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adequate

I don't think that's how I would describe the care given by the VA.

Corporation don't pay taxes really anyways, because 1. They are fictional entities, and 2. Costs get passed down into first-order (consumer) goods for the most part anyways, Additionally the. U.S has an absurdly high top corporate rate. (40% vs 15-20 of most other similarly industrial nations), and is a large reason why U.S corporation keep as much money and revenue overseas as they can.

Public sector compensation is already quite generous, http://www.cagw.org/media/wast....

Most of what you mention is just sort of normal compensation and can be negotiated individually as appropriate (Or just look at average private-sector compensation as a baseline) . This due process thing is precisely what a lot of the best and brightest in the public sector object to, as it makes it difficult of impossible to remove low-performers and inappropriate behaviors. Why should someone be forced to support a group that advocates for policies they think are harmful or unnecessary in order to keep their job? What you call freeloading, is just a pejorative term applied to a positive externality. Unions pushed for the eight hour workday and made it the norm, but does every worker with a 8-hour day ow the Wobblies a union due? No, they did it to benefit themselves, and they did see the benefit, the setting of that social norm was just gravy.

I suppose if you reduce the entire US Economy to a Keg Party, you might be right. Alas, it's not.

But staying with the analogy, some would suggest you stop spending the money collected for beer on stupid party hats and actually spend it on fucking beer. Others would suggest that you pay for the beer you drink. Yet others would say there's enough beer and that BTW, stop buying that premium shit.

The bottom line is that these people want the government to spend even more money than the $3 trillion it collects in taxes and the $1 trillion it borrows because that fall in line with their political agenda.

The science is on the skeptical side of the CAGW argument.

I'm not sure how Citizens Against Government Waste is relevant here, but, indeed, science is always on the skeptical side. That skepticism is expressed by making calculations, making measurements, doing experiments, and learning about the physical world. Making models and testing those models is what scientists do; it is what climate scientists have been doing for a century.

The Ghosts of Jamie Whitten and John Stennis live on in Mississippi. Bringing federal dollars to pork barrel projects.

Jamie Whitten was the ranking member of the House Ways and Means Committee and any appropriations bill that passed by had to have something for Mississippi. Stennis was the same way in the Senate and together they always got something for Mississippi it seems in every appropriations bill.
That was true when the Advanced Solid Rocket Motor was mandated by Congress after the Challenger incident. NASA didn't want it but if they wanted to fund the shuttle and other programs, they had to take the ASRM too. Things like having to deliver the ASRM rockets on barges were put into bid contracts to prevent Thiokol (the supplier of RSRM engines for the shuttle) from bidding on the contract. Oh, they just happened to have the site at Iuka MS, which among being the site of a defunct Nuclear Reactor project by the TVA and was also a former weapons depot.

You see that's the problem with the seniority system in Congress, you can get politicians re-elected by people and they just move up the ladder on all these committees and it's the committees where all the power is in Congress. You can't just put legislation on the floor of either the House or Senate, it has to go through Committee first and if you have ranking congressmen and senators blocking projects until they get what they want, then important legislation can be held up indefinitely. It's been that way since our Federal Government was formed and handcuffs well meaning legislation with bad things that garner support from fringe members of Congress to get the votes necessary to pass the whole package.

Even though everybody thinks that Earmarks are supposedly a thing of the past, they're still around. The testing facility in MS shows again that port barrel spending is alive and well and a lot of things still get through, for example with the recent budget deal. Did you also know we have a STARBASE program as well? Well in 2012 it received $5m in funding and while most won't consider it a lot, it's really a glorified recruiting program.

Here ya go: Pig Book

So what spending would you get rid of?

p-o-r-k

Here is a good start: http://www.cagw.org/reports/pig-book/2010/pork-database.html

The difference, at least in principle (i.e when the government does not bail them out), is that inefficient and wasteful private businesses can be forced into bankruptcy and eliminated either by more efficienct competitors or their own incompetence. The US government on the other hand cannot by definition go bankrupt, no matter how wasteful or incompetent, because they control the currency in which their debts are denominated. Private companies cannot compel your cooperation or participation in their schemes whereas the government, under threat or actual use of coercion, can. It does not bother me that private corporations may be inefficient because I am not forced to buy their products or use their services whereas taxes are not voluntary in the same way that discretionary spending is. In fact, it seems that I receive very little individual benefit from all of my taxes (the government has come out way ahead on me thus far in my life in terms of cost vs taxes paid). I know for a fact that I could make better use as an investor of the money that I now pay in taxes than the federal government can and does. For example, they spend billions of dollars every year on worthless pork barrel projects to research pseudo scientific bullshit (I am not talking about legitimate R&D funding like JPL or NASA here). For example, how about $4,545,000 for wood utilization research? After 10,000 years of human civilization is there still 4 million dollars worth of wood using knowledge that we don't already possess? Please. Private corporations may be wasteful, but the government is unmatched in either size or stupidity of wastefulness by even the worst private corporations.

