That "big government" you hate is private industry stealing your money

You want government to be efficient and accountable? Ban all privatization and contractors.  The bonus is that doing so will hurt repugs and the plutocrats they fellate.

Digby:

This scheme to give taxpayers money to the private sector to do traditional functions of government was touted as being more "efficient" even though we were paying a profit-taking middle man. The idea stemmed from a belief that those profit-taking middle men were just so much better at everything than some faceless government bureaucrat. And they are very good at what they do --- scamming lots of money from the taxpayers.

One of the GOP's great successes during the Reagan era was persuading people that government was their enemy.  This, in turn fed naturally into the idea that private institutions, corporations, were your friend. They were making it possible for you to live a better life. (GE's famous advertising slogan was literally that: "We bring good things to life.")  Now, why average workers actually believed this I never understood except for the idea that they were intimate with their own bosses and co-workers and so saw the essential humanness of them as compared to "the government". But they did believe it. And the results are in. In nearly all aspects of our lives, wealthy individuals and private institutions in conjunction with government are spying on us, getting us into useless wars from which they profit, putting us in jail and making us financially vulnerable.

This new discussion of income inequality remains quite abstract in many ways.  And it's hard to tell if it will mean anything if people start to feel a little bit less stressed financially.  But the fact remains that people have been getting royally screwed for decades and things aren't getting any better.  If the Democrats can shake off their propensity to sell themselves to the highest bidder for campaign cash, they might have a winning message.  This experiment has been a failure for average people. If they are willing to tell the truth about that, people may just be ready to hear it.