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Reminds me of a Kurt Vonnegut short story. The Big Space Fuck.

Already proposed by Kurt Vonnegut : The Big Space F***

Kurt Vonnegut would agree.

Thank you for posting that. Awesome.

Kurt Vonnegut would agree.

50 years of design and the best shape that rocket scientists can come up with is penis shaped?

There is a reason for that.

http://www.pierretristam.com/Bobst/07/wf041307.htm

In that case, if Libertarians had had their way, you would've been lucky that he was on the clock when he hit you. What if he hadn't, and he didn't have enough assets of his own to compensate you for your injury? Tough luck for you, I guess.

No, because this wasn't his first accident he wouldn't have been driving. Legally at least. As it was, though the state he fled from had a warrant out for his arrest he was able to get a driver's license in the state I lived in at the tyme.

Yes, really. Just because the economy was improving doesn't mean everything was fine; an improvement in the average doesn't translate to an improvement in every single person's life. If private charity and the market had been providing for everyone, there would've been no demand for social programs.

Robbing Peter to pay Paul is never right, and that's exactly what government does when it taxes your income. Taxing also hurts the economy, because of taxes people can't spend as much, increasing consumer spending will create jobs. As it is now, billions of tax payer dollars goes to hugh corporations as subsidies. For instance Cargill, a private corporation, and Archer Daniel Midland (ADM) receives billions of dollars in farm subsidies. People talk about welfare but what is rarely ever heard about is the corporate welfare that goes on. ADM has been called a corporate "welfare queen". Over Bush's veto congress passed $300 Billion in farm subsidies. Yet it's not small farmers who are being helped with these subsidies, one farmer called leaving his farm to his children "child abuse". The average age of a farmer in the US is 53, younger people are leaving even though some want to keep farming. They can't compeat with large agricultural corporations who receive massive subsidies.

Investing for your retirement is a good idea, obviously, and I'm fortunate enough to be able to do it myself. But not everyone can afford to invest, and not everyone who does invest will come out ahead.

With lower or no income tax, the economy would be better thus increasing people's pay. With higher pay people would be able to invest more, which would increase employment and again pay. The one place I would tax income is on corporations and maybe on the dividends they pay out to stockholders. I admit many libertarians wouldn't tax corporations but I would. They have limited liability and they should pay for that privilege. Then I'd have user fees and maybe a pollution tax. A fuel tax for instance, drivers would pay a tax on fuel which would then be used to pay for roads. Roads are another place I disagree with other libertarians, at least some want to privatize roads but the USA Constitution specifically gives the federal government the authority to build roads.

I'll also admit I agree that as it is now not everyone will come out ahead. But I place that squarely on education and government. From what I've seen and heard for years school doesn't teach economics and finance much anymore. When I was in 9th grade a teacher I had for civics had us students play a game for some weeks. He had us pretend we had $25,000 to invest and we could invest it however we wanted. During class we'd look through the financial section of the newspaper and decide what we wanted buy and sale, say I may pick to sale the stocks in X I own then buy stocks in Y. The next day I'd look at the selling price of X, then multiply that by the number of stocks I owned in X. Then I'd look at the selling price of Y and divide how much money I had by the amount to see how many stocks of Y I could buy. And that was in a public school. Now, I have not heard of anything

That is one of the things I love in Kurt Vonnegut's The Big Space Fuck:

...so even the President was saying shit and fuck and so on, without anybody's feeling threatened or taking offense. It was perfectly OK. He called the Space Fuck a Space Fuck and so did everybody else...

On the other hand Bush has been making inroads in that direction...