never going to last very long.

You'll have spates of it in reaction to even bigger government liberalism.

But I think that at a certain point, I know it's controversial and I know it's falling out of fashion.

At some point, conservatives may have to argue again for smaller government, not just quote unquote more efficient government.

I think that unless you connect it to a broader program of slashing these programs and restructuring these programs, it's very difficult to see it moving the needle.

And this is kind of what I was referring to earlier.

As long as the Republican Party is the party of, yeah, we should have these gigantic social welfare systems, but we'll just make them slightly more efficient.

And the Democratic Party is that's ungenerous and you should spend more money on them.

I think you lose that argument every time.

The whole point of the if you go back to the original sort of iteration of the pushback against the welfare state, which really had to wait until Ronald Reagan, the sort of welfare queen argument, right?

The idea that people are driving around Cadillacs based on welfare.

that was an argument that was not devoted to the idea that people were bilking the welfare system purely and so we should crack down on the fraud the idea was we may need to cut welfare entirely or we need to heavily chop into welfare we need to completely restructure the system as it works and that culminated of course in actual welfare reform in the 1990s under newt gingrich which is i still think one of the single most transformative things republicans have done over the course of the last half century well now you you look at what republicans are talking about and they're saying okay

You know, we'll do the Doge.

Doge will save us all the money because we'll go and we'll eliminate this line item that shouldn't have happened.

Or we'll do an investigation.

We'll cut this little piece of fraud out.

That's not going to get anybody animated.

The argument here is that Medicaid itself has huge systemic flaws.