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In 2010, with the economy in the toilet, there should be an outright moratorium on new taxes or tax increases. Taxes should be slashed to spur growth and keep people from going broke.
In 2010, with the economy in the toilet, there should be an outright moratorium on new taxes or tax increases. Taxes should be slashed to spur growth and keep people from going broke.
NO ONE should EVER support new taxes.
i understand this thought process and mostly agree, but, you have to pay for the services somehow. no one wants to cut anything, and no one wants to raise taxes to pay. and - no one wants to compromise and do a little bit of both.
State taxes work for us in what way? It helped to make me poorer.
NJ has one of the highest taxes to pay. All to fund corrupt governors and government and their spending on everything. They throw more money at bad schools in bad cities and guess what. They continue to be bad while the school administers get to build bathrooms in their offices.
Dang - what's sales tax in Washington state? I imagine high since you haven't had income tax. I'm not sure why the few states left with no income tax would want to change that - it's a big draw for retired folks.
but in the end, if you want services, you have to pay taxes. What services are you willing to relinquish (of course, everyone always lists the ones they don't use - but really, of the ones you use - what would you give up?).
For one example, police. Everyone assumes they're necessary for protection. But if you look into the dat and studies, you'll find that only about 2% of crimes are solved, and the presence of police has no effect on the crime rate.
Ref.
Malcolm C Young, Marc Mauer: "...ultimately, only about 2 percent of violent crimes result in a conviction." ("Tougher Laws Will Not Prevent Crime." In: _Crime_, P. Winters, ed. San Diego, CA: Greenhaven Press, 1998)
The Kansas City preventive patrol experiment was a landmark experiment...by the Kansas City Police Department. It was evaluated by the Police Foundation. It was designed to test the assumption that the presence (or potential presence) of police officers in marked cars reduced the likelihood of a crime being committed.
Major findings
1. Citizens did not notice the difference when the frequency of patrols was changed.
2. Increasing or decreasing the level of patrol had no significant effect on resident and commercial burglaries, auto thefts, larcenies involving auto accessories, robberies, or vandalism-crimes.
3. The rate at which crimes were reported did not differ significantly across the experimental beats.
4. Citizen reported fear of crime was not affected by different levels of patrol.
5. Citizen satisfaction with police did not vary.
"Over 30 years of criminological research has shown that the ability of police to influence crime is extremely limited. For example, neither the number of police in a community nor the style of policing appears related to the crime rate. In 1991, San Diego and Dallas had about the same ratio of police to population, yet twice as many crimes were reported in Dallas. Meanwhile, Cleveland and San Diego had comparable crime rates even though Cleveland had twice as many police officers per capita. And in 1992, the District of Columbia had both the highest homicide rate and the most metropolitan police per square foot of any city in the nation.
The most thorough study ever done, a 1981 analysis of police beats in Newark, NJ, found that foot patrols had virtually no effect on crime rates."
--Richard Moran, professor of criminology at Mount Holyoke College.
"Community Policing Strategies Do Little to Prevent Crime." In: _Crime_ P. Winters, ed. San Diego, CA: Greenhaven Press, 1998.
"The New York Story: More Luck Than Policing." _Washington Post National Weekly Edition_, Feb 17-23,1997
David H. Bayley, Ph.D. (1961) Princeton University, Distinguished Professor of Criminal Justice, School of Criminal Justice, State University of New York at Albany:
_Police for the Future_ Oxford University Press: New York 1994
"The police do not prevent crime (Ch 1)...Dishonest law enforcement...is by and large what we have now. It occurs when the police promise to prevent crime but actually provide something else - namely, authoritative intervention and symbolic justice." (p. 124)
A study of policing in Detroit from 1926 and 1977 found no relationship between policing and crime rate (Ch 1)
--_What Works in Policing_ by David H. Bayley (Editor). New York: Oxford University Press, 1998.
Secondly, I'd get rid of these "screeners" and social workers at mental health clinics. They are not professionals are have a vested interest in getting people admitted to a hospital. In fact, several investigations found that hospitals were paying bounties for each patient admitted.
