Yellowstone business owners unhappy campers

Guessing most of these owners vote for Republicans because, small government. That would be the same Republicans who forced the sequester cuts designed to take a chainsaw to the national budget to take effect because, pisses off liberals, or something. Then the business owners discovered this is what "small government" looks like.

Yellowstone Park having to cut something, suspended snow plowing for a couple of weeks to save $400K . Bad for business. Via Kevin Drum, owners decided to pony up the cash to get it done themselves.

But therein lies the perennial rub: Cuts that are welcomed in the abstract are not always appreciated when they hit home. And everything the government does, however small, touches somebody. "You pay your taxes to get certain services," said Bruce Eldredge, executive director of the Buffalo Bill Historical Center, a world-class museum in the center of town, which delivered a $10,000 check to the chamber. "We would, I think, probably argue as a community that we pay our federal taxes to make sure the park is open at a specific time."

This is, obviously, the problem of government in a nutshell: everyone wants spending to be cut, but no one wants spending to be cut on them. They want it to be cut on other people.

In particular—and please excuse the wild guess here—I imagine that most people who have a serious jones for cutting federal spending are really only interested in cutting spending on poor people. Cutting other services just isn't what they signed up for. It's the Obamaphones and the food stamps that are wasteful, not the Yellowstone snowplows and small town air traffic controllers.

Exactly. Their spending is necessary. They are the mighty makers. Only wasteful spending is on those shiftless poors. You know, those takers who are dependent on government services these people don't need.