Oh, come on. Canada could do it too if they wanted. It just takes a two step process.
Har, har. Very funny. Just so that you have a better laugh you should know that Canada can produce a pile of nuclear warheads in a jiffy. I hope that it wont become necessary and the world recovers from its present bout with insanity but you should remember that Canada has an extremely advanced nuclear program and is capable of producing vast quantities of plutonium at a drop of a hat from our many reactors. As a matter of fact, the plutonium in many of the British warheads was made here. Just so you know.
Let me tell you, British Airways does a lot more than hand out barf bags, which is why their experience keeps them competitive in a global market.
Except that the Russians are not in any tourist "business", they are doing it as a stop-gap desperation funding shortage measure. The "space tourism" idea is universally hated at all levels of the Russian space agency and will be promptly abandoned as soon as the monetary need is no longer there. We are really talking about the barf bag level of effort here. They are doing nothing whatsoever to make it easier on the "tourist", unlike British Airways who does not (last time I heard) require you to pay for your own pressure suit and sit around with an oxygen mask on while the plane performs high-g rapid manouvers to make it easier for the airline to fullfill other, more important, prorities.
I complained about the $billions the US has spent on the ISS, from which the Russians have benefitted disproportionately.
I understand what you are saying, and right here is your hangup: the Russians did not "benefit disproportionately" in any of this. They already had the experience, the tech and the people. The US had no orbital habitat experience to speak of. Enter a cash transaction, the Russians get coin, the US the experience to peruse, at 1/100th of the real price.
NASA has not "bought" the superior Russian experience. It's "rented" it, because we don't actually increase our experience with what we bought.
That is not true. The major part of the deal was for NASA to have complete access to the manufacturing processes, engineers, documentation and a whole other range of that Soviet experience. What NASA will do with that, is another discussion.
Another point that you fixate on is your invention of "isolationism" on my part. I have not said we shouldn't work with other countries, and in fact have repeated that we should in every message in this thread. You are the one fighting that strawman, not me.
Actually no, the "strawman" appearance originates from the fact that you are self-contradicting yourself. On one hand you say that international cooperation and funding of foreign research is a good thing and on the other that it is counter-productive and gets the US taxpayer nothing. While I keep pointing out that the particular ISS deal was actually a downright thrifty purchase for NASA.
So Russia gets an American to give them 14% of their operating budget to tag along on a mission, rather than stop helping Iran proliferate... So US subsidies, and even private expenses, pay to develop the Russian space program, which helps Iran get nuclear missiles. Regardless of how Iran, Russia and the US got to that point, US investment in increasing that threat is obviously bad for the US.
There you go. "Helping Iran to proliferate". Never you mind that so far the Russians did nothing to actually help Iran build nukes, only to get their civilian program working, to which Iran is entitled under the non-proliferation treaties. Never you mind that the tech is already there from the days of Uncle Stalin. Never you mind that ISS or other space budgets have absolutely nothing to do with any of that Iranian activity. What do you really mean is to put Iran in the dog-house, where the US wants it, and thus for the Russians to be extorted into losing a major customer, who will then get his civilian stuff from somewhere else, regardless? Irrespective of which Iran will get their defense program going one way or another. A rather legitimate defense stuff to begin with. Look, the world does not revolve around US's ass. Iran is not getting nukes to level New York pre-emptively, they are getting them because they are scared shitless of US nuking Teheran pre-emptively, for that mad policy of pre-emption is now empirically evident for all to see in, say, Iraq and there are US senators on the record with ideas like "nuking Mecca" in response to any "terrorist att
The issue is not so much the money, it's who's getting what it buys
The US got the 20 years worth of Russian orbital habitat experience on the cheap. I still do not understand your point.
And it's really not the proceeds from this single passenger, to which I did not refer, though that amount is not insubstantial. $20M of a $400M Shuttle mission is 5%, which is a pretty substantial amount.
You gotta be kidding. NASA budget in 2005 alone is around $16 billion. The $20 mil may be "substantial" to the Russians with their laughable (and yet sufficient to compete with NASA) $130 million yearly budget. But not to the US.
What's at issue is that the Russians are getting the experience of launching civilians, and the US (or any US launcher) is not.
"Launching civlians" is the easiest part of that deal. You get one, get him simplified training and stick his ass into the Soyuz. There is no "experience" to be gained from this, other then how many barf bags to bring along.
It's the billions the US has spent subsidizing the ISS, which the Russians have always had a disproportionate share in.
As I keep explaining, the major motivation was to purchase the Russian experience, which NASA did not posses.
While that subsidy was keeping Russian scientists from getting jobs with proliferators like Iran, it was worth the money in the bad deal. But now that subsidy has (in part) enabled the Russians to circumvent the Iran nonproliferation treaty, as you point out. So the US is subsidizing the Russians, who are thereby able to offer technology to Iran.
Actually, no. You see, as I keep pointing out, the Russians had already acquired all that experience in the Soviet days, at the expense of the ole USSR. NASA was merely purchasing it. The missile experience was there already, and will remain there for an indefinite future. As to Iran, we are talking about 60 year old missile and nuclear tech and I think the US is completely bonkers to believe that Iran will not get the stuff sooner or later, from somewhere. Pakistan, that industrial and scientific "giant", got it. North Korea, who cannot manage to feed its people and keep their apartament complexes lit and heated, still managed to get (or get near to) nukes on its own. Etc, and so on.
Who is threatening the US with nuclear missiles (as soon as they have them). That sounds like a terrible investment for US taxpayers, regardless of the cost.
That view is not very convincing. You seem to be in the camp which believes that any foreign expenditure is counter-productive as some of the money will always, inevietably, meander its way somewhere where you would not like. As to Iran threatening the US with nukes, I would like to point out to you that Iran's nuclear ambitions did not gain frantic, panic steam until the oh-so-diplomatic "axis of evil" musings of a certain high-placed individual, followed by some adventures in Iraqi sand. And that is remarkable since Israel has been menacing the whole region with both nukes and missiles to carry them for many decades now. Your view is completely one-sided and unreastically US-centric as I charged originally.
For example, here. But you should really google yourself. Russian space agency budget is mere $130 million in total per year. That is why $20 million for a paying customer is a big deal. Note that a single Shuttle launch costs around $400-500 million. Presently the Russians are not receiving even the contract work they used to due to the Iran Nonproliferation Act of 2000 as the US law forbids it.
