Why would anyone resist taking care of a small problem

Before it becomes huge and massively more expensive? Those who wish to spend neither compassion nor money. Via skippy, Jane Smiley at Huffington Post:

What costs more--a government that functions smoothly or one that is riven with investigations and conflicts? A government where experts can do their jobs, or one where experts are continuously interfered with so that finally they leave in droves, to be replaced by know-nothings who can't do the job? (Let's not forget that the right wing's war on the government continues whether they are in power or out of power.)

What costs more--having sensible regulations for consumer product safety or having no regulations--which leads to injuries, illnesses, deaths, medical bills, lawsuits, bankruptcies, loss of productivity, and years of inconsistencies in the marketplace that hamper product design?

What costs more--a vast middle class who can support themselves and their towns and cities and schools and children and elderly relatives, or a vast class of working poor who can barely support themselves and certainly cannot take care of failing schools, deteriorating housing stock, surging crime, and chaos proliferating all around them? Just because the conservatives don't want to pay for something doesn't mean costs are not incurred; they are simply put off for another day, when they will be geometrically higher.

The root problem of conservatism is that it is tribal--conservatives cannot or will not believe in such basic concepts as epidemiology, ecology, or even Keynesian economics (not to mention brotherly love). But even though conservatives have been fighting interconnectedness forever, it continues to exist (that "reality has a liberal bias" sort of thing). Regulations and benefits like healthcare and diplomacy exist not out of soft-hearted liberal guilt, but because taking care of matters before they get out of hand is cheaper, while hiding your head in the sand, clinging to us-and-them beliefs, and arming yourselves to the teeth is ever more expensive. In Bleak House, Charles Dickens pointed out to a ruling class that was reluctant to assume the expenses of public sanitation that smallpox could not be excluded from the houses of the rich simply because the rich disdained the poor. That was a hundred and fifty years ago, and we are still having to point the same thing out today. You don't have to recognize the connection (as in smallpox, as in global warming) in order for it to be there.

The fight, since Reagan, has been literally for the soul of the US. Conservatives are determined to define the nation as a hierarchy in which white Christian men are at the top, unchallenged by other groups, but able to extend favor to nonthreatening men or good-looking women as individuals. They want to define the world as a place where what America says goes, no matter how far away other countries are, or how much they disagree with our policies. Liberals assume that our nation is a place where work, citizenship, and simple humanity can claim certain rights and where no single group should predominate under the law. They assume that the world is never going to be a uniform place, but that other nations don't lose their humanity just because they disagree with or distrust us.

This explains so clearly why that odd 33% will not ... CAN NOT listen to the facts, reasoned discourse, logic. They cannot let Bush be attacked because to let him fall is to fall with him.

(fixed grammar... sheesh!)