Here's some related reading that I was saving for a post on its own:
The Rise of the Administrative State

As a practical matter, the modern state comes out of Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal, which launched a large bureaucracy and empowered it with broad governing authority. Also, as a practical matter, the agencies comprising the bureaucracy reside within the executive branch of our national government, but their powers transcend the traditional boundaries of executive power to include both legislative and judicial functions, and these powers are often exercised in a manner that is largely independent of presidential control and altogether independent of political control.

But while the actual growth of the administrative state can be traced, for the most part, to the New Deal (and subsequent outgrowths of the New Deal like the Great Society), the New Deal merely served as the occasion for implementing the ideas of America's Progressives, who had come a generation earlier...

Enter Woodrow Wilson:

For the American pioneers of the administrative state--the Progressives of the late 19th and early 20th centuries--this older, limited understanding of government stood in the way of the policy aims they believed the state ought to pursue in a world that had undergone significant evolution since the time of the Founding. They believed that the role of government, contrary to the perceived ahistorical notion of Founding-era liberalism, ought to adjust continually to meet the new demands of new ages.

That's enough of the citation. That article is quite a read and gives good background to how we got to a place where SS and the EDU dept., to name a couple, are cesspools of wasted cash.

With a 100 years of progressive mind fucking, society has been groomed to think that the role of the Fed should always be expanded. I'm not even going to go into what the Free-Love society added to the mix. Suffice it to say, from Wilson to JFK/LBJ there was a considerable amount of groundwork that was laid that made the Great Society a natural evolution.

If you add that notion to the battery of empty campaign sound bytes that is our election process you can start to get an idea of how fucked up things have gotten. People have an understanding of the issues and and expectation of what they should be hearing. The political hacks just serve it up and reel them into the polling booths. Any attempt to shed light on the realities involved, as you have in regards to the mid class tax rates, takes too much time and works counter to the public's perception.

It's really sad how much of the political discourse that wins elections is twaddle. Given that, it does not surprise me that things like SS and EDU started as with well intentions, but have spiraled past those and down towards futility without the possibility of correcting the dive.

I wouldn't go that far. I think SS started out as a piece of shit legislation. The economy was in the tank, and unemployment through the roof. People who HAD jobs refused to leave when they got too old because they couldn't afford to. Instead of making this a personal fault, why not just pay the old farts to retire? You open up new jobs and spread the cost of paying old people to not work around. No one person can really object, and now more people can have jobs. It isn't a huge fraction of the work force, but FDR had already gone down the road of having government pay one person to dig a hole and another person to fill it in.

Now some idiots are shocked, SHOCKED, that it actually might induce some people to not save if they believe they'll get paid at the end of working since they deserve money just for taking a breath.

I think FDR knew it was crap, but only cared about being in office. One of the great egomaniacal fucks ever to sit in the White House, he was still smart enough to know what was good policy and what was good politics. He chose politics over everything else.

I believe there is very little, if anything, that FDR did for this country that was positive. He wanted into WWII badly and got it. The positive result, though maybe not a net positive, given the price that had to be paid, was a huge shift of men out of the workforce, and the resulting shift into the workforce of women. The influx of people into a labor force is part of economic growth, so this helped us get out of the Depression. People like to say that claims about the war ending the depression were crap, and direct links pretty much are crap (otherwise government spending would be the answer to economic growth, which some people think is true, but clearly isn't, as can be seen by any half awake moron), but there were structural shifts in our population that helped bring the downturn to an end. Of course, this isn't BECAUSE of FDR any more than the tech boom of the 90s was BECAUSE of Clinton.

Cutting taxes and not cutting spending is exactly the problem.

It started with Reagan, Clinton almost fixed it, then Bush II nuked it completely.