However, I won't be heartened if the numbers show the US is "saving money" by investing it in the Russian space industry rather than our own. Our space program spins off manifold its cost in benefit to our economy, not to mention our national pride.
What I was pointing out is that the total amount is miniscule by comparison to the NASA budget.
I don't mind producing science and engineering knowledge the rest of the world also gets secondhand. In fact, that's one of the benefits to the US: we're valuable to other countries. It's one of the social benefits from the essentially transnational scientific community that has been possibly the most civilizing force in our species for hundreds of years. But I don't want us getting it secondhand from other countries at our expense.
It all depends by what do you mean at your "expense". The zero-g Russian experience from two decades of operating orbital facilities would be very expensive to obtain otherwise. Or are you suggesting that the US should have not built the ISS with the rest of the world and made a new Skylab (NASA's last orbital habitat experience was 30 years old)?
I want us investing in our own space industry, which also grows our own commercial aerospace industry (those huge contracts go to aerospace corporations, not just relatively small NASA units). So we can stay competitive, even with the extremely experienced Russians and their cheaper economy.
As I said, you are making an issue from some spare change on the fringes of the American space activities.
TrollMods just keep blasting away. Why not post a counterargument? Because doing so would reveal my original post is no Troll, but rather a cogent criticism, composed of facts and logic? And that TrollMods have no argument for that? I thought so.
I'll bite. I am in a charitable mood today.
The most probable reason is that they considered your "contribution" to be so far out as to not warrant a reply. While there are wacky moderators here, trolls are far more numerous. And then there is the particular species of American-centric troll who believes that the whole world (and possibly the Universe itself) is/was/is-to-be saved from doom at US taxpayers expense, had divine US knowledge granted to them (and thus all their pitiful attempts at technology or science are "stolen" or "derrivative"), and generally mooched off the oh-so-benevolent US taxpayer tit, followed by being belligerently ungrateful snakes who refuse to acknowledge the Divine Light bestowed upon them by the inhabitants of the Chosen Land of the US of A. Or something along these lines.
Point in case: the US taxpayer was not funding the Russian space program to any significant degree. There was contract work done on many things, like long-term zero-g habitiation components of ISS with which NASA had next to zero experience. Russia is involved in many commercial ventures, some of them funded indirectly by the US government but that is because... they are the best bang for the buck. US taxpayers are actually saving money on those deals (like for example the various payload agreements and lauch facilities use deals). The total amount spent on all of that stuff is about 4-5 shuttle launches worth over the last decade.
Russians are actually at this point sustaining the NASA's ISS activity by ferrying US astronauts to and from the station at no charge, way past their original obligation, ever since the Shuttle is effectively kaput.
There, perheaps this should clarify a thing or two.
When the government takes a dollar in taxes from someone and spends that in a distant war, that money is no longer available for job creating investments.
The waste of tax dollars on foreign wars is of course a valid point of disagreement. I for one posit that it is because the current government is driven by fantasies of Empire and by greed of its cronies. In any case, the mechanisms of control of government spending are of course at the crux of the matter and could be disucssed separately. I admit that it is the main weakness of any government-centered scheme, and how to keep the government in check and on the task is a daunting challenge. But in my view not an unsolveable one.
It is not the big mega-corporations that are the life-blood of the economy and the creators of American jobs, but the small to medium size businesses. These do not tend to ship their employees jobs to far away corners of the world and therefore should be treated better by the government and not taxed excessively.
I fully agree, that is why a progressive scale is needed. I would even agree that one can base the progression on factors such as the import/export ratios. I did not mention this but I believe that sales taxes in any shape or form should be abolished as they are the ones impeding the economy. In the scheme I am discussing, the large, humongous companies would be the ones hit hard for the reasons of their size and for their predatory import/export activities. Small business would largely see its income taxes increase marginally (while the personal taxes of the owners would increase dramatically) but at the same time they would gain from the sales taxes being gone.
Instead of taxing the income of wage earners, the government should tax the cheap, slave labor produced imports, so these would cost the same as domestically made similar items.
This is called "protectionism" and it has been empirically proven not to work. The income tax based gradiation scheme is harder hitting where it hurts i.e. directly at the owner's pockets without an ability to pass it onto the consumers as it is possible with the protectionist scheme you describe. The pass-it-on-to-gullible-consumer method of avoiding financial consequences has to be defeated.
That way there would not be as much incentive for the Walmarts of this world to buy almost everything overseas.
By making the companies of the size of Walmart financially not viable and by connecting the progression of tax to the import/export ratios of a company both of these would be achieved. Wallmart is destructive not only because it promotes abuse of foreign manufacturing but also because it displaces small, home-grown businesses. The system I describe would address both.
The number one business of any government is to protect its citizens from each other, regardless whether these are gun wielding thugs, such as we have seen in the Katrina aftermath, or large corporate citizens (such as the Enrons and big oil) whose loyalties are only to the bottom line, at the expense of real living American people.
Absolutely. But the government has to also protect from external threats and natural disasters. We are merely arguing about the mechanism by which best to achieve such protection.
Big companies, such as the entertainment megaliths for example, have discovered that they can purchase all the politicians they need to get the laws passed in their favor. We the voters need to learn who these polititans are and let them know that it is not the big companies that put them into office and then throw them all out at the next election. In the end, we the voters have to care and vote for some candidates of integrity who are not for sale at any price.
I fully agree. The problem though is cultural. The public has been sucessfully rendered indiferrent to the happenings of government by a combination of corporatization of media and promotion of what I would term "culture of selfish greed"
180 days of school per year, times 3 hours per day, times minimum wage is what? Being able to leave their kids at school for those hours means parents can work those hours, and they don't have to pay for day care.
You mean most likely the parent (singular) and no that would not add up to anything because the cost is still sky high to her vs. letting them sit at the house (unsupervised most likely).
Umm, how do you figure that vouchers would cause the funding of the public schools to decrease?
It was your own calculation. I just accepted your proposed number as an example. I assume that would occur by voucher holding parents moving to your private schools as you have yourself indicated, leaving those who cant afford it behind and removing the presssure on fincancing of those public schools as those who are left attending them have next to zero political power, being poor, and most likely black or in some other impoverished inner-city minority.
Exactly my point. The Federal government had no power to levy taxes directly, they had to request the money from the states
Which is still taxation. The claim was being made that no taxation was authorized/occuring. The exact mechanism by which the taxation is happening is secondary in light of that claim.
