A story from my mother's childhood (hang on: there's a moral at the end).
My grandfather, a lawyer, died when my mother was twelve. My grandmother sold their large country house outside St. Joseph, Missouri, moved herself and her young daughter into a smaller but still-large house in the heart of town, and began taking in boarders. To keep the boarders in fresh eggs, she raised chickens in the back yard.
The gruff old man next door also raised chickens.
This was in the 1920s, and poultry-keeping had become a science. Grandmother, a former schoolteacher, studied the literature. She kept her chickens healthy on scientifically blended chicken feed, purchased from a local farm-implement and feed store.
Her neighbor observed this. "You're wasting your money," he told her. "Go to the ice-cream cone factory on -" He named a street. "They dump their broken cones out back. They'll let you haul them away for fifteen cents a load. My chickens are perfectly content on that."
Grandmother smiled. "And how many eggs are you getting from them?" she inquired politely.
The old man looked sour. "Not a damn one," he growled.
In my mother's telling, the neighbor never did make the connection between what he was feeding his chickens and the number of eggs he was not getting out of them. In that way (look out! here comes the moral!) he was much like today's critics of government spending. They can't seem to make the connection between the poor government services they complain about and the cheap chicken feed they insist on paying for with their taxes. We can certainly disagree on how many eggs we need, and what kinds of dishes we want to make out of them. But if we don't understand that our chickens must be fed properly, there won't be any eggs at all.