TO BE HONEST, CAN YOU BLAME THEM? Salena Zito: Americans have lost faith in government.

It is no mystery that Americans do not have trust in their government. A recent Pew survey finds only 3 percent of Americans actually trust the government with 16 percent saying they believe they will “get it right” most of the time.

In the 1950s almost 70 percent of the country expressed a high level of trust in government, when Pew first started measuring the public’s trust in its institutions. Clearly, confidence in America’s institutions and their ability to get it right has hit an all time low.

But how did it get this way?

How, indeed? The rise of social spending, and the accumulation of programmatic parasites probably play a role.