At least Dems spend the money on useful things.

Are you sure? If you believe that other people spend your money more wisely than you do, then why not donate even more of your income to the government by paying extra taxes. Surely, the wise Dems will spend your money in a way that pleases you more than spending (or saving it) yourself? Please. The average middle class tax payer is tired of working hard to move ahead while the government is continually pushing them back and standing on their shoes. It is not just the taxes we pay directly, but all the government interference and bungling, good intentioned or not, acting like a giant brake on the economy.

The housing crises, which most people agree was at the heart of the Great Recession, was largely precipitated by the cajoling and encouragement of the Federal Government in the form of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. They gave the snowball its initial push down hill by forcing the banks to lend to sub-prime bowers. Does anyone believe for one second that banks or Wall Street firms like Goldman Sacks would have loaned money on such a massive scale to sub-prime minority borrowers if the Federal Government was not backstopping those loans? Hell no. Does the government have total blame for everything that happened? No. There was greed enough to go around in the private sector too; but the crises would not have been nearly as bad or as large if not for the bungling interference of the government in a misguided attempt to use the financial markets as a tool of social policy for increasing the number of poor and minority homeowners. These people should never have been loaned so much money and if not for the interference of the Federal Government in the marketplace; they never would have been.

Sorry it was a $640 toilet seat and a $436 hammer. Where do you think Independence Day got the kernel of truth from? Source: Here. Anybody with a grain of sense knows they were slush funds, I'm sure today that money still flows around its just not as well accounted for as a $436 hammer ;)

1) Using http://www.cagw.org/site/PageServer?pagename=reports_pigbook2008porkpercap as a source, an anti-spending organisation that most would consider right-wing as a source, some quick math (email me and I'd be glad to send you, otherwise, import it into excel...): The average pork per capita is $46.30 in states won by Obama, and $88 in states won by McCain. That's a 90% difference.

2) Of course, pork spending is a miniscule portion of the federal budget. Let's look at overall federal spending: The Tax Foundation, another anti-tax group, has data at http://www.taxfoundation.org/research/show/266.html . Plugging this into excel and comparing with election08 data (Feel free to email me asking for the data if you don't trust me), the average Blue state gets $0.96 in spending for every dollar it pays in taxes. The average Red state receives $1.40 in spending for every dollar in taxes it pays.

These figures include essentially all types of federal spending: Defence, Welfare, Medicaid, etc. You can read more about the methodology at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_spending_and_taxation_across_states.

If anything, it seems like it's the Republican politicians are "better at siphoning the federal pork." !

Per person?

Per person, things are pretty much the same. Weighing population, you get that Blue states receive 96 cents in spending for every dollar they pay in taxes, while Red states receive $1.27 in spending for every dollar they pay in taxes.

enough, you can come to rather dire conclusions just about anything you (pre)set your mind to.

Not in this case. Under pretty much every conceivable metric, Blue states perform better then Red States. This is, at heart, because Blue states have lots of cities, while Red states tend to be rural. Cities are much richer then rural areas, and money tends to fix social and economic problems. There's a good argument to be made that this has nothing to do with governance, but the data is what it is.

As for your claim that Democrats benefit from having republican predecessors: There is a good deal of evidence that vote margins can be very accurately predicted on the basis of economic performance (See the "Bread and Peace" model published by Hibbs(2005)). If Democrats gain power from Republicans, this implies that the Republicans must have done very badly. Since there are more Democrats then Republicans at every level of government right now, this creates a strong theoretical reason to believe that Republicans do not perform better then Democrats. Because of this strong theoretical basis, the burden of proof is on you to prove otherwise, preferably with a lot of data.

"Even a 60% crop wouldn't cause a famine in Florida... As for your being part of a large country, that's irrelevant, because you didn't get food as charity from the government — you paid for (most) it, with industrious, profit-driven capitalists in a hurry to deliver supplies in exchange for money. If Nicaragua had any of that (instead of living harvest-to-harvest) — they would've been able to absorb an occasional hurricane too."

Having lived through a bunch of Hurricanes, I'd say that without the massive federal assistance Florida gets after a bad Hurricane, famine-like conditions would be a strong possibility. It's hard for "industrious profit driven capitalists" to get food when they can't leave their houses without being electrocuted to death by downed power-lines.

All of these things require lots of money, and you're right, if Nicaragua was richer, there wouldn't be any problems. But Nicaragua's GDP is higher right now then it was a couple years ago when they w

I believe you make the false assumption that only businesses squander money and research projects do not. We shouldn't setup the government to compete with the free market nor manipulate it.

Democrats NEVER hide unnecessary spending or unrelated projects in omnibus spending bills. They're for responsible government, remember?

Change! Transparency!

The same post office that paints mailboxes to look like R2D2?. Lets see, who paid for that?

Or do you mean the post office that spends $8000+ on a hotel room for one of its execs?

