This framing means absolutely nothing, which is why politicians love it. It just sounds bad, without actually saying anything and pretty much any negative news headline can be accommodated by it.
But it doesn’t actually shed any light on what the actual problems are. In this case, as you point out, there’s an agency issue. The people paying the money have no real representation in the effort to distribute that money. The problem has nothing to do with the size of the government.
This framing means absolutely nothing, which is why politicians love it. It just sounds bad, without actually saying anything and pretty much any negative news headline can be accommodated by it.
But it doesn’t actually shed any light on what the actual problems are. In this case, as you point out, there’s an agency issue. The people paying the money have no real representation in the effort to distribute that money. The problem has nothing to do with the size of the government.