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To have a government like Finland or the Netherlands requires pretty left-wing policies and attitudes, including paying civil servants well, which requires a lot of tax money. If you keep insisting on low tax rates because we don't have a government type that doesn't arise unless one has somewhat higher tax rates, I'm not sure what to say.

Feds earn 74% more than people in the private sector.

The Cato Institute’s Chris Edwards compared data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis to show that, in his view, civilian federal workers are overcompensated. Factoring both salary and benefits, Edwards pointed to BEA data showing the average federal employee earns about $119,000 annually, compared to the private sector worker who earns $67,000 per year. When comparing just salaries, feds collect 50 percent bigger paychecks, Edwards said.

Since the 1990s, federal workers have enjoyed faster compensation growth than private-sector workers.

More sources:
U.S. Office of Personnel Management: "Senior Executive Service Performance & Compensation"
Congressional Research Service: "The Federal Workforce: Characteristics and Trends"
Congressional Budget Office: "Comparing the Compensation of Federal and Private-Sector Employees".

Apparently our Government is starved for cash? Here's where we tax. Look at how it's spent.

Isn't http://www.opencrs.com/ designed to resolve this issue?

Why is that a bewildering number of people paint the world as black-and-white? ...

Choice == Freedom. Monopoly == Slavery.

You've got a mighty big brush there yourself.

First: You exaggerate. US healthcare is more costly, but only by 1.1x not 2x. Foreign healthcare like Canada is also costly, but most of the cost is hidden behind bureaucracy and taxes.

Total horseshit.

You are looking for "Table 1. Health Care Spending in OECD Countries, 2004"

In 2004, health care spending in the United States averaged $6,102 per person,
according to data from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development
(OECD). The OECD consists of 30 democracies (listed in Table 1), most of which
are considered to be the most economically advanced countries in the world.1
As shown in Figure 1 and Table 1, U.S. per capita health care spending was
well over double the average of OECD countries, which was $2,560 in 2004. Health
care made up 15.3% of the U.S. economy in 2004, as measured by Gross Domestic
Product (GDP) -- up from 5.1% of GDP in 1960. No other OECD country devotes
as much of its economy to health care, also shown in Table 1.

The table before that ("Table 1. Health Care Spending in OECD Countries, 2004") shows the breakdown between private and public funding for health care in industrialized countries. In case you didn't feel like doing the math, it works out to about $2,684 spent by the US government last year for your health care, which is more than the Canadian government spent on universal health care per capita ($2,183).

Please stop peddling this bullshit like you aren't going to get called out on it.

For all its flaws the U.S. is still superior to government-run hospitals. People can get free care simply by walking into the ER, with the cost borne by the megarich corporations (who can easily afford it). I think that's a good system, and certainly better than if Uncle Sam Care was run like Uncle Sam Amtrak or Uncle Sam Postal Service (both nearly-bankrupt).

Actually, according to every study that I've ever head of, the U.S. (like http://assets.opencrs.com/rpts/RL34175_20070917.pdf for example) has middling to poor outcomes compared to other developed nations and pays more than any other country in the world for average, at best, results.

Canada and the U.K. actually get better results than the U.S. for less money. There are certainly horror stories that can be told about every health care system, like the ones linked above. But the pural of anecdotes is not data. When you look at the whole system the most (if not all) of world's government run health care systems are more effective and cheaper than the U.S. system.

The best systems both on results and cost tend to be mixed public/private systems, but for some reason Americans seem to be afraid of such systems.

Governments do not 'reserve' anything. In a pure free market capitalist economy, if someone is unable to feed themselves (say because a powerful group has decreed 'no one give him any work if you want to do business with us.') then that person will starve to death. Destroyed, and not by a government. Corporations destroy people's lives all the time, and what do you think this financial mess was about? Corporations making money up out of thin air.