Certainly, you're not referring to the USPS that uses its budget to unseat a senator.

Clearly, Fermilab lost out funding over much more worthy initiatives. These include:

$7,556,660 for grape and wine research.

$22,716,664 for 18 projects by Senate appropriator Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), including $1,574,400 for a cooperative agreement between the Department of Energy and Inyo County and $107,256 for long term sediment management at Humbolt Bay.

$787,200 by House appropriator Betty McCollum (D-Minn.) for advanced green design at the Museum of Natural History in Minneapolis.

$19,942,000 for four projects funding presidential libraries.

$50,000,000 for REAL ID grants.

$16,833,240 for eight projects by Senate Interior Appropriations Subcommittee member Ted Stevens (R-Alaska), including: $3,937,600 for the Tongass Timber Supply Pipeline; $3,937,600 for the United States Geological Survey Volcano Observatory; $2,953,200 for the Alaska Conveyance Program; and $492,200 for the Craig Recreation land transfer.

$5,906,400 by Rep. Heath Shuler (D-N.C.) for Great Smokey National Park, North Shore Road Settlement.

$6,700,000 for two projects funding fitness centers at two military facilities.

$14,878,000 added by the House for the International Fund for Ireland (IFI).

$33,005,420 for 35 projects by Senate appropriator Christopher (Kit) Bond (R-Mo.), including: $1,470,000 for statewide bus and bus facilities; $551,250 for the Heart of America Bicycle/Pedestrian Bridge; $367,500 for improvements to Downtown Square Street in Grant City; $367,500 for redevelopment of the 11th and Grand neighborhood in Kansas City; and $183,750 for restoration of the Poplar Bluff Historic Depot.

$18,071,200 for 17 projects by House appropriator John Olver (D-Mass.), including: $5,880,000 for development and construction of the MBTA Fitchburg to Boston Rail Corridor Project; $1,470,000 for downtown streetscape in Pittsfield; $784,000 for the Franklin Regional Transit Center; $735,000 for MART bus and commuter facilities; $269,500 for the Barrington Stage Company for the renovation and buildout of the Berkshire Music Hall and Octagon House in Pittsfield; and $196,000 for the Massachusetts Landscape Connectivity Study.

Others can be found at http://www.cagw.org/site/PageServer?pagename=reports_pigbook2008.

http://www.cagw.org/site/PageServer?pagename=reports_pigbook2008

I know where they can recoup some of this...

http://www.cagw.org/site/PageServer?pagename=reports_pigbook2008

OTOH, I believe there is a genuine problem with people paying for a lot of services that are only used by a few to enrich themselves. I resent the continual implication that because we all use (in the sense of insurance, even if we never direct claim it) some services funded by government that this somehow means any service funded by government should get a pass. Frankly, I'm willing to receive less from the government in exchange for paying less to the government. I don't see this as an unreasonable request even if it does happen to be "selfish".

Further, when you talk of "benefit to society", you should consider the opportunity cost of spending that money versus not collecting it in the first place. For example, somewhere around a billion dollars a year is on corn ethanol subsidies which as far as I can tell takes as much fossil fuel equivalent to produce as it displaces. In comparison, sugar cane, which is a far more efficient source for ethanol, is propped up by around half a billion dollars in direct subsidies a year and protected by import tarriffs. Sugar prices in the States have been at times triple the global market for sugar. And peanut subsidies are enjoyed mainly by "quota holders". If you aren't a quota holder then you don't benefit unless you can rent from someone who does hold part of the quota. These quotas cost US consumers billions per year. In return we get the "benefit" of having our food supply controlled by business interests in the name of the "family farm" (of which admittedly there are a few still out there) and food security.

Justifying the "gigantic" military on the basis of the miniscule amount of research it funds is silly. After all, the government could fund the research directly (and actually it does through DARPA and similar programs). And military spending is one of the key hidden subsidies of the global oil infrastructure. Ie, the US military is a key factor in global oil security. But the cost of that protection isn't reflected at the gas pump. Nor are any potential environmental costs. Here, government spending distorts the market and results in US citizens consuming more oil than they would if the price of oil genuinely reflected the cost of obtaining that oil? We should stop being selfish here, right?

There are huge problems with waste, lazy bastards taking advantage of the system, and administrative incompetence. But to say "I'm paying for services I don't use!" belies a selfish lack of concern for the wellbeing of society and a failure to understand that we live in an interconnected society where the success of someone else affects our success as well. If you feel you could do better on your own, you're welcome to try, but I will say this: there is a reason why no such society exists in our world.

To boil down your argument, yes, government spending is out of control, but those who propose cutting back on government spending are "selfish". Any reduction in spending (no matter how misguided that spending was to start with) will eventually hurt you. Further, since government is everywhere, that's another reason not to try to control government spending. A little dose of fatalism to ward off the obstinate, I suppose.

