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What on earth are you talking about? I stated much the same thing when I said that "rights" can only be protected by law, not granted, and I was responding to another poster who said that rights were granted. It is privilege that is granted.
I have been a strong and consistent supporter of rights on this forum, including the right of self-defense.
That will be done in a couple of years when Obamacare comes into being. I live 140 miles from the nearest city hospitals and without the small one in my town would not be here since they called the city bunch when I had my gentle but serious heart attack years ago. I like my tiny town hospital that my land owning friends call a band aid station because they don't like to pay property tax to keep it going. Ranches out here are pretty good sized in acreage.
Speaking of those ranchers, I will never forget the one who got gored in the groin by a bull and got sewed up at that band aid place as well as the city doctors could have done. However, he was too far away to get the proper care soon enough. He died of natural causes about 10 years ago but would have been gone without the "band aid" station in 1976.
We like living in the sticks but we all pay taxes, of all kinds, and like to be considered worth something.
We've had many discussion on "what to cut". I say, cut Congressional salaries and benefits FIRST, as a mere symbolic gesture, next foreign aid and then get to work slashing the uncountable, useless federal agencies and bureaucracies that eat up hundred of millions of dollars and are of little benefit.
Gov't pays for empty flights to rural airports (http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/U/US_AVIATION_SHUTDOWN_RURAL_SUBSIDIES?SITE=AP&SECTI ON=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT&CTIME=2011-08-11-21-42-37 - broken link)
On some days, the pilots with Great Lakes Airlines fire up a twin-engine Beechcraft 1900 at the Ely, Nev., airport and depart for Las Vegas without a single passenger on board. And the federal government pays them to do it.
Federal statistics reviewed by The Associated Press show that in 2010, just 227 passengers flew out of Ely while the airline got $1.8 million in subsidies. The travelers paid $70 to $90 for a one-way ticket. The cost to taxpayers for each ticket: $4,107.
... The EAS (Essential Air Service program) was created to ensure service on less profitable routes to remote communities when airlines were deregulated in 1978.
... Severin Borenstein, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley who helped design the EAS program, said Congress originally intended for the program to end after 10 years.
... "They call it essential for a reason," she said. She said her industry group supports "common sense adjustments" for eligibility, but added that rural communities already struggle to attract and keep doctors and other professionals.
"If you take away air service, who wants to live in those communities?" she said.
People shouldn't live there if they can't afford the cost.
Sure.
lol
You realize when that happens, all your cities will be ghost towns? If city residents paid the true cost of living where there's no local resources to support them, they'd be fleeing in droves half starved and very thirsty.
great idea,cut off air service to rural Americans foriegn aid is a better use of our tax money. they are even trying to close many rural post offices around me but give away money to other countries like candy. yeah great idea
Many of these airports were subsidized because of the politicians in those districts, Morgantown, Clarksburg and several others in West Virginia were placed there because of Senator Byrd in the 1980's. Morgantown is just over 100 miles from Pittsburgh and they need a subsidy?
There are plenty of rural areas around the US but they may have not had a senator on the ways and means committee, I would love to see the criteria as to how they came up with those locations.
The subsidies given to airports or even airlines to maintain a minimal level of service is an example of universal service. The idea that a American citizen in a flyspeck of a town in Eastern Montana, the most remote region of Appalachia or in an urban ghetto is entitled to have phone service, electric power, roads to get to a nearby town or even air service out of a place like Livingston was established during the New Deal. Before the New Deal large parts of this nation did not have electric power, tarmac, phone service or even paved roads . It was simply not profitable for private industry to provide such service and pay for hundreds of miles of power lines or cables to service say a few dozen people. Once you got away from the East Coast and other large urban areas it was like the 19th century and people used kerosene lamps and without electric power forget about indoor plumbing and flush toilets. So we brought places like Eastern Montana or Tennessee or Arkansas into the 20th century. So to those who take cheap shots against the Federal Gov. put ones brain in gear before we tumble back into the dark ages.
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