The 16th amendment was passed for a reason. The combination of the 16th and 17th amendments radically altered the balance of power between the Federal and State governments.
Quite possibly, but note that this goes only to the mechanism of taxation (income tax) and the direct vs indirect route. One way or another the Federal government was authorized to collect taxes in some form from the get-go, as that original passage from the Constitution clearly shows. The mechanism of collcection was originally left to the states, who as the other poster already pointed out, failed miserably in doing so. Subsequently the Feds took over forcibly.
All ideas of the artificial redistribution of wealth are basically flawed in that they take away or drastically reduce the individual incentive to be more productive or innovative than the the next person.
Total crock. Or are you going to tell me that Billy would be less inclined to do his shenaningas with DOS if he were to merely be a millionaire as opposed to multi-billionaire? Or that the fact that CEOs of Japanese companies earn only 10-20 times the salary of average worker makes them work less hard then the US ones who get 500-1000 times?!
It takes better than $20,000 of investment to create even a job for one worker. Where is that to come from if society (other people through government) take that away from someone who would otherwise expand their business enough to be able to hire someone?
Cooperative investment, aka stock market. The fact that an individual would have hard times personally becoming multi-billionaire, does not mean that his company could not manage multi-billion investment funds composed of small individual investments: see mutual funds and the like.
if someone has a good idea and a marketing plan to match, such as Microsoft or others why should they not reap the benfits.
For a good idea, sure. But only reasonable gain. Also, Microsoft is an example of a mediocre idea, greased by nepotism, legal stupidity of one company taken advantage of by the other, borderline illegal tactics, brainwashing of consumers and finally abuse of monopoly position. You were saying something about "reaping benefits" from abuse of society, no?
In the end, society benefits by the number of tax paying workers they employ.
The number of paying workers would actually increase because what we are talking about would be less conductive to multi-national corporations shipping workers overseas.
Society should only step in to ensure that everybody must operate by the same rules of fairness.
Precisely.
Do you really think that government, really the bureaucrats that run it, knows better how to spend my money than I do?
The government is to spend on social things such as medical care, education, police, army, infrastructure, funding research and arts. The rest is up to the enterpreneurs. You are jumping to conclusions that the government is to be the investor in the industries. Nothing of the sort. As to arts and science, the government should fund a vast majority of research in the academia as well as arts through patronage, while removing copyright and patent protection for art and most of the so called "inventions".
There are plenty of rich people in the socialist countries you mention.
They are far more rare (per capita) then in the US. Sure their systems are not perfect either. But it is a start.
We have currently a boy living with us whose mother is partially blind and disabled. He has been in our house for 5 years now. We have not gotten one red cent from any government agency other than having gotten him on the Oregon Health Plan, since we cannot put him on our own medical insurance.
That is very noble of you... but on a large scale it is utterly insufficient. Charity can only work as a supplementary force, never the main one because it only covers a small fraction of needs. And did you notice how helpful your (completely barbarian) medical insurance scheme and the penny-pinching government are? And you are defending that? Here in Canada he would have automatic 100% health coverage by just being a resident of my province.
Forcing people to be responsible is generally a futile endeavor.
Quite true. That is why taxation is the only way out. Those people then do not have to be responsible, only to bitch and moan about how they are being "robbed at a point of a gun" of their "fair and square gotten loot" by the "evil gubmnt".
Now WHO would decide what is excess and where it is needed?
The government of course, via the priorities of a voting populace. Democratically.
How poor would you make say Bill Gates by taking away his wealth?
The idea is not to make him poor but to create an escalating scale of taxation which makes getting richer harder as one progresses up the scale. If he ceases to be productive and does nothing to generate income, his wealth would slowly be reduced, slower the closer to the upper-middle-class he gets, until he qualizes with the median of the population.
Who is the "one" who would do that and what or who gives any human the right to take away what belongs to another person, assuming the belongings were not stolen?
The society, The same society which makes it possible for Gates to get education, to use inventions and ideas of others who went before him, like the alphabet and numbers. It is here prehaps, where the greatest crackpot, deceitful idea of the whole "self-made-man" etos of the right wing is at its most annoying: there is no such thing as a "self-made" man. Gates got where he got by using the society's graces to his advantage. The society deserves its due.
Wealth is not the only thing that is very unevenly distributed in this world we live in. How about health? Would you also take away the health of those who have it (if that could be done) and give it those who are sick?
Red herring. Health is not earned or traded. It is not a valid commodity in a free market. There is no way to "redistribute" health. One can only work at making sure that those of failing health are afforded care.
What about intelligence? Should the smart people be downgraded to the level of the dumber ones? Athletic or artistic ability?
See above. Red herrings galore.
There are great differences in humans and also in the willingness to work is greater in some than in others. Should all these differences be ironed out?
Those who can be helped, should. That has nothing to do with "ironing out" differences. The progressive taxation is about creating balancing forces. You assume that Wealth = Virtuous Hard Work (a disingenous right wing meme). As false as equation as one can possibly make. At present (in order of importance): Wealth = Luck + Inheretance + Willingnes for unscrupulous (and possibly illegal) exploitation + Inventiveness + Hard work. If you can remove the first three, then you could possibly claim that no additional measures are required. But this is clearly impossible. Thus progressive taxation is the only mechanism to offset these factors.
There are those who are poor through no fault of their own, and they should be helped, not by handouts, but by giving them a chance to help themselves.
Particularly the permanently sick or disabled, right? So that all the wheelchair bound paraplegics can become masters of international commerce, or some such similar nonsense.
Then there are those who are lazy and poor by choice and they should remain poor.
They should -- but at basic sustinence levels, not below. But their children should be given all the chances, because their parents' failings should not determine their fate.
A friend once offered a "homeless" person begging at a Walmart store parking lot a minimum wage job. The beggar turned it down, saying he made more money begging and it was tax free.
Or he was a junkie who would not be able to hold a job and he was after money for his fix anyhow. Which is a medical/psychiatric problem and in a sane society he would be taken care of in a mental hospital until his condition improved and if that occured, given basic work education and set up at an entry level job.
The communist experiment was a failure. Even so, there are still so many like you who advocate such or a similar system.
This has nothing to do with communism (other then to mis-label your opponent's position to try
Further, the state actually spends nearly $5000 per student, per year, so they really could have offered a $3000 voucher, made it possible for parents to use this private school for free, and *still* been up $2K.