And we should ignore a bunch of the vast inefficiencies that the US government has introduced into running a business, employing people, having kids, education, healthcare, retirement, etc because there's some minor insurance related benefit? I probably am selfish, but I'm willing to cut back on my consumption of government services and give up a few government-based protections in order to obtain a global reduction in government services and generate a collective benefit to all of US society. Are you? Or is your piece of the action too big to give up?

Finally, let us also recall that once government provides services in a certa

Where will most of this stuff be make or assembled?
In Sen. Barbara Baxter's (D-California) state?

I'll venture a guess that she's against the war in Iraq since that sends federal money out of her state. With all the anti-war stuff happening in California, I was encouraged to see their "pork" level listed at #43 in the country according to the Citizens Against Public Waste. That's very low. http://www.cagw.org/site/PageServer?pagename=repor ts_pigbook2006porkpercap

In the past CAGW was without question shilling for corporate interests ... the letters from dead people advocating against Microsoft's anti-trust prosecution were certainly that :-)

However, the organization has been cleaned up, and has returned to its original mission, and if you look at some of their more recent work and argument, they are doing what their name implies, and as a hardcore liberal / libertarian European who finds even the US **Democratic** party too right wing for my taste, I find myself agreeing with a lot of what CAGW has to say nowadays.

Oh, and our company hosts their website ... on Linux.

Citizens Against Government Waste once ran a hit piece on me, prompted by the Church of Scientology. (What I don't know is whether the Scientologists actually paid them cash to do it, or merely supplied the material.) They ran this piece without ever attempting to contact me or Carnegie Mellon University to verify their facts, or ask for a comment. They also didn't have the guts to post the URL for the web site they were complaining about, which concerned the Sherman Austin free speech case. As far as I can tell,they're just a bunch of clowns pretending to guard the people's interests while cynically pursuing their own -- much like the rest of Washington.

Ted Stevens is from Alaska

Ted Stevens is but a rank amateur compared to Robert Byrd. And of course, unlike Stevens, Byrd has such a colorful background, being unanimously elected as the "Exalted Cyclops" of his local chapter of the Ku Klux Klan. I mean, you can't beat stuff like that.

Argghh, matey. We be feeding this post to the trolls, eh?

Axe public health? Check.
What exactly is this president "axing"? Legislation to give universal healthcare? That's all Congress. Oh, and you're assuming that universal healthcare is a good thing.

Axe social security? Check.
YEAHH! GO TEAM! Social Security is going bankrupt, due to Republican and Democratic politicians spending all of the money in any "reserve" it may have once had. I'm 30, and neither I nor any contemporary I've discussed SS with believes we'll see a dime of it. Graduate it out, now. At least save me the last bit of money I'd have to pay into a dying system.

Axe public education? They're most certainly working on it.
Nice. The state of Georgia is consistently bottom of the barrel in education in the US, despite being the 8th highest spending state on primary and secondary education. For once, conservatives are advocating a program (vouchers) that allow people to choose whether or not they like public schools. But you don't want that, do you? Public schools are what you want, and public schools are what those whining bastards will get. Let them eat cake.

Ignore urgent need to invest in renewable resources? Check.
Good plan. Let bureaucracy do our research. It worked before, right?

There's seriously not much more they can axe to funnel more money into the military, is there?
Sure there is. If you weren't just another troll, you'd put your time in helping reduce pork. But no, you just want to bitch, not do anything productive.

I agree, the US government spends 49% of its discretionary funds on the department of defense. That amount needs to be A) reduced dramatically and B) transitioned to local defense spending.

Or are you referring to the 1% identified by the Citizens Against Government Waste as pork. This group deliberately uses a pretty loose definition of pork, and that's what they've managed to identify.

I don't disagree with you on the level you are making your point at; your first comment simply kinda gave me the impression you were arguing the longer view which blames social programs for the country's larger economic issues.

Although in principal I agree it may be in many circumstances unfair for taxpayers to be burdened with the debts of underachievers, the view I take is that dollar for dollar I am supporting large corporate interests and bad government policy far more than I am my or your relatives who are just too damn lazy to haul ass and make a better life for themselves.

There isn't much I can do about my cousin's particular situation, but there sure are things I can do when I don't agree with government subsidies of billion dollar businesses, or the fact that I may still be paying $797,000 for an outhouse in PA. (http://www.cagw.org/site/PageServer?pagename=geti nv_Survey_Expenditures)

According to this, at least the first $1M in an estate is exempt from estate tax. To say he "couldn't afford the taxes" is a bit misleading. I could believe that he was forced to sell the house to cover the taxes on the excess value over $1M, but that's not the same thing, and it's not a problem most people would be afraid to face.

That said, I would have no problem supporting heavy estate taxes if I thought the government would do a better job of handling the money than most heirs do, but sadly, nothing is further from the truth. Frankly, I'd rather some spoiled rich brat spend it than Robert Byrd and his ilk.

