manus;842066938 said:
So, what you are saying (?) is that there our citizens of this Country that are so self-sufficient and live in such a vacuum...
...that they have no need of the soldiers who protect us, roads, fire protection, police protection, schools, traffic lights, care for the disabled amongst us, public transportation, bridges, levees, disaster relief, etcetera, etcetera (=all of the latter and more which COSTS money...that comes from citizen taxpayers)?
Interesting...
No need? Did I say that? No. Nor did I say that there should be no taxes at all, bu there does have to be a sensible limit and I feel it should be a lot lower than you do. As for your list of items.
Soldiers - I'm for this, but most of the people demanding tax increases turn around and demand that we CUT defense spending, so why would I support their tax increase?
Roads - This I support, but this is a tiny part of the budget.
fire protection -A sensible item, but should be covered by local property taxes since fire protection is on property. Income taxes should not be used to fund fire protection. (and I absolutely hate the pension system we have which has been grossly abused and will soon cost us more than the active protection we receive.)
police protection - again should be dealt with largely on a local level and be funded through sensible property taxes. However, here we are also seeing far too much administration. I'm sorry a desk jockey at some state board for law enforcement adds little value to the overall police protection, but tends ot add a ton to the costs. We can almost certainly save money here.
Schools - This has long been a quandry for me. Our public schools are horrible and getting worse. We have too much adminstration at district and state levels, too many agendas in the education itself and a public that doesn't beleive that education matters. And this has become a disaster at the college/university level where attempts to graduate more kids has driven tuitions and adminstration costs sky high without really improving the lot of many of the kids who go. And with new internet technology emerging which can greatly improve learning we could probably drop the cost quite a bit if we got out of the current mindset. We are already seeing that with MIT and Harvard offering online classes that can have 10,000+ students.
traffic lights - part of roads, why make it a seperate item?
care for the disabled amongst us - The standard here is a question, and how we define "disabled." I've met quite a few people who were "disabled" and collecting benefits, but could have easily done most jobs. THe problem is the benefits they could receive exceeded the salaries they could start at. I do want to help these people, but bureaucracies are notorious for wasting money and offering poor return. From what I've seen this is one.
public transportation - With the way the suburbs have grown up in California this is always a heavily subsidized line item. I agree that some provisoins need to be made to help those without a car move around and be able to conduct their lives, but I also often wonder if the benefits we receive from this are worth the cost. For the most part I've been willing to accept this line. However, the High Speed sinkhole being built in the central valley is a complete waste of our tax money.
bridges - part of roads
levees - recent studies suggest that these have actually made floods worse over the years. This is a wonderful example of our government inventing a reason to exist and then finding a problem to justify the reason after the fact. sadly, its a bit hard to remove a levee after we've built it.
Disaster relief - Ah, the jobs of collectivism. Some disasters probably do rate some level of government help, but far too many "disasters" are excuses to throw money away. Flood relief is a wonderful example as is flood insurance. If the government didn't provide the relief, people wouldn't build in flood plains and then we wouldn't have to spend the money. It's kind of funny that so many groups and organizations stress proper disaster preparation, but one of the ways that is never mentioned is at the start where you can build to avoid or alleviate most of the forces of a disaster. You'll still get the occasional situations like Hurricane Sandy, which travelled into an area not any hurricanes travel and surprised the population on the East Coast, but many experts have pointed out that New Orleans is largely built below sea level so the Hurricane Katrina disaster was inevitable. The location guarnateed massive damage.
I could go on and pick apart many of the departments I consider far more costly than the few you started with. Welfare is one I noticed you avoided despite the fact that many people admit that its abused far too often.
and that is the problem. You jumped on my comment and started saying that because I want to keep more of my money I must be anti-government, something I didn't say. I do see a need for government at some level, but I believe that what government we have no is excessive and that at all levels we have a severe spending problem. Government is trying to do far more than just fire, police, defense, roads, schools. That is the problem. Let's keep government to what it can do well, and fix the root causes of the other problems. Until we do that government will be a cancerous growth on society. My only question is if we'll go down like Greece appears to be heading to, or will it end up being a quiet death like Imperial Rome which eventually spent itself into decline and oblivion.
