Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
By asking the question "you need to ask yourself which services wind up paying for themselves and which are not needful" I see that the entire point of my point has been totally missed
Let's go back to the video tape. Once upon a time mental institutions were far more active than they are now. Imbibing a purist ideology of freedom meant closing those institutions down based on nothing but preservation of their rights, but took no account of how incompatible with civilization they had rendered themselves. Set the crazies free. OK. Now x % are in prison at a much greater cost with no actual remedy. They're held to a legal standard they can't abide and we call it humane treatment. They're also the nuisance element undermining business. They have the freedom to lie down on a highway during rush hour traffic, and the freedom to sue anyone who accidentally runs them over in a high speed lane in the dead of night. It's a drunks right to use the public park sandbox as a urinal. The whole world has to conform to/ compensate for drunks who refuse to be accountable for themselves. Is there a more cost effective solution? Sure! Hold them accountable for themselves. I find it no small accident you used insurance as an example when the concept of insurance printed a license to do things beyond your ability to pay in terms of consequence. Now it happens on a multi trillion scale and exxon can buy SCOTUS decisions defending the 'rights' of an artificial entity.
Rights are responsibilities we have to ourselves in relation to others. Rights in their current definition played out in the minds of too many= avoidance of personal responsibility. That would be the complaint of residents in NH chasing down drunks because the policy itself is crafted from the wrong perspective. I concur this isn't limited to NH, but you too aren't seeing the greater tide. Law and policy design that doesn't start from a vantage point of enabling human beings to be maximally accountable for themselves is spendthrift. Inherent design flaw. Corporations do an end run around it entirely. The more you steal, the more innocent you appear.
The services rendered by government are invisible to you, and so, you've deemed them worthless. All manner of prevention is deemed worthless. Until crazy is putting graffiti on your home or menacing your kid at the school bus stop. Until your municipal water supply is privatized and charging $5 a gallon just because they can. Guarding sober foreign policy and maintaining ethics on wall street is 'unnecessary' until our multi billion air craft carriers are useless defending Iowa from a Chinese bank collecting property taxes. The majority having no expertise on any of the subjects involved only know they want immediate gratification and deny there's wisdom behind any decision made by representation. You want the simple life, you're free to abdicate responsibility by dropping out and be Amish. All others have to pay for participating in secular life. The argument you've put forth is wanting cake and eating it too.
Does NH need 500 cops to police 500 citizens? If there's no need, why do they exist? If the residents of NH are avoiding being responsible for themselves yet expect government to establish a higher standard of civilization for all it's citizens, this is it's fruit. Citizens created the demand (every stitch of legislation and ordinance) for every complaint you have about your local government. So I ask you not just about local politics of NH, but of the nation-- whatever policy we would reasonably consider, why is our attention persistently distracted off those creating the problem? Refusing to be responsible is antithetical to good governance, and it's very bad for business in the long term. Not just the flash in the pan get rich quick schemes & sleight of hand parlor tricks too many CEO's have been chasing around.
The down side to purist capitalism is it's inclination to peddle vice as it's most lucrative source of income. The product is irrelevant, the golden calf is all. It has a penchant for monopoly & negative competition. We now have the worst of both worlds. Crony capitalism is calling itself free market and it owns our government through k street. It has assaulted with thousands of paper cuts the checks and balances that kept America sound. It's every single 'cost plus' contract written by the military industrial complex, and how dare a florida congressman call them on it when they're paying for the negative ad campaign against that florida congressman to protect their own free lunch. They're calling themselves patriots at the expense of the troops. Could this get any more morally repugnant than it has? Indeed it can if you refuse to see it and blame the troops for what hides behind the cloak of respectability.
47% of those surveyed say yes, the government should redistribute wealth through heavy taxes on the rich.
This is very interesting because I believe the official figure is about 47% of all people pay no federal income tax, whatsoever. Even more interesting is that this demographic is more likely to consume government services. So basically you have the government taking from one group and giving to another, yet the recipient class consistently clamors that they want even more from the productive class, and that the productive class is greedy and selfish for wanting to keep the spoils of their own labor. The productive class is shrinking by the day, and the recipient class is getting bigger and bigger. What will happen when there's no more worker bees left to carry everyone else on their back?