Actually I'm willing to admit I get some useful services out of my tax money. The worthless services outnumber the good though. I take a look at the latest Federal Transportation bill with 6,000 pork barel projects, including a bridge in Alaska that no one wants, and I have to say there are better things to spend my money on. Then I look at my local news and find out that after using my tax money to build a road our local transportation officials want to turn the thing into a toll road so they can charge me more. If a private company want to fund a toll road, great. But to double tax me like that is offensive.

If we eliminated just some of the government waste we could do so much more. The American Society of Civil Engineers give our nation's infrastructure a failing grade. And yet money is poured into new projects. Acording to the citizens against government waste:

The gas tax has morphed from 3 cents per gallon in 1956 to 18.4 cents today. Far from being a user fee for road travelers, the Highway Trust Fund pays for museums, bus stops, bike trails, and mass-transit boondoggles all over the country. Why don't we repair our bridges before building hiking trails?

Actually pothole repair probably would have been on McGreevey's platform in New Jersey, if he had run for re-election. There was a lot of publicity around pothole repair in the 03-04 winter. In places where roads are pretty much maxed out, repairing roads is an issue. As a local issue, potholes can be winner. But as a federal issue it isn't sexy. Even locally it's a big snore unless it's a major problem. And why has it become a major problem? Because it wasn't worth fixing the problems until they became major. So until things are so bad that everyone's complaining politicians will spend that money on new projects, not on infrastructure.

But, what's your point? Gas taxes should be cut and the transportation system goes to shit?

How about a moratorium on new projects until some of the infrastructure is repaired? How about a removal of pork from appropriation bills? Cut my gas taxes and the government has less to waste. The're already lettting things go to shit, this just prevents them from fiddling while the city burns.

What's really funny is that according to Netcraft, the Citizens Against Government Waste are using Open Source, Open Standard software:

Site report for www.cagw.org
Site http://www.cagw.org/ Last reboot 158 days ago Uptime graph
Domain cagw.org Netblock owner convio.com
IP address 66.45.103.69 Site rank 120043
Country US Nameserver named.cagw.org
Date first seen August 1997 DNS admin netadmin@convio.com
Domain Registry publicinterestregistry.net Reverse DNS unknown
Organisation Citizens Against Government Wa, 1301 Connecticut Avenue, NW Su, Washington, 20036, United States Nameserver Organisation Citizens Against Government Wa, 1301 Connecticut Avenue, NW Su, Washington, 20036, United States

Hosting HistoryNetblock Owner IP address OS Web Server LastChanged
convio.com 8025 I.H. 35 North AUSTIN TX US 78753 66.45.103.69 FreeBSD Apache 1-Jun-2005


And wait, could it be that "Americans for Technology Leadership" also run Open Source, Open Standards software? You betcha!

Site report for www.techleadership.org
Site http://www.techleadership.org/ Last reboot 58 days ago Uptime graph
Domain techleadership.org Netblock owner Global Net Access, LLC
IP address 65.254.39.124 Site rank 889858
Country US Nameserver ns.ez-web-hosting.com
Date first seen November 1999 DNS admin billingsys@ez-web-hosting.com
Domain Registry publicinterestregistry.net Reverse DNS ez13.ez-web-hosting.com
Organisation Association for Competitive Te, 1413 K Street, N.W., Washington, 20005, United States Nameserver Organisation Ez-Web-Hosting, 4633 Welborn Dr., Sherrills Ford, 28673, United States

Netblock Owner IP address OS Web Server Last changed
Global Net Access, LLC 55 Marietta St, NW Suite 1720 Atlanta GA US 30303 65.254.39.124 Linux Apache/1.3.33 Unix mod_auth_passthrough/1.8 mod_log_bytes/1.2 mod_bwlimited/1.4 FrontPage/5.0.2.2635 mod_ssl/2.8.22 OpenSSL/0.9.7a PHP-CGI/0.1b 29-Sep-2005


If MS's pro-predatory "standards" are so much better than Open Standards, then why are these organizations using software founded and created upon and with Open Source, Open Standards software?

There is a name for this type organization: Hypocrite

ttyl
          Farrell

The key sentence:
Jim Prendergast is executive director of Americans for Technology Leadership.

Americans for Technology Leadership Founding members
        * Association for Competitive Technology
        * Citizens Against Government Waste
        * Cityscape Filmworks
        * Clarity Consulting
        * CompTIA
        * CompUSA
        * Microsoft Corporation
        * 60Plus Association
        * Small Business Survival Committee
        * Staples, Inc.

http://www.cagw.org/site/News2?page=NewsArticle&id =8966&news_iv_ctrl=1037

itizens Against Government Waste (CAGW) today urged Congress to eliminate the National Institute of Standards and Technology's Advanced Technology Program (ATP), which funds private sector research and development

These are the other tech programs CAGW doesn't like.
http://www.atp.nist.gov/gems/listgems.htm