The bailouts: bad. The stimulus: meh, not done right. Health care? It's a moral issue. We're the only first world nation without socialized medicine. And we have the least effective yet most expensive system. Look at some figures:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:International_Comparison_-_Healthcare_spending_as_%25_GDP.png

http://assets.opencrs.com/rpts/RL34175_20070917.pdf

http://dll.umaine.edu/ble/U.S.%20HCweb.pdf

http://ucatlas.ucsc.edu/spend.php

http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/11/14/why-does-us-health-care-cost-so-much-part-i/

Most recent polls show a supermajority of the population supports radical health care reform and socialized medicine. Despite big pharma spending billions to change public opinion.

http://www.opencrs.com/

Americans who say that they like/prefer to keep their health care system the way it is have to be either utterly ignorant of the facts or blinded HURRAH AMERICA! patriots who percieve anything about their country as great.

America has the most expensive health care system in the world and the least effective in direct comparison with other developed countries.

http://assets.opencrs.com/rpts/RL34175_20070917.pdf

And here comes Obama, trying to put it right, and everyone is like "WTF??? Communists are taking over the country!!!"

Seriously, for the fucking love of Jesus Christ, what the hell is wrong with you people? Stop believing all the bullshit on Fox News and start getting a grip on reality.

Read up on the American school of economics: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_School_(economics)

Ah, Hamilton. Well, Hamilton was a Nationalist and felt that the central government should be very strong, with the states and the people subordinate, quite in contrast to Jefferson and most of the other founding fathers. Note that his idea of a "central bank" meant that the federal government would control it, not some conglomerate of private banks like exists now in the Federal Reserve.

Frankly, I simply feel that it's the wrong philosophy, because of the danger of a tyrannical leadership taking over.

Your idea of what "progressive" is seems to be fear based,

No. It's based on policies I see advocated by self-proclaimed "progressives".

and is largely incorrect. The idea of community property is not a new one, and does not belong solely to the communist ideal (in their ideal - everything - is community property, no one in the United States suggests going that way).

As far as I can tell, progressive is another word for use the best system for the case that comes up. In healthcare, some kind of baseline publicly funded system is the only one that makes sense. We currently pay the most per capita for healthcare out of every nation, and we rank 38th in terms of quality of care. There is no way to defend that.

You're comparing apples and oranges here. The US rank 38th in overall "health", based on factors like infant mortality and life expectancy. That's different than "health care". In the US you can obtain the best health care that money can buy (well, yea). The per capita costs for health care is because of the regulations in place which discourage people for shopping health care based on price. Some might shop health insurance by price, but pretty much no one in the US shops health care by price, because of the crappy system. It doesn't need to be socialized to fix that.

For a reasoned report on spending and health care comparisons to other countries, here is a pretty unbiased view of the issues.

On the internet, I see very little that needs to be regulated - of those things that do need it, they tend to be related to the infrastructure, and those old media companies that run that infrastructure - regulation of the highways, not what you drive on them. Real highways have more regulation than that, and I think that's fine - the net doesn't (yet) need very much government intervention. There's nothing even vaguely communist about that.

Agreed.

BTW, you may also be interested in the US Constitution - so few actually read that marvelous document (it's an easy, short read).

http://www.archives.gov/exhibits/charters/constitution_transcript.html

http://www.archives.gov/exhibits/charters/bill_of_rights_transcript.html

I'm quite familiar with that - in fact I keep a copy in my pocket, just for reference. Unfortunately, it's stunning all the unconstitutional acts that the Federal government gets away with these days. I thought Obama would reverse course on that in at least some areas, but he seems to be more of a puppet that's intent on shredding the Constitution even more than it has been in the last 8 years.

I think API is redundant because CRS Reports are freely down-loadable from here

OpenCRS

from http://www.opencrs.com/ "American taxpayers spend over $100 million a year to fund the Congressional Research Service, a "think tank" that provides reports to members of Congress on a variety of topics relevant to current political events. Yet, these reports are not made available to the public in a way that they can be easily obtained."