Right. Do explain to me why is this that US of A is the only industrialized countrly on the planet with such problems? That and the medical care thing.
I can only see one possibility: either your culture is akin to some primeval jungle where bands of savages skinning each other is the only modus operendi available or there is some determined and coordinated effort going on to destroy all "common" and "public" insitiutions. I do not get it.
Not that $500 is nothing, but the three hours per day of day care (from 3pm when school gets out, to 6pm, when latch-key time ends) provided by the school are worth more than that.
Possibly, except note that people in NOLA did not have the $40 for gas to get out of a path of a hurricane. The $500 would mean for most of poor that the public school would still be the only choice, except now it would be funded to the tune of $3000 per student, a $2000 drop, and would be attended exclusively by children of the poorest. To the great improvement of the quality of it, no doubt.
Then why did they proceed to establish a government that had no power to tax?
I am not sure that was the case. Constitution, Article I, Section 2: Representatives and direct Taxes shall be apportioned among the several States which may be included within this Union, according to their respective Numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole Number of free Persons, including those bound to Service for a Term of Years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other Persons
The federalist papers also speak of taxes in great extent, See for example Fed 11 or 12.
School vouchers enable poor people trapped in underfunded, ghetto schools that don't offer all of the things needed to properly educate their pupils to escape their failing schools and be able to attend whatever school they want to.
Yes that's the sales pitch. And it would be somewhat related to reality if it were not for the fact that there are only two types of schools where the vouchers can be redeemed by a low income family: public and religious. And because the school voucher program is coupled with reduction of funding for the public schools themselves while the religious stay funded by their respective cults, that reduces the choice to one category. A typical neo-con charade: pretend that something is an improvement for everyone, while making sure that it only benefits your backers.
School vouchers, if done right, enable all people to pay for schooling and enable them to go to any school that they wish (as opposed to full privatization).
School vouchers are full privatization in disguise.
Since students can attend any school that they wish, the schools will now compete on a market system in which the schools that offer the most programs and has the best performance gets the most voucher money.
If the "competition" was restricted to public schools only, you might have had a point. But it is designed to destroy them altogether.
In the current version of primary and secondary education, poor people get stuck in underfunded public schools while rich people get to go to excellent public schools or private schools. Which is more selfish to you: poor students forced to go to poor schools, or an environment where schools compete with each other for students based on a market system?
They are both fucked. The solution of course is to fund the public system properly, as it is done nearly everywhere else on the planet, including here in Canada. How is that the richest country on the planet has the most fucked up public school system? Never mind, I know the answer, it is also the country where selfish greed rules more decisively as each year passes.
I guess your belief that the government solves all social problems can be a religion, too. Government schools, government checks, government medicine, government subsidies, government cheese, government this, government that. Government needs to stay out of most of these issues and let the free-market do its thing.
No, government must handle things for which the free market is not an acceptable solution. There is no problem for example with private industry and the like. But even then the market must be regulated. Less important the segment of the market, less regulation. Truly free market is only possible for a horde of small companies trading in bolts and the like. That is because free-market, left to its own devices would simply devolve into a set of oligopolies and gouging cartels sprinkled generously with vast scams.
Hell no. The government needs to exist for protection, law enforcement, infrastructure, and some other very basic things.
It all depends what one considers "basic". Education, Healthcare, social safety nets and market regulation are some of those "basic" things.
as if your utopian collectivist government can do any bette
No one is proposing any "collectivism". But one has to acknowledge reality of human failings. Greed and selfishness are some of them.
I'm not rich, but I'm also tired of all rich people being lumped together as Mr. Scrooges that need to be forever taxed because they are sinful, selfish creatures that need to be forever punished.
The alternative is for all practical purposes feudalism. Accumulation of wealth beyond one's contributions to society is the anathema of capitalism. That is why Adam Smith was for nearly 100% estate tax and anti-cartel regulations. Unchecked accumulation of wealth perverts the market mechanisms and skews the workings of the system meant to create wealth via
Oh come on... You can't blame the litigious nature of the American public on neo-conservatives. They haven't been in power THAT long.
That was not my claim. I merely indicated that the government officials were cowed by this attitude instead of being strong when strength was being called for. That cowing is the result of "government is the evil to be destroyed" attitudes of the people in power in Washington as well as the predominant political culture where Rove, amplified by the likes of Rush Limbaughs and O'Reilly, gets to dictate the agenadas. It is a state of political paralysis. Witness the frightened Democratic officials all over the country and their meek "criticisms" of the administration. Very few of them have spine enough to actually opose forcefully the right's agendas. This is what I speak of, not the litigious nature of society, which was something that could have been pre-empted on the basis of national emergency.
The neo-conservatives aren't good and should be fought against. But let's at least maintain a realistic view of what they are--and more importantly what they aren't. (i.e. some nefarious group responsible for all of the world's ills)
No such claim is being made. There are certainly other causes of all sorts of other problems and in politics frequently multiple causes exist for the same phenomenon. But in this case, the outrageous weakening of the government functions, the primary cause is the neo-con ideology. And that is on top of their kleptocratic ways, of treating vital agency appointments as rewards for political operatives.
If you're in hostile territory, know it is hostile territory, choose to stay and get shot, is it your fault or shooters?
Specially when the territory turned hostile when you were already in it and you are crippled or sick and unable to get out...
By the way, in your example, it is always the fault of shooters. Always. Were it not so, Iraqi civilians could be blamed for being "stupid enough to live in a warzone". And you are a "self-made, pulled-himself-by-his-bootstraps" idiot.
People really shouldn't be that stupid and gullible.
Perhaps the general state of education in the US has something to do with it?
All they should need are two obvious facts to trump all the shills:
* New Orleans is below sea level
* Water flows downhill
Just from that it's easy to conclude that sooner or later, New Orleans would be flooded!
Again it is more complicated then it appears. Even if the people had understood the information, you assume that the situation was the same over the last five or so decades. It was not. A number of canals were built which severely increased the danger. Wetlands which constituted buffer zone to the levies were drained. Most people had no say in this and were in fact oposing these developments. But many of them were unable to get out of town due to their job prospects, poverty and other situations. So you buy a house in a city which is reasonably protected by an existing system and which then proceeds to get more and more dangerous. Life is not black and white, I think that majortity of those who stayed behind could not be reasonably blamed as having the sole, or even the majority, of the responsibility for this if you combine all the factors.