Who is Association for Competitive Technology?
http://www.actonline.org/aboutus.htm
While ACT members include some household names like eBay, Orbitz and Microsoft, our members are primarily small and mid-size companies. Smaller, entrepreneurial technology firms like Sax Software,

http://www.actonline.org/principles.htm
ACT and its members believe that the best way to achieve a healthy Tech Environment and a thriving technology industry is to apply free-market principles that promote innovation, investment and competition. ACT is committed to core free-market principles including:

        1. Consumers, not governments, should pick winners and losers in the marketplace.

        2. Small tech businesses thrive on innovation, not regulation and litigation.

        3. The law of regulation includes the corollary of unintended consequences.

  60 Plus has set ending the federal estate tax and saving Social Security for the young as its top priorities. Why should they be against this? It would save money in the long term.

        The Small Business & Entrepreneurship Council (SBE Council) works to influence legislation and policies that help to create a favorable and productive environment for small businesses and entrepreneurship. By educating policymakers, elected officials, the media and the public about the critical role that small businesses play in our economy--and how government actions can positively or negatively affect the small business community.

I don't know about you, but I'd want a refund from the SBE Council if they are supporting not going to an open document standard. A standard means that every small business could work and bid on any part of the project. Odds are most of the work would be done locally and not outsourced overseas. This is a great move for small business. (It is a bad move for those small businesses that store everything in their own little data format that only they know about. Which is exactly what this effort is trying to get rid of in the government realm.)

If this isn't the grossest mismanagement of government funds this side of the Atlantic I don't know what is.

• IRAQ
• http://www.occupationwatch.org/reports/archives/20 05/06/us_mismanagemen.html
  Strategic Missle Defence
  New Orleans

I could go on all day.

Is this even necessary? $308M is a lot of money (maybe not for our federal government, but for the average taxpayer) and this really seems to be a waste to tax and spend on a program that is better solved by private companies.

Will we need old information in digital format? How many old books have we needed to save that were better saved just by reprinting them? How much information will the future need, and is it important to save just about everything just for memory sake?

It just sounds like pork to me. Competitive pork, yes, but still pork. Our government has kept Lockheed afloat for decades.

I'm trying to find out where in our Constitution does the Federal Government find an enumerated power to pay for this. It is outrageous -- there are numerous companies out there already attempting to archive old data. Why does our government even care? I bet it has more to do with raising taxes, creating new taxpayers to be paid on the government dole, and increasing unemployment figures.

Similar to Hazlitt's Broken Window Fallacy, taxes are NOT good for creating wealth for the country. Instead, they create profit for certain select individuals and reduce wealth for everyone else.

Our elected officials continue to finance deficit spending, which will only make us taxpayers and the next generations poorer.

Great. Pay-as-you-go policing and a subscription-only Army (haven't paid? fight your own war).

Forget for the moment that defense is one of the few things the federal government is actually charged with doing (by the Constitution).

I notice you left out ambulances/emergency services. Many ambulances, most perhaps, are commercial services, not government run.

Public education is not "free," it is paid for by taxpayers like me, and squandered by people who do not appreciate it because they don't have to work to pay for it. Those that really do appreciate it would be able to receive education through charitable organizations if people were giving less money to the government, and had more available to donate.

You have all these "underpaid" public school teachers, many of whom are not good and/or qualified for the jobs, trying to teach a bunch of kids, many of whom do everything in their power to avoid school/work. This problem has arisen because the government is running the school system. Period. No, I am definitely not happy about our "free education" system. It's fucked.

You don't think the money the federal government is spending rescuing Louisians from the roofs of their houses isn't being wisely spent?

Should we spend the money and get it done? Yes. Is it wisely spent? No. There was a mandatory evacuation in most parts. Those people should not have been there. That's why so many are dying. Maybe next time they'll heed the warnings. (Maybe we can stop subsidizing flood insurance with taxpayer money, too... let them pay for the risks they are taking by living in a flood plain.)

That being said, the two things you mentioned are two things that the federal government is SUPPOSED TO DO. Libertarians don't have a problem funding those types of gov't activities.

You, however, conveniently ignore all the money that is wasted on pork barrel spending and useless social programs, loopholes for lobbyists, etc.

Read some of the studies on this site, a non-partisan site, and tell me if you honestly still think the government is spending money wisely:

http://www.cagw.org/

" Additionally many countries accept violence as not being a crime at all."

Like the States?

Considering nearly everyone in the country is forced or threatened by assault and kidnapping to pay taxes to the federal government every year that fund things like "$26,000,000 for Alaska villages through the Rural Community Advancement Program" (link). Something like agriculture subsidies. Farmers can get their own money, not mine. If they can't, they shouldn't farm.

Or when the banks perform fractional reserve banking with your money and deflate it? Apparently that's called good economic sense. Still sounds like violent crime to me, because if you try to protect your property from them you'll be assaulted or murdered by the police or whomever. That happens to everyone with money.

Okay, I'll bite.