UNJUSTIFIED PSYCHIATRIC COMMITMENT in the U.S.A.
by Lawrence Stevens, J.D.
http://www.antipsychiatry.org/unjustif.htm
U.S. Representative Patricia Schroeder of Colorado held hearings investigating the practices of psychiatric hospitals in the United States. Rep. Schroeder summarized her committee's findings as follows: "Our investigation has found that thousands of adolescents, children, and adults have been hospitalized for psychiatric treatment they didn't need; that hospitals hire bounty hunters to kidnap patients with mental health insurance...that psychiatrists are being pressured by the hospitals to increase profit; that hospitals 'infiltrate' schools by paying kickbacks to school counselors who deliver students; that bonuses are paid to hospital employees, including psychiatrists, for keeping the hospital beds filled. I could go on, but you get the picture" (quoted in: Lynn Payer, Disease- Mongers: How Doctors, Drug Companies, and Insurers Are Making You Feel Sick, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 1992, pp. 234-235).
[M]uch of this unjustified involuntary psychiatric commitment of normal and law-abiding people to the prisons called psychiatric hospitals is motivated by the financial needs of psychiatric hospitals and the people who work in them. ...psychiatric hospitals made a practice of admitting adolescents in distress, using the diagnosis of bipolar disorder inappropriately in order to increase their billing to insurance companies. This practice was so widespread that the federal government finally intervened, charging the hospitals with fraud and assessing fines of millions of dollars. Many of these children did not have bipolar disorder at all, but were acting inappropriately because of stresses in their families, with their friends, and at school." Edward Drummond, M.D., Associate Medical Director at Seacoast Mental Health Center in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, in his book The Complete Guide to Psychiatric Drugs (John Wiley & Sons, Inc., New York, 2000), pages 13-14. Dr. Drummond graduated from Tufts University School of Medicine and was trained in psychiatry at Harvard University."
i understand this thought process and mostly agree, but, you have to pay for the services somehow. no one wants to cut anything, and no one wants to raise taxes to pay. and - no one wants to compromise and do a little bit of both.
I don't understand this thought process at all. The theory that somehow we "need" services, otherwise we won't survive.
Let's look at some of the things that could be cut. The EPA was setup, for the sole purpose of reducing our dependence on foreign oil. At the time, our foreign oil consumption was around 50%. Now, our foreign oil dependency is around 75%. So an organization that was setup to do one job, not only failed but the problem got worse. Are we all concerned about the environment? Yes. Will the worse of humanity come out if we don't have certain regulations? Absolutely! Do we need a monstrous agency that accomplishes little to nothing? No!
Next lets look at the Department of Education-one only needs to look at our schools performance since the DOE's inception to realize this part of the Federal Gov't is a failure.
Money coming in isn't our government's problem. It's the reliance on government that is the problem...
I don't understand this thought process at all. The theory that somehow we "need" services, otherwise we won't survive.
Let's look at some of the things that could be cut. The EPA was setup, for the sole purpose of reducing our dependence on foreign oil. At the time, our foreign oil consumption was around 50%. Now, our foreign oil dependency is around 75%. So an organization that was setup to do one job, not only failed but the problem got worse. Are we all concerned about the environment? Yes. Will the worse of humanity come out if we don't have certain regulations? Absolutely! Do we need a monstrous agency that accomplishes little to nothing? No!
Next lets look at the Department of Education-one only needs to look at our schools performance since the DOE's inception to realize this part of the Federal Gov't is a failure.
Money coming in isn't our government's problem. It's the reliance on government that is the problem...
if you remove a lot of what the EPA has done, our consumption of oil would be far greater than it is right now. at the time our it was set up, our population was less and many other factors contributed to our growing demand. it is a fact though that without many of the enhancements to engines and exhaust systems that resulted from regulations, we would be consuming far more oil than without those regs.
i'm not saying they are perfect, but you're skewing the data.
and as for washington state - you're not even remotely on topic.
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