Money waste is a prespective thing. I think floating our military empire around the world making companies like Halliburton billions is a grotesque waste of taxpayer funds. The war on terror nearly bankrupted us and still might, but the stockholders in companies making weapons made out like bandits.
As for taxes - I'm talking about percentage of income that an individual pays in to the government. Then we can take it to the other end of spectrum and see who is sucking us dry. You have the welfare people of course, which is a huge Republican tool to get votes from average people. But we are also giving elderly people surgery after surgery to prolong their lives. By the time these people finally pass away, they have way exceded what they ever paid into the government.
Managing a civilization like we enjoy takes a lot of funds. It would sure be nice if the two sides could work together. What we have in government now is obstructionists, the people with bad ideas versus the people with no ideas. As I've grown older, I have turned in my heartless Republican idealisms an realized that this isn't a world for individualists, it is a world for collectivists. We are now at the end of the thirty years of the trickle down economics and we are in debt up to our eyeballs and the economy sucks. The right wing wants to blame that on Obama - how fuckin dumb do they think people are?
But back to Scott Walker, this is going to be huge, and all of America is watching.
Originally Posted by: DakotaT
Sorry, my friend, but the bold sentence accents your fatal assumption, and Obama's and virtually everyone else who believes that the government solves problems.
Civilization is not something that needs management.
Civilization is what removes the need for management. Civilization is what exists when social ties are built upon trust of fellow members of society. Trust that is willing to have faith that others will often enough be forbear to take everything that they can get through power and influence and ability. Forbearance that recognizes that we survive together by our willingness
not to insist upon everything we "deserve."
If we truly need a lot of funds to manage ourselves, we are either:
1. Barbarians.
2. Mental incompetents.
3. Children.
Or, occasionally, puppies.
Are we a civilization?
Tocqueville probably was the first to realize it fully. The first to realize that our genius wasn't "democracy." That it was democracy taking place "in America." The genius of American civilization was our willingness to trust each other through a web of social ties, ties built through churches, sporting teams, barn-raisings, saloons, coffee shops, trade associations, commodity exchanges, and the thousands of other ways we associate with each other.
Civilization doesn't come from the king, and it doesn't come from the emperor, and it doesn't come from the czar, and it doesn't come from the chief or the CEO. It doesn't come from corporations, it doesn't come and it doesn't come from Congressional committees. It doesn't come from the governor or from the "loyal opposition."
It doesn't come from application of the ideas of Plato or Machiavelli or even from Thomas Jefferson and James Madison.
It comes from us. From us joining together in places like our church congregations, our little leagues, our Packershome.com and our slashdot.org and, yes, even our Facebook groups.
Civilization comes from us.
Or it doesn't come at all.
And do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, that you may prove what is that good and acceptable and perfect will of God.
Romans 12:2 (NKJV)