Thank you very little for opening up with the most trite and least respectful opening on Slashdot. I am fully capable of debating and discussing every bit of your ideology and value system provided that you are able to maintain at least a base level of politeness.

Capitalism rewards the lazy and stupid, too. What world do you live in where this isn't painfully obvious?

If capitalism rewards the lazy and the stupid, then why are so many poor people lazy and stupid? Perhaps this ugly truth is too painful for you to bear, so you pretend that it isn't true. My sister, a Leftist, steadfastly refuses to believe that some people don't want to work. Do you share that belief?

This is where you start arguing that any results you don't like are because people aren't practising "real" capitalism. I love how both sides resort to that.

You exhibit your black-and-white thinking with your "both sides" comment (as if there were only two sides to this issue).

Your accusation of "no true Scotsman" is false because I never define the taking of property by force as capitalism. The two are mutually exclusive. Whether others share my view is immaterial. We are debating *my* philosophy, after all. (And we'll debate your nasty philosophy, too.)

Some other points about your painfully cliche libertarian post. "Seized taxpayer income"?!? Ever heard of the social contract? If you don't like paying taxes go live in a cave and don't use any of the things that my tax dollars paid for, you cheapskate. Or move out of the country and go found your own.

That's actually one point, not plural "points," to which you raised an objection. Perhaps you were in a rush when you typed this. It doesn't appear that you tried very hard, that's for sure.

The phrase you're looking for is "ugly truth," not "cliche." If taxes weren't seized then why is there an IRS (yes, I'm a USian)? If taxes weren't seized, then what happens to me if I don't want to pay for pork? And if you find me one person who actually likes paying taxes, then I'll show you a person who's actually paying tithes to his God (the State) to be managed by the Priests (his Leftist represenatives) and stands testament to my belief that Leftism, for some, is more of a religion than it is a philosophy.

As to your "social contract" point, yes I've heard many such garbage from many such Leftists and I reject quite a bit of it. The way that I understand social contract is the means by which all humans understand morality. Social contract used to forbid interracial marriages, used to promote lynchings, and currently maintains me and my family as second-class citizens because we're gay, so I don't choose to follow it blindly, much less use it as an excuse for you to denigrate me as you do. Are you going to argue, "That's not 'true' social contract!" now?

The Free Market isn't perfect. Communism isn't perfect. Hell, even Democracy isn't perfect.

First, we don't live in a Democracy. In fact, no governments in the world are Democracies. My country (the USA) is a Constitutional Republic. And yes, Democracy sucks as a form of government. I know it's probably "uncool" to quote the founding fathers of the USA to you, but the government was set up in many cases to usurp the "Tyranny of the Majority," which, of course, is the deciding factor of the ugly government known as Democracy.

Second, I never argued that that Capitalism was "perfect" or that Communisim was "imperfect." Instead, I offer that Communism is immoral and Capitalism is moral (according to my values of course). That you somehow equate Capitalism with Communism by labeling them both "not perfect" is shallow. Are the sins of Capitalism equivalent to the sins of Communism? That's a value judgement, of course, and I probably think your values suck as badly as you think mine do.

We would

To be clear:
1> "human persons" must *not* send spam, "corporate persons" are exempt.
2> To distinguish the "sender" between the "transmitter" of the message and the identity in the message's "From" data field, see <1>
3> "Spam": see also "pork".

People, in general, are too stupid to realize that voting for X or Y is going to save or cost them money in taxes. Look at all the poor people voting republican despite the fact that their tax burden is going up because of it.

I'll agree with "people, in general, are too stupid." It causes all sorts of problems.

The poor people voting Republican are actually lowering their taxes since Bush's tax cuts were across the board. Bush's immense spending programs will actually affect our descendents. Democrats are "tax and spend," while Republicans are "borrow and spend."

Now, what politicians actually do is give money to their campaign (and pro-them PACs and 572s) contributors, who then give them the money they need to stay in office.

Politicians give money to their voters and campaign contributors in all sorts of ways. It's called "pork." For example: check out the Pig Book to see some of governments most egregious examples of using taxpayer-plundered money to buy votes.

It's an inherent flaw in democracy. Unless you can think of a better solution, suck it up and pay your taxes, whiner.

Perhaps you'll be surprised to know that our form of government is a Republic, not a Democracy as many politicians like to lie. And thinking up a better solution is not hard at all: eliminate 90% of the federal government. It's the implementation of that solution that is the hard part. After all, how do you convince someone that receiving plundered money is a bad thing when they're already quite comfortable with their moocher lifestyle? The only way to do that is to win constutents to your point-of-view, and the only way to do that is to, as you put it, "whine." It also helps me to refine my argument to sharpen my steel on posts like yours.

Entergy will sometimes sell some of their excess off-peak generation from AR Nuclear-One for as low as $7/MWh. Compare that to the average coal cost of about $15/MWh, natural gas of about $70/MWh, oil-2 $60/MWh, and less refined oil about $50/MWh. I don't understand why the US doesn't have more nuclear plants. I guess people fear what they don't understand. See this and this for more info.

