Not all government expenditure is waste: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Entrepreneurial_State https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Entrepreneurial_State But it

Not all government expenditure is waste: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Entrepreneurial_State https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Entrepreneurial_State But it's also not hard to imagine equivalent scenarios of corporate welfare / graft. At some point, how different is it to give a corporation a bespoke $10B tax break, vs. wasting an identical amount in markup on a crony no-bid contract? Choosing the former over the latter is not necessarily any better. It's entirely reasonable to default to skepticism with regard to government spending; but that's different than the Norquistian view that taxation and government spending is a a-priori evil or net-negative on outcomes.