This is representative of how local, state, and federal government breaks down under a heavy load. The local and state governments weren't able to evacuate their citizens quickly enough (which they should have done so at least 4 days before the storm arrived), and FEMA (federal government) acted in the way that the federal government always acts: slow and bureaucratic. It took the feds four days for them to finally show up to New Orleans. Meanwhile, thousands of people ended up dying because help didn't come their way quickly enough because of the snail-pace speed of these layers of government. It's not because a conservative is in office.
I agree that the response was unacceptably slow. But it is a looong stretch to blame this on the supposed nature of government in general. If it were so, all prior disasters, some also on a major scale (California Earthquake) would be dealt with similarly. But they were not. Furthermore, most of the governments with far less resources then those at the disposal of the Federal, State and Local governments in this case were capable of handling immediately a vastly more devastating disaster: the Tsunami, where governments of impoverished countries reacted with speed and level of effort far exceeding that of the Bush Administration in regards to New Orleans. Cuba evacuated all their citizens out of the path of their last major hurricane. And so on. The failure has nothing to do with "nature" of government as you would have people believe and everything with the ideology of government being in the way of raking in money to which right-wingers subscribe. If it were otherwise, Cuba, with its outright socialist government, would be the one with people crammed in a convention center begging for food and water.
It's not because a conservative is in office.
I disagree. FEMA was nearly completely gutted and turned into an adjunct of Homeland Security, which itself was obsessed with defense contractors and ways of spending vast sums of money to counter-act a small band of idiots with box-cutters or perhaps with an RPG or two. These actions are directly responsible for the performance of both of these federal agencies.
And what is so "selfish" about free-market ideas that libertarians and conservatives champion, such as school vouchers, privatized social security, privatized health care, negative income taxes, limiting inflation, and more?
Free-market ideas are all fine and dandy as long as one remembers that free-market is a limited and narrowly applicable tool to make sure that certain types of economic activity are efficient. It is not a religion nor a philosophy.
Free-market is perfectly applicable to 50 small businesses trying to compete while manufacturing soap.
Free-market is not applicable to medical care because one of the cornerstones of free-market, one I am sure you are familiar with, the "competition" is absent. One does not do "price/performance analysis" when one is dying of a heart attack. You go to the nearest ER and at that point you do not have any control over prices you are being charged. Only selfish people, who are wealthy enough to have transportation arrangements with their private clinics, or who simply do not care about the price, would claim that putting free-market into such a scenario is "not selfish". The result is 40 million uninsured Americans with no health care. A situation worthy of Congo or Angola. But that is OK, because the top 10% is luxuriously served. Selfish. As in caring about your own lucky ass only, while claiming that everyone else should be left to their own devices.
Similarly with education, in science at least, there is only one group of schools which is capable of delivering the goods: secular academia. The rest are various flavours of medieval religious zealotry masquerading as "science". Very much as the Madrasses in the Middle East. Allowing them to brainwash people until they start believing and acting on superstition and all sorts of nonsense in order to
Never attribute to malice what can be more easily laid at the feed of stupidity-- the old saying is as relevant now as it was yesterday.
The old saying misses the possibility of malice being combined with stupidity, which is the way I see the Bush Administratiom.
Let me put it this way. Cuba managed to evacuate their people before the last big hurricane hit. Ponder that while you compare their resources with that of the richest country on the planet. Where was their "hubris" and disbelief at the climatologists?
Also, if you're looking for a party that wants to socailize the nation's economy, there are several, I think. The american Communist party springs to mind, you're welcome to vote for their candidates, as well.
This is quite disenginious since the views which would be considered "left" in most of the world constitute a tiny minority within US politics. Taken indivdually or as parties, US politicians are at best center-right to far-right from the point of view of most of the world. What you term "left" bears no resemblance to the typical "left" elsewhere. I think this is a part of deliberate extreme right wing strategy, to loudly label and denounce even most miniscule deviation from their agenda as "liberal" and "left". And soon after that, center-right viewpoints, such as the ones represented usually by CNN are labeled "liberal". So the witless victims of this try to be more "balanced" and "receptive" and move further to the right. Never sufficiently enough though to cease being called "liberaly biased". That would only stop if they were to hand out scripts written by Karl Rove himself to all their staff to read.
You are defending this of course because it suits your own particular bias, that of a far right wing, and you have no use for oposition to it because you see democracy as a system for hammering out minutia of implementation of right-wing policies.
Since 2003, FEMA is no longer responsible. The Department of Homeland Security has supplanted them.
Which obviously helped a lot. They were far more concerned with dancing to the tune of defense contractors in order to defend the country against a scruffy band of box-cutter wielding malcontents who had to work diligently for 20 years before they managed to finally stage successfully one major attack. As oposed to the remote, never before seen danger of a hurricane in the South.
They had the option to write "provide for the common defence and the general Welfare"
Note that they did not use that construct anywhere in the sentence. Instead they kept coming up with a new verb for each of the items, such as "secure" Liberty instead of "insure" which they used with "domestic Tranquility". They could have used "secure domestic Tranquility and Liberty". But they did not. I think it was all merely a literary style.
Notice the two words "provide" and "promote"? There is good reason why "provide" isn't used twice.
I don't want to be a nit-pick but it is my understanding that in those days it was considered a bad literary style to use the same word more then once in an oratory statement. Note that they used "establish", "insure", "provide" and "promote". None of them appears more then once. It is possible that your interpretation is the correct one, but I am somewhat skeptical of reading the wording with such detail.
It shouldn't take "experts" to see that building below sea level right next to the coast is dangerous; that's just common sense!
Not if some shills-for-hire for the devlopers are pretending that the experts are really "liberal partisan hacks" and out to rob you of your beautiful new and cheap house. And look, the Johnses are moving in next door. And our experts are saying the levees will hold, dont you worry about a thing...
.. I grew up in that area and quite honestly belive that Katrina was a good thing. We'll be able to weed out the popularity of the gangs (through seperation or execution), reengineer New Orleans to make it a safer harbor to live in, and generate more jobs for low income families to work in. With the destruction brought by Katrina, we may bring a rise of constructive ingenuity. Am I sorry for what happened to those caught in it? No. They had plenty of time to get out. For those who had no ability to get out all I can say is that is their own fault. They've lived in New Orleans for years knowing this day will come and yet they dwelled in gang filled neighborhoods living in poverty waiting for the next check from Uncle Sam. I am not the least bit sympathetic torwards any of them. Thats what they get for living in a damn bowl below sea level.