The Iran Nonproliferation Act of 2000 (INA) was enacted to help stop foreign transfers to Iran of weapons of mass destruction, missile technology, and advanced conventional weapons technology, particularly from Russia. Section 6 of the INA banned U.S. payments to Russia in connection with the International Space Station (ISS) unless the U.S. President determined that Russia was taking steps to prevent such proliferation. When the President in 2004 announced that the Space Shuttle would be retired in 2010, the Russian Soyuz became the only vehicle available after that date to transport astronauts to and from the ISS. In 2005 Congress amended INA to exempt Soyuz flights to the ISS from the Section 6 ban through 2011.

Here's an interesting if a bit outdated article that might make the issue a little clearer: http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewsr.html?pid=15775
as well as this: http://opencrs.com/document/RL34477

It appears that the Iran Non-Proliferation Act "bans U.S. payments to Russia in connection with the International Space Station unless the U.S. President determines that Russia is taking steps to prevent [the proliferation of weapons and weapons technology to Iran]." An amendment was made to this in 2005 that exempted Soyuz flights from the payment ban through 2011.

True, and after the Yorktown was such a disaster, the programme was scrapped.

However, it looks like you're right - the Yorktown sank any chance of getting Windows on any warship, the COTS concept of making advanced software cheap enough to be ubiquitous on all warships turned out to be a poor idea. (though, maybe it was the contractor selling it at fault)

The navy still wants (and perhaps needs?) a better technology in their ships, so maybe they'll get it, but I think that it won't be running Windows after all.

This report says Potential candidates for the basis of an eventual common open-architecture combat
system for Navy surface ships include (but are not necessarily limited to) a modularized
version of Lockheed's Aegis system, Raytheon's Total Ship Computing Environment
Infrastructure, or TSCEI (the core of the combat system being developed for the DDG-
1000 destroyers), and the Core Mission System developed by General Dynamics and
Northrop for the General Dynamics version of the LCS.

Note: the Raytheon system runs Red Hat and a 'custom' real-time Linux, General Dynamics system runs Concurrent Corp.'s RedHawk Linux. source

Cuba's "terrorism" activities consisted mostly of stuff from the 1960s (Castro supported some of the more militant "black power" movements, and one of them was gearing up to blow up the Statue of Liberty), and Castro's support of various pro-Communist movements in Latin America, which stopped about fifteen years ago when the USSR tanked. Even the Congressional Research Service report doesn't point to any concrete instances of terrorist activities out of Cuba in recent years.

The US boycott of Cuba is mostly about getting votes from Cuban exiles in South Florida.

They do. It's called the Congressional Research Service, and it's part of the Library of Congress. Their job is to write reports on issues that are of concern to members of congress. Reports are confidential unless and until a representative or senator decides to release them.

While the CRS doesn't seem to have a web site, many other sites contain lists of reports that are available to the public.

"the National Commission on Terrorism (NTC), a congressionally mandated bi-partisan body, issued a report providing a blueprint for U.S. counterterrorism policy with both policy and legislative recommendations. The report could be significant in shaping the direction of U.S. policy and the debate in Congress. It generally argues for a more aggressive U.S. strategy in combating terrorism. Critics, however, argue that NTC conclusions and recommendations ignore competing U.S. goals and interests; i.e that a proactive strategy might lead to the curbing of individual rights and liberties, damage important commercial interests, and widen disagreements between the U.S. and its allies over using the "stick" as opposed to the "carrot" approach in dealing with states that actively support or countenance terrorism."

This was dated February 6, 2001, 8 months before the Patriot Act (the aforementioned report was issued June 6, 2000).

http://www.opencrs.com/document/RS20598/

I think there is some good content, for example:

U.S. Housing Prices: Is There a Bubble?
May 16, 2003

http://www.opencrs.com/document/RL31918/

Just for a heads up, a couple of the reports cover details on the Patriot Act including provisions that expire at the end of this year. Figured it was a topic of interest on /.