Q: What do you get if you vote for people who warn you about getting too dependent on government?
A: You end up with a government you can't depend on for anything.
How hard is it to figure out after all? If you put people in government who don't believe government is the answer to anything, they're not going to be part of the solution - they'll be part of the problem!
This isn't rocket science, but it might as well be for too many people.
Feel free to riff on this in comments and come up with ways to put it to work. Think of it as homework for Thanksgiving, when those certain relatives will be showing up and they'll have all kinds of talking points they've been spoon fed by FOX, Rush, Hannity, etc. etc. You may not convince them - but if you can get the fence-sitters to thinking, it just might be worth a try.
Just for starters, let me throw out a classic: "Heckuva job, Brownie."
If you want more material for discussion, Digby has a good summary of just how "Socialist Hell" compares with American Freedumb. It takes from an article by Josh Holland on The Great American Ripoff: The High Cost of Low Taxes.
Contrary to popular belief, American families and corporations enjoy relatively low taxes – in the OECD, we ranked third from the bottom in total tax burden in 2010 – but it’s almost a wash when you add back what we spend out-of-pocket. The eight OECD countries with the highest tax burdens in 2010 (Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Belgium, Italy, France, Austria and Finland) paid out an average of just over 32 percent of their economic output for social services, while we forked over just under 30 percent.Facts are good things, but most people have worked hard to build up defenses against them - so hopefully the Q&A above might be able to crack open a small opening.The difference is that we ranked near the bottom in the OECD (26th out of 34 countries) in terms of public spending on these services. Government-provided services accounted for around 19 percent of our gross domestic product (GDP), compared with 29 percent of GDP in those high-tax countries. The difference was made up from out-of-pocket spending by citizens.