European countries have more of a dependence on Nuclear power than the US, see power statistics.

Throughout the world, most people are uneducated about nuclear power and do not consider it green at all. In fact, nuclear power is much cleaner and cheaper than coal. Wind and hydro power are both less environmental friendly and more expensive. See this government waste article for details. Also, you can't put wind, hydro, and tidal generator in as many places as nuclear. But, people fear what they don't understand making electric companies like the one I work for less likely build nuclear power plants because of the bad feelings people get about nuclear power.

Yeah, some funding into multi-person computer voice recognition/transcription might be nice, but translation is the key. Right now the bottleneck is the limited number of Arabic speakers. Perhaps adding a mandatory fast short course in Arabic to military training might be helpful. Do it immersive, and do it like the marines teach hand to hand: "Ladies, I'm here to teach you enough to get yourself killed."

"By the time he's dead, there will be so many buildings with his name on them..."

And he'll STILL be behind THIS guy.

So what have we learned here today...

Half the state employees are playing Solitaire or the stock market, and the other half are screwing around spying on their coworkers ?

Tax dollars at work ;)

Verizon is stupid for demanding that the spectrum be auctioned to the highest bidder because Nextel and the FCC are doing what is in the publics best interest.

not according to the Citizens Against Government Waste porker of the month

I read an article on their site against the idea of allowing only open source to compete for a bid. They would rather have it open for all to compete.

I agree. If the goal is to lower the cost of government, you never reduce the competition for a project.

From the article:
The last argument was countered with a statement made by Chief Information Officer Peter Quinn at "Doing IT Business with Massachusetts State and Local Government," an American Electronics Association forum in Cambridge, Mass. Quinn told the conference, "Massachusetts will spend millions on open architecture systems. Everything will be open source. It will take years to implement, but if you are a parochial vendor, you will not be able to do business in Massachusetts." Quinn clearly indicated there would be no exceptions to the rule permitting only open-source/Linux software.

I just read the article--I must be a bad /.er--where they praised President Reagan for creating the Grace Commission and encouraging the formation of CAGW. It sounds like you are trying to revise their article, or I missed where it said what you said. :)

This is an issue that is just beginning to blossom, and many in the policy world have yet to choose a side. It is important that the issues related to open source be fully understood. Many states that are suffering from huge deficits may turn to it as a quick solution, only to find themselves more in debt later down the road.

You ignorant slut! Pork knows no party! Democrats are just as bad as Republicans. Go read a book on the subject sometime or go straight to the source. Maybe next time you post can look less like the typical anti-Bush lemming and more like an intelligent citizen.

Nothing that the government did has been a factor in Linux growing market share. So next time you start to talk about the big bad evil Microsoft, perhaps you should consider how much money you've given to Microsoft and compare that to how much has been taken from you by Uncle Sam to fund frivolous lawsuits and pork barrel projects.

The key to being successful is to provide a better quality service or product than the other fella. This is true of businesses, and this is true of individual people. Most people I know who I would consider successful are so because they work hard at producing quality work in everything they do. And many people I know who are less than successful are often more concerned with worrying about what other people are doing and focused on complaining as loud as they can about how they haven't gotten the same breaks as the successful people.

I don't intend for this to turn in to a tirade, but I do believe that the power of market forces are often underestimated. A truly free market is one of the most just and powerful forces on the planet. It is not meant to be taken lightly and shackled for the sake of expedience.

Also they immediately lose all credibiliy with their links page. Under 'Technology Reform Links' they list 'Microsoft Corporation - Visit the Microsoft website to examine the future of cyber technology!'. Riiight.

Funny thing is a quote from CAGW is being served by none other then microsoft.com themselves. Odd situation here.. they are against wasting tax payer money so they stand with MS's fight against using open source in the government.

One of their press releases released last year looks very similar to the recent MA complaints. The president of CAGW seems to have somewhat good intentions as a whole, but does not seem to have enough knowledge of the commercial software industry to justify his postion on this issue. Saving taxpayers money is one thing and consistant with what CAGW stands for, the theory he has I quoted below is good, but his final conclusion on how this can actually save taxpayer money is very misguided and provides the opposite of what he is trying to point out. Spoon fed?

When purchasing software, the government should examine which
products are the most compatible, efficient, technologically advanced, and
cost-effective on the market. Purchasing source codes would provide no
inducement for software makers to become competitive and would hinder the
development of new products.

I wonder if he could explain what he means by that or who is he looking out for there.
Maybe someone should ask him how far in the future he is looking or if he is aware of Microsoft's save some now but pay later and forever method of licensing through "software assurance" and their long standing history of making sure just enough information is held back to make any true competition is hard to find. Add in the cost of getting everything MS so it works just right or to ensure compatibility and it looks much worse.