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Evidently I am having comprehension problems with that portion of the history of federal taxation that exists only in your head. If you graph historic tax rates against historic tax revenues and adjust for inflation there is not a statistically significant increase in revenue associated with an increase in tax. Higher taxes suppress transactions, suppress earnings, suppress investment and suppress tax revenues.
You have a point as far as taxes which go to pointless endeavors like our bloated military-industrial complex.
You are 180 degrees off base as far as taxes that are invested in national infrastructure such as bridges, education, natural resources.
And since you started this with the notion that companies moving offshore to avoid paying taxes is good, you're really just spinning in circles.
$13,000,000,000,000.
That's one nasty number. And loopholes and tax cuts, in combination with grotesque spending on the military, explain it.
when you mess with people's money you make them angry.
we are the land of opportunity. the notion that its not manifest destiny, the notion that we dont have to slaughter everything that gets in the way of that opportunity is new and not always well received.
god gives us dominion over the earth, but god also gives obligations for proper management over the garden of eden. we are held accountable, the strong protect the weak, is part of it.
Pretty much everything the government touches goes to hell. It becomes inefficient and wasteful. Anyone who can't see that is not being honest. And it costs ten times what it should. That's what happens when you appoint a committee to study the most efficient way to wipe your **s, a czar to choose the proper toilet paper, an inspector to keep the act code and regulation compliant, a bureaucrat to record the height of the splash, a hazmat crew to monitor gaseous emissions, and a community organizer team to ensure the flushing efficiency is fair for everyone in the community, rather than just sitting down and doing the job.
I love it when people talk about "the government" as if it's not made up of people just like them (if, perhaps, not collectively sharing their identical opinion, which I think is where the real rub comes in).
Makes a great bugaboo to wave around to try to achieve complete consensus with one's own opinion, too, I've noticed.
Pretty much everything the government touches goes to hell. It becomes inefficient and wasteful. Anyone who can't see that is not being honest. And it costs ten times what it should. That's what happens when you appoint a committee to study the most efficient way to wipe your **s, a czar to choose the proper toilet paper, an inspector to keep the act code and regulation compliant, a bureaucrat to record the height of the splash, a hazmat crew to monitor gaseous emissions, and a community organizer team to ensure the flushing efficiency is fair for everyone in the community, rather than just sitting down and doing the job.
Indeed. As quickly as government starts spending the taxpayers money in large amounts, it looks like free money.
I love it when people talk about "the government" as if it's not made up of people ...
People? Is that what you call them? I'd say more like some horrifying variant of space aliens or something. Their logic and actions certainly don't appear to be from this planet, unless we're talking an insane asylum or something.
Heck, I'd rather deal with the tree huggers--they often rant, but so does a fly buzz around my head at times. The government, on the other hand, is more like an army of six foot long mosquitoes looking for their next meal.
And as long as you consider "the government" that way, instead of perceiving it as made up of people just like you, the less likely anything is to change, because that very perception gets in the way of change, if change is, indeed, what you really want. Some people find that perception of "the government" as leviathan, as a single entity monster, because it CAN be very useful, as I said, as a bugaboo to scare people into going along with what they, the "anti-government" leviathan, want them to think.
As soon as you stop thinking of it as a single entity and start thinking of it as a bunch of people, ways to really effect change become much more easy to see. Of course, that then means that if successful, there would be no more boogeyman to scare people with, and a whole new one would have to be created to fill that space for that purpose.
I'm with ChrisC on this one. The "government" is a monolithic enterprise. At its worst, it is a bunch of individual people carrying out their own interpretation of what the rules are. At least as a monolith it is predictable and avoidable. But when government acts as individuals act, you have not only tyranny, but maniacal tyranny.
I suppose you could guess, I support smaller government.
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