The term is "social darwinism", one of the avenues of bottomless stupidity on the glorious way to fascism (or possibly feudalism). The poor all should die because they dared to get born poor or with debilitating illness or got old and lost their earning capabilities. The rich are God Chosen to prosper and multiply. God should kill all the poor to make way for the afluent. Etc and so on.
Sigh.
You, Sir, are one of the half-digested pieces of poisonous, rotten meat in the vomit of a dying democracy.
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Har, har. Very funny. Just so that you have a better laugh you should know that Canada can produce a pile of nuclear warheads in a jiffy. I hope that it wont become necessary and the world recovers from its present bout with insanity but you should remember that Canada has an extremely advanced nuclear program and is capable of producing vast quantities of plutonium at a drop of a hat from our many reactors. As a matter of fact, the plutonium in many of the British warheads was made here. Just so you know.
Except that the Russians are not in any tourist "business", they are doing it as a stop-gap desperation funding shortage measure. The "space tourism" idea is universally hated at all levels of the Russian space agency and will be promptly abandoned as soon as the monetary need is no longer there. We are really talking about the barf bag level of effort here. They are doing nothing whatsoever to make it easier on the "tourist", unlike British Airways who does not (last time I heard) require you to pay for your own pressure suit and sit around with an oxygen mask on while the plane performs high-g rapid manouvers to make it easier for the airline to fullfill other, more important, prorities.
I complained about the $billions the US has spent on the ISS, from which the Russians have benefitted disproportionately.
I understand what you are saying, and right here is your hangup: the Russians did not "benefit disproportionately" in any of this. They already had the experience, the tech and the people. The US had no orbital habitat experience to speak of. Enter a cash transaction, the Russians get coin, the US the experience to peruse, at 1/100th of the real price.
NASA has not "bought" the superior Russian experience. It's "rented" it, because we don't actually increase our experience with what we bought.
That is not true. The major part of the deal was for NASA to have complete access to the manufacturing processes, engineers, documentation and a whole other range of that Soviet experience. What NASA will do with that, is another discussion.
Another point that you fixate on is your invention of "isolationism" on my part. I have not said we shouldn't work with other countries, and in fact have repeated that we should in every message in this thread. You are the one fighting that strawman, not me.
Actually no, the "strawman" appearance originates from the fact that you are self-contradicting yourself. On one hand you say that international cooperation and funding of foreign research is a good thing and on the other that it is counter-productive and gets the US taxpayer nothing. While I keep pointing out that the particular ISS deal was actually a downright thrifty purchase for NASA.
So Russia gets an American to give them 14% of their operating budget to tag along on a mission, rather than stop helping Iran proliferate ... So US subsidies, and even private expenses, pay to develop the Russian space program, which helps Iran get nuclear missiles. Regardless of how Iran, Russia and the US got to that point, US investment in increasing that threat is obviously bad for the US.
There you go. "Helping Iran to proliferate". Never you mind that so far the Russians did nothing to actually help Iran build nukes, only to get their civilian program working, to which Iran is entitled under the non-proliferation treaties. Never you mind that the tech is already there from the days of Uncle Stalin. Never you mind that ISS or other space budgets have absolutely nothing to do with any of that Iranian activity. What do you really mean is to put Iran in the dog-house, where the US wants it, and thus for the Russians to be extorted into losing a major customer, who will then get his civilian stuff from somewhere else, regardless? Irrespective of which Iran will get their defense program going one way or another. A rather legitimate defense stuff to begin with. Look, the world does not revolve around US's ass. Iran is not getting nukes to level New York pre-emptively, they are getting them because they are scared shitless of US nuking Teheran pre-emptively, for that mad policy of pre-emption is now empirically evident for all to see in, say, Iraq and there are US senators on the record with ideas like "nuking Mecca" in response to any "terrorist att
The US got the 20 years worth of Russian orbital habitat experience on the cheap. I still do not understand your point.
And it's really not the proceeds from this single passenger, to which I did not refer, though that amount is not insubstantial. $20M of a $400M Shuttle mission is 5%, which is a pretty substantial amount.
You gotta be kidding. NASA budget in 2005 alone is around $16 billion. The $20 mil may be "substantial" to the Russians with their laughable (and yet sufficient to compete with NASA) $130 million yearly budget. But not to the US.
What's at issue is that the Russians are getting the experience of launching civilians, and the US (or any US launcher) is not.
"Launching civlians" is the easiest part of that deal. You get one, get him simplified training and stick his ass into the Soyuz. There is no "experience" to be gained from this, other then how many barf bags to bring along.
It's the billions the US has spent subsidizing the ISS, which the Russians have always had a disproportionate share in.
As I keep explaining, the major motivation was to purchase the Russian experience, which NASA did not posses.
While that subsidy was keeping Russian scientists from getting jobs with proliferators like Iran, it was worth the money in the bad deal. But now that subsidy has (in part) enabled the Russians to circumvent the Iran nonproliferation treaty, as you point out. So the US is subsidizing the Russians, who are thereby able to offer technology to Iran.
Actually, no. You see, as I keep pointing out, the Russians had already acquired all that experience in the Soviet days, at the expense of the ole USSR. NASA was merely purchasing it. The missile experience was there already, and will remain there for an indefinite future. As to Iran, we are talking about 60 year old missile and nuclear tech and I think the US is completely bonkers to believe that Iran will not get the stuff sooner or later, from somewhere. Pakistan, that industrial and scientific "giant", got it. North Korea, who cannot manage to feed its people and keep their apartament complexes lit and heated, still managed to get (or get near to) nukes on its own. Etc, and so on.
Who is threatening the US with nuclear missiles (as soon as they have them). That sounds like a terrible investment for US taxpayers, regardless of the cost.
That view is not very convincing. You seem to be in the camp which believes that any foreign expenditure is counter-productive as some of the money will always, inevietably, meander its way somewhere where you would not like. As to Iran threatening the US with nukes, I would like to point out to you that Iran's nuclear ambitions did not gain frantic, panic steam until the oh-so-diplomatic "axis of evil" musings of a certain high-placed individual, followed by some adventures in Iraqi sand. And that is remarkable since Israel has been menacing the whole region with both nukes and missiles to carry them for many decades now. Your view is completely one-sided and unreastically US-centric as I charged originally.
