Text 3530, 239 rader
Skriven 2006-07-07 14:17:00 av Robert E Starr JR (4003.babylon5)
Ärende: Re: Atheists: America's m
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* * * This message was from Josh Hill to rec.arts.sf.tv.babylon5.m * * *
         * * * and has been forwarded to you by Lord Time * * *         
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On Tue, 4 Jul 2006 21:05:37 -0500, "Carl" <cengman7@hotmail.com>
wrote:

>
>"Josh Hill" <usereplyto@gmail.com> wrote in message 
>news:dk2ma2pl8g6arsnivujnsa058tjd38d3gu@4ax.com...
>> On Mon, 3 Jul 2006 23:34:29 -0500, "Carl" <cengman7@hotmail.com>
>> wrote:
>>
>
>>>> I don't think either is true. The government can take all your money,
>>>> if it does so in a lawful manner
>>>
>>>Which would be creating a slave.
>>
>> No, a slave is owned.
>
>Distinction without a difference; all of the benefit of your work goes to 
>someone else that determines and gives you what you "need."  Work harder, no 
>difference.  Almost like a king deciding that the peasants didn't actually 
>own anything...that there were no private property rights and everything 
>could be taken as the property of the realm.  Hey...didn't we fight against 
>that attitude once before?
>
>The govt that tried to take all of our money wouldn't last long.

But I haven't suggested that it do so. I'm simply pointing out that it
isn't slavery. There are government that /have/ done that, and done so
without reducing the formerly wealthy to slavery or anything like --
they just became ordinary citizens.

>>>No, but in previous discussions with you, you often make reference to
>>>wealth that a person doesn't "need."  Since I have a life of my own and
>>>don't *need* the money, would you then say the govt should take it all?
>>
>> No, I'm simply pointing out that the money the government /should/
>> take isn't needed and so will cause no hardship.
>
>Which is saying the govt should take as much as it can without causing 
>hardship?

It should take what it needs to meet the needs of the Republic. And
that will depend on finding the best balance between beneficial
expenditures and the needs and desires of the taxpayer, as well as
economic considerations. There's no constant there, e.g., during World
War II, the government took tires and butter and nylon stockings
because it had to.

>One thing that strikes me about your arguments Josh is that you *seem* to 
>want to use taxes for social engineering and you seem less concerned with 
>what they're used for.  I'm not saying that you don't care, but you seem 
>content to tax for the sake of taxing too. There are absolutely plenty of 
>good uses and plenty of things that could be done... but you seem to want to 
>tax first and figure it out later.
>
>Wouldn't it be fair to look at what we want to accomplish, figure out how to 
>do it (particularly if an existing program could be done better), figure how 
>much it's going to cost and then figure out how to pay for it?

Sure, but except in a few special cases, the inheritance tax being one
of them and economically necessary Keynesian stimuli another, I don't
think I've ever advocated anything else.

>BTW...a short side topic....
>
>There's also a lot of other money to be had by removing waste and fraud. 
>Wouldn't it be better to eliminate the waste and fruad and better use that 
>money that we've already  collected through taxes first?
>
>Check this out:
>http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/california/la-me-welfare1jul01,1,5796307.story?coll=la-headlines-pe-california&ctrack=

>
>or...to summarize:
>
>"Welfare Fraud costs L.A. County millions
>
>Welfare recipients and their friends and relatives could be defrauding 
>taxpayers of $500 million a year through the county's child-care programs, a 
>grand jury report concludes.
>
>According to the report, released Thursday, some county employees estimate 
>that half of the $1.1 billion in funding for the CalWORKs program is lost to 
>fraud because the Department of Public Social Services doesn't verify that 
>welfare-to-work recipients meet the requirements for child-care payments."
>
>And that's one program in one county.  There's also a bridges to Alaska and 
>all sorts of other pork projects that exist. I'm not suggesting that's 
>enough to do what we want/need to do, but we could certainly improve some of 
>the programs we have with this money without having to increasing taxes.

I oppose pork and other wasteful projects, which is one of the reasons
I'm so dissatisfied with the Republican record of the last six years
-- the Democrats were horrendous, but these guys make them look like
amateurs!

That being said, I don't believe that one can or should depend on the
other. We need fiscal discipline. You can't just say "OK, because
government is wasting some of my money I think we should lower taxes
so that government doesn't take enough in." Because all that buys you
is a soaring deficit and the interest payments on it. And it lets
politicians play games, e.g., borrowing now to keep their constituents
happy knowing that the borrowing will bite them, and the next
administration, a few years down the line. That's what happened to
Bush Sr., who had to raise taxes to pay for Reagan's deficits, and
paid with a recession and failure at the polls.

So: pay the bills, and when you've done that, figure out what's fluff
and what you really need. That's what you'd do at home, isn't it?

