Aren't the last 30 years sort of the problem though? How about we check the 30 years before that: medicare, social security, the tail end of the new deal, the rapid cleanup of acid emissions which were wrecking forests all up and down the east coast... Seems like, starting in the 80's, you would have looked at this and said hey, this government knows what it's doing, we should let it do more stuff.

Instead we basically did the opposite, starving federal programs everywhere possible (virtually every entitlement or program that existed in the 80's is smaller today on a per-person-PPP basis). And now we're seeing the results in a crisis that demands an agile and powerful government response.

So I'd sort of flip this around: what was it we did in the last 30 years that destroyed our confidence in our own government? Because it used to work.