For example, here. But you should really google yourself. Russian space agency budget is mere $130 million in total per year. That is why $20 million for a paying customer is a big deal. Note that a single Shuttle launch costs around $400-500 million. Presently the Russians are not receiving even the contract work they used to due to the Iran Nonproliferation Act of 2000 as the US law forbids it.
However, I won't be heartened if the numbers show the US is "saving money" by investing it in the Russian space industry rather than our own. Our space program spins off manifold its cost in benefit to our economy, not to mention our national pride.
What I was pointing out is that the total amount is miniscule by comparison to the NASA budget.
I don't mind producing science and engineering knowledge the rest of the world also gets secondhand. In fact, that's one of the benefits to the US: we're valuable to other countries. It's one of the social benefits from the essentially transnational scientific community that has been possibly the most civilizing force in our species for hundreds of years. But I don't want us getting it secondhand from other countries at our expense.
It all depends by what do you mean at your "expense". The zero-g Russian experience from two decades of operating orbital facilities would be very expensive to obtain otherwise. Or are you suggesting that the US should have not built the ISS with the rest of the world and made a new Skylab (NASA's last orbital habitat experience was 30 years old)?
I want us investing in our own space industry, which also grows our own commercial aerospace industry (those huge contracts go to aerospace corporations, not just relatively small NASA units). So we can stay competitive, even with the extremely experienced Russians and their cheaper economy.
As I said, you are making an issue from some spare change on the fringes of the American space activities.
I'll bite. I am in a charitable mood today.
The most probable reason is that they considered your "contribution" to be so far out as to not warrant a reply. While there are wacky moderators here, trolls are far more numerous. And then there is the particular species of American-centric troll who believes that the whole world (and possibly the Universe itself) is/was/is-to-be saved from doom at US taxpayers expense, had divine US knowledge granted to them (and thus all their pitiful attempts at technology or science are "stolen" or "derrivative"), and generally mooched off the oh-so-benevolent US taxpayer tit, followed by being belligerently ungrateful snakes who refuse to acknowledge the Divine Light bestowed upon them by the inhabitants of the Chosen Land of the US of A. Or something along these lines.
Point in case: the US taxpayer was not funding the Russian space program to any significant degree. There was contract work done on many things, like long-term zero-g habitiation components of ISS with which NASA had next to zero experience. Russia is involved in many commercial ventures, some of them funded indirectly by the US government but that is because ... they are the best bang for the buck. US taxpayers are actually saving money on those deals (like for example the various payload agreements and lauch facilities use deals). The total amount spent on all of that stuff is about 4-5 shuttle launches worth over the last decade.
Russians are actually at this point sustaining the NASA's ISS activity by ferrying US astronauts to and from the station at no charge, way past their original obligation, ever since the Shuttle is effectively kaput.
There, perheaps this should clarify a thing or two.
The waste of tax dollars on foreign wars is of course a valid point of disagreement. I for one posit that it is because the current government is driven by fantasies of Empire and by greed of its cronies. In any case, the mechanisms of control of government spending are of course at the crux of the matter and could be disucssed separately. I admit that it is the main weakness of any government-centered scheme, and how to keep the government in check and on the task is a daunting challenge. But in my view not an unsolveable one.
It is not the big mega-corporations that are the life-blood of the economy and the creators of American jobs, but the small to medium size businesses. These do not tend to ship their employees jobs to far away corners of the world and therefore should be treated better by the government and not taxed excessively.
I fully agree, that is why a progressive scale is needed. I would even agree that one can base the progression on factors such as the import/export ratios. I did not mention this but I believe that sales taxes in any shape or form should be abolished as they are the ones impeding the economy. In the scheme I am discussing, the large, humongous companies would be the ones hit hard for the reasons of their size and for their predatory import/export activities. Small business would largely see its income taxes increase marginally (while the personal taxes of the owners would increase dramatically) but at the same time they would gain from the sales taxes being gone.
Instead of taxing the income of wage earners, the government should tax the cheap, slave labor produced imports, so these would cost the same as domestically made similar items.
This is called "protectionism" and it has been empirically proven not to work. The income tax based gradiation scheme is harder hitting where it hurts i.e. directly at the owner's pockets without an ability to pass it onto the consumers as it is possible with the protectionist scheme you describe. The pass-it-on-to-gullible-consumer method of avoiding financial consequences has to be defeated.
That way there would not be as much incentive for the Walmarts of this world to buy almost everything overseas.
By making the companies of the size of Walmart financially not viable and by connecting the progression of tax to the import/export ratios of a company both of these would be achieved. Wallmart is destructive not only because it promotes abuse of foreign manufacturing but also because it displaces small, home-grown businesses. The system I describe would address both.
The number one business of any government is to protect its citizens from each other, regardless whether these are gun wielding thugs, such as we have seen in the Katrina aftermath, or large corporate citizens (such as the Enrons and big oil) whose loyalties are only to the bottom line, at the expense of real living American people.
Absolutely. But the government has to also protect from external threats and natural disasters. We are merely arguing about the mechanism by which best to achieve such protection.
Big companies, such as the entertainment megaliths for example, have discovered that they can purchase all the politicians they need to get the laws passed in their favor. We the voters need to learn who these polititans are and let them know that it is not the big companies that put them into office and then throw them all out at the next election. In the end, we the voters have to care and vote for some candidates of integrity who are not for sale at any price.
I fully agree. The problem though is cultural. The public has been sucessfully rendered indiferrent to the happenings of government by a combination of corporatization of media and promotion of what I would term "culture of selfish greed"
You mean most likely the parent (singular) and no that would not add up to anything because the cost is still sky high to her vs. letting them sit at the house (unsupervised most likely).
Umm, how do you figure that vouchers would cause the funding of the public schools to decrease?
It was your own calculation. I just accepted your proposed number as an example. I assume that would occur by voucher holding parents moving to your private schools as you have yourself indicated, leaving those who cant afford it behind and removing the presssure on fincancing of those public schools as those who are left attending them have next to zero political power, being poor, and most likely black or in some other impoverished inner-city minority.
Which is still taxation. The claim was being made that no taxation was authorized/occuring. The exact mechanism by which the taxation is happening is secondary in light of that claim.
The 16th amendment was passed for a reason. The combination of the 16th and 17th amendments radically altered the balance of power between the Federal and State governments.
