It began sometime ago, but the climax started eight years ago with the election George W Bush.  With republicans calling themselves the government opposition party, they railed against taxes and wasteful spending. They promised to remove government from our lives by getting rid of regulation. George W. Bush took care of the things they cared about most, taxes and regulations. 
But that's just mechanism. What we are dealing with are thieves. When Alan Greenspan lowered rates to about 1% and left them there, housing prices skyrocketed and banks reaped hugh profits for their preferred share holders and executives. Oh, did I mention Phil Gram deregulated the banking industry, allowing them to trade securities for the first in over seventy years. Then they played musical chairs with pieces of paper called mortgage backed  derivatives. When the music stopped, they demanded the tax payer to give them more money. That's using other people's money going up and going down. The property itself is merely incidental as the guys have no interest in holding such assets. These guys rigged the outcome. Just as Enron falsified their accounting to make themselves look profitable. The banks manipulated and cheated in the mortgage industry. Keep in mind when a person's home is foreclosed they have lost all the money that went into interest payments and also in a declining housing market they may lose equity too. The banks get the asset to resell. The government steps in to make up the difference between the current equity value and the future equity value. The bank makes out like the bandit it is, never losing.
This heist will cost citizens of the US, nearly over two trillion dollars. The perpetrators have so far gotten away with vast amounts of wealth. When you combine that with the privatizing of war. The heist swells to nearly five trillion. There is no incentive to win a war when you profits count on the war continuing.