The question I have is who many people are in favor of corporations redistributing the wealth to executives and sending investment capital outside the United States to finance the building of factories, research and development centers, retail outlets and distribution centers in low wage emerging market countries around the world while middle class wage growth has stagnated in this country for the past 30 years?
Income growth over the last few decades has been enormously unbalanced, and this must be taken into account as the nation considers shifts in tax policy and develops a fiscal plan that strengthens the recovery and targets a sustainable deficit. According to the Congressional Budget Office, between 1979 and the start of the current recession in 2007, the pre-tax incomes of the upper 1% grew 214%, while the incomes of the middle-fifth and lowest-fifth grew, respectively, 25% and 4%. As the Chart shows, this extremely unbalanced growth implies that 38.7% of all of the income growth accrued to the upper 1% over the 1979-2007 period: a greater share than the 36.3% share received by the entire bottom 90% of the population.
Those in the top 10% of the income scale received 63.7% of all the income growth generated over the 1979-2007 period. In contrast, the bottom 20% of all earners saw such a small share of income growth – just 0.4% – that it barely shows up on the included pie chart.
Note: “Upper-middle fifth” (60-80%) refers to those in the income scale who make more than 60% of earners but less than the top fifth. “Lower-middle fifth” refers to those who fall in the lower 20-40% range of the income scale.
God forbid any of you ever end up needing help. What a lesson that would be in how your poop bears as much odor as anyone else's. You benefit from the society you live in, whether you admit it or not, and when society comes calling in the form of taxes, be thankful that you're so spoiled that you can whine about your taxes, instead of wondering when the bottom will fall out, like so many others have to. I have no sympathy or respect for your attitude.
True enough. It would be nice if those old people and children could live in something other than decaying urban slums and have enough food to eat. What's with this "productive class", anyway? America's wealthiest 20 percent earns half the nation's income. We are talking about people like the corporate finance CEO's who drove the US economy to its knees with their self serving decisions that ended up destroying the institutions they supposedly worked for and forced the rest of us to bail them out with our own hard earned money. Meanwhile these corporate criminals floated away on golden parachutes. That's productive?
Precisely. Where will crooked financial institutions and big buisiness go for their corporate wellfare handouts? What will they do without their sweetheart deals with the government (think Halliburten), their undeserved tax breaks, and the laws enacted for no other purpose than to help fatten their bottom line?
Be a toady for the wealthy and the international mega corporations all you want and see where it gets you - a stray dog snapping up scraps that fall from their table as they laugh at how easy you and others like were to manipulate for their own ends.
They pledge allegiance to the United Corporation of America. A point of injustice applicable not only to those have nots at the bottom, but to all small biz and countless unrelated industries. All of the above were penalized for the reindeer games of a few in finance passing off toxic securities for legitimate commercial enterprise. Same was true for the global multi trillion tax levied against the manipulated price of oil. Who knows the difference between organized crime and a legit corporation anymore? This is the problem at it's core. I have no animosity toward legitimate commerce, but sociopaths hiding behind a cloak of immunity belong under ricoh statutes. Economic violence isn't real? Is that SO? Global economics scream otherwise.
When a mfg corporation is assaulted by wall street shenanigans, it does affect us all. Their hands are tied behind their back shooting fish in a barrel the same as have nots on the bottom, and yet, the wall street shenanigans on K street own the rules. How many in board rooms can comprehend how to make an honest living anymore? Would they recognize it if it bit them?
The "productive class" is what - the top 1% or 5% or what? The non-productive, dependent class is 95% or so - Is that about right?
Recipient class are the people who have zero federal tax liability, but suck up the benefits.
Productive class are we who work and pay into the system, therefore allowing the recipients to live.
Please register to post and access all features of our very popular forum. It is free and quick. Over $68,000 in prizes has already been given out to active posters on our forum. Additional giveaways are planned.
Detailed information about all U.S. cities, counties, and zip codes on our site: City-data.com.
Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