>Right now everone has their own pet projects... and figures that we can 
>raise taxes or generate revenues for their project in isolation.
>What if we actually made a list of national priorities... in priority order? 
>Not everything  is #1.
>
>How do the people here prioritize the various programs we have in the govt?
>
>Education
>Welfare
>The environment
>Health care
>Defense
><Fill in your own favorites>

I think that, broadly speaking, they're all necessary -- not every
expenditure, but the overall programs. But they don't all receive the
same funding and some need funding increases while others could get by
with decreases if less money were wasted. In other cases, it isn't so
much a matter of increases or decreases as spending the money on the
right thing. For example, the military spends too much on strategic
arms -- there's no one now except the Russians who can come anywhere
near matching us, and I'm sure they'd be glad to agree to more mutual
reductions. But it should be spending more on the unglamorous ground
troops that deal with terrorism and the like.

>This...chaos...of govt spending seems crazy to me...and just saying raise 
>taxes because someone has some extra and there's something that needs doing 
>seems insane.   Doesn't anyone want to see a real plan any more?  Does 
>ANYONE want to actually improve the 81 welfare programs we have... or is 
>simply throwing more money at it good enough?  What about the education 
>system.  Does anyone think it will take more than money to fix it?  Are we 
>so locked into the current system that it's blaspemy to suggest something 
>else?  How much would something else cost?
>
>I think you'd probably be able to get people to be much less resistent to 
>tax increases if ***anyone*** had a real clue as to how it would really make 
>things better (not just maintaining the status quo).
>
>Okay... end of rant.

Well, take one example, which I've mentioned in other threads: health
care. We spend more than twice as much per capita as France, Canada,
and Germany, which provide free health care to all their citizens and
score better than we do in objective measures of health. What our
government spends /alone/ is more per capita than they spend, and yet
they provide all our citizens with decent health care while our
government provides health care only to the elderly, the poor, and a
few other groups such as veterans and government employees.

So -- we need universal health care. Extending Medicare is as good a
plan as I've heard. But universal health care is blocked by the
Republicans and conservatives. All we got from them was the Medicare
drug plan, a nightmarish program (check out the details sometime) that
was more a giveaway to the insurance and drug industries than anything
else. So -- no universal health care. Higher expenses. Worse health.

And this is true in so many areas. One area in which we've lagged
terribly is controlling greenhouse emissions and achieving oil
independence. There are alternatives and we could be pioneering them.
But once again, our government has refused to take measures that would
be unpopular with business -- putting realistic economy limits on
cars, for example -- while paying off various business and political
constituencies with pork like subsidies for ethanol from corn, which
takes 85% as much energy to make as it produces. Not only is the
Administration not taking the measures we need, but it's even going so
far as to join the auto industry in suing the states that are trying
to exercise their rights under the Clean Air Act to reduce automotive
greenhouse admissions. They're claiming carbon dioxide isn't a
pollutant! It's outrageously cynical.

Education? We need level financing so inner-city kids aren't taught by
sub-standard teachers in broom closets. We need to abolish busing, if
that's still around, because it had precisely the opposite effect of
the one originally intended, viz., it increased rather than decreased
segregation. We need a basic national curriculum, so that kids who
move from one locality to another, as many do, can begin where they
left off. We need a national test and a national diploma, or more
properly, two classes of diplomas, because many of the state tests and
diplomas are shams that are designed to be unrealistically easy to
make the results look good. We need homogenous grouping, up to and
including classes for the gifted and more than gifted, because you
just can't educated a kid with an IQ of 85 in the same class as a kid
with an IQ of 185 without sacrificing one or the other and usually
both, for the sake of the center. We need to mandate recess and
physical education and music and art and science classes because,
sadly, many schools have abolished these things. We need to take a
hard look at racial and ethnic preferences, but only insofar as they
appeal to political wishful thinking rather serving the needs of the
students. 

We need to abolish the more extreme examples of mainstreaming, viz.,
those in which the mainstreamed kids can't be expected to keep up with
the work, e.g., putting a mentally-retarded child in a math class. And
we need to offer preschool from age three and heavily enriched day
care from day zero, because as far as I know it's the best
widely-applicable tool we have to help underclass children. Beyond
that, I'm not sure that there's much the Federal government can do,
though if they could become involved I wouldn't mind seeing the
abolition of bilingual education, which has been a miserable failure,
support of the right of teachers to discipline their students -- I
know talented teachers who simply won't teach anymore because they get
hell and aren't supported if they so much as look askew at Little
Precious -- limits on special education and drug use, alternative
paths to teacher certification, the ability to fire incompetent
teachers and remove unruly students to special schools so that others
can learn, salaries and working conditions which attract good people
to teaching, and so on. Dream away . . .

-- 
Josh

"I love it when I'm around the country club, and I hear people talking about
the debilitating
effects of a welfare society. At the same time, they leave their kids a
lifetime and beyond
of food stamps. Instead of having a welfare officer, they have a trust officer.
And instead
of food stamps, they have stocks and bonds."

- Warren Buffett
                                                         
--- SBBSecho 2.11-Win32
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