Quite possibly, but note that this goes only to the mechanism of taxation (income tax) and the direct vs indirect route. One way or another the Federal government was authorized to collect taxes in some form from the get-go, as that original passage from the Constitution clearly shows. The mechanism of collcection was originally left to the states, who as the other poster already pointed out, failed miserably in doing so. Subsequently the Feds took over forcibly.
Total crock. Or are you going to tell me that Billy would be less inclined to do his shenaningas with DOS if he were to merely be a millionaire as opposed to multi-billionaire? Or that the fact that CEOs of Japanese companies earn only 10-20 times the salary of average worker makes them work less hard then the US ones who get 500-1000 times?!
It takes better than $20,000 of investment to create even a job for one worker. Where is that to come from if society (other people through government) take that away from someone who would otherwise expand their business enough to be able to hire someone?
Cooperative investment, aka stock market. The fact that an individual would have hard times personally becoming multi-billionaire, does not mean that his company could not manage multi-billion investment funds composed of small individual investments: see mutual funds and the like.
if someone has a good idea and a marketing plan to match, such as Microsoft or others why should they not reap the benfits.
For a good idea, sure. But only reasonable gain. Also, Microsoft is an example of a mediocre idea, greased by nepotism, legal stupidity of one company taken advantage of by the other, borderline illegal tactics, brainwashing of consumers and finally abuse of monopoly position. You were saying something about "reaping benefits" from abuse of society, no?
In the end, society benefits by the number of tax paying workers they employ.
The number of paying workers would actually increase because what we are talking about would be less conductive to multi-national corporations shipping workers overseas.
Society should only step in to ensure that everybody must operate by the same rules of fairness.
Precisely.
Do you really think that government, really the bureaucrats that run it, knows better how to spend my money than I do?
The government is to spend on social things such as medical care, education, police, army, infrastructure, funding research and arts. The rest is up to the enterpreneurs. You are jumping to conclusions that the government is to be the investor in the industries. Nothing of the sort. As to arts and science, the government should fund a vast majority of research in the academia as well as arts through patronage, while removing copyright and patent protection for art and most of the so called "inventions".
There are plenty of rich people in the socialist countries you mention.
They are far more rare (per capita) then in the US. Sure their systems are not perfect either. But it is a start.
We have currently a boy living with us whose mother is partially blind and disabled. He has been in our house for 5 years now. We have not gotten one red cent from any government agency other than having gotten him on the Oregon Health Plan, since we cannot put him on our own medical insurance.
That is very noble of you ... but on a large scale it is utterly insufficient. Charity can only work as a supplementary force, never the main one because it only covers a small fraction of needs. And did you notice how helpful your (completely barbarian) medical insurance scheme and the penny-pinching government are? And you are defending that? Here in Canada he would have automatic 100% health coverage by just being a resident of my province.
Forcing people to be responsible is generally a futile endeavor.
Quite true. That is why taxation is the only way out. Those people then do not have to be responsible, only to bitch and moan about how they are being "robbed at a point of a gun" of their "fair and square gotten loot" by the "evil gubmnt".
The government of course, via the priorities of a voting populace. Democratically.
How poor would you make say Bill Gates by taking away his wealth?
The idea is not to make him poor but to create an escalating scale of taxation which makes getting richer harder as one progresses up the scale. If he ceases to be productive and does nothing to generate income, his wealth would slowly be reduced, slower the closer to the upper-middle-class he gets, until he qualizes with the median of the population.
Who is the "one" who would do that and what or who gives any human the right to take away what belongs to another person, assuming the belongings were not stolen?
The society, The same society which makes it possible for Gates to get education, to use inventions and ideas of others who went before him, like the alphabet and numbers. It is here prehaps, where the greatest crackpot, deceitful idea of the whole "self-made-man" etos of the right wing is at its most annoying: there is no such thing as a "self-made" man. Gates got where he got by using the society's graces to his advantage. The society deserves its due.
Wealth is not the only thing that is very unevenly distributed in this world we live in. How about health? Would you also take away the health of those who have it (if that could be done) and give it those who are sick?
Red herring. Health is not earned or traded. It is not a valid commodity in a free market. There is no way to "redistribute" health. One can only work at making sure that those of failing health are afforded care.
What about intelligence? Should the smart people be downgraded to the level of the dumber ones? Athletic or artistic ability?
See above. Red herrings galore.
There are great differences in humans and also in the willingness to work is greater in some than in others. Should all these differences be ironed out?
Those who can be helped, should. That has nothing to do with "ironing out" differences. The progressive taxation is about creating balancing forces. You assume that Wealth = Virtuous Hard Work (a disingenous right wing meme). As false as equation as one can possibly make. At present (in order of importance): Wealth = Luck + Inheretance + Willingnes for unscrupulous (and possibly illegal) exploitation + Inventiveness + Hard work. If you can remove the first three, then you could possibly claim that no additional measures are required. But this is clearly impossible. Thus progressive taxation is the only mechanism to offset these factors.
There are those who are poor through no fault of their own, and they should be helped, not by handouts, but by giving them a chance to help themselves.
Particularly the permanently sick or disabled, right? So that all the wheelchair bound paraplegics can become masters of international commerce, or some such similar nonsense.
Then there are those who are lazy and poor by choice and they should remain poor.
They should -- but at basic sustinence levels, not below. But their children should be given all the chances, because their parents' failings should not determine their fate.
A friend once offered a "homeless" person begging at a Walmart store parking lot a minimum wage job. The beggar turned it down, saying he made more money begging and it was tax free.
Or he was a junkie who would not be able to hold a job and he was after money for his fix anyhow. Which is a medical/psychiatric problem and in a sane society he would be taken care of in a mental hospital until his condition improved and if that occured, given basic work education and set up at an entry level job.
The communist experiment was a failure. Even so, there are still so many like you who advocate such or a similar system.
This has nothing to do with communism (other then to mis-label your opponent's position to try
I forgot. Also that calculation is per child. Make it a $14k a year single mother with four. See how that works out.
Right. Do explain to me why is this that US of A is the only industrialized countrly on the planet with such problems? That and the medical care thing.
I can only see one possibility: either your culture is akin to some primeval jungle where bands of savages skinning each other is the only modus operendi available or there is some determined and coordinated effort going on to destroy all "common" and "public" insitiutions. I do not get it.
Not that $500 is nothing, but the three hours per day of day care (from 3pm when school gets out, to 6pm, when latch-key time ends) provided by the school are worth more than that.
Possibly, except note that people in NOLA did not have the $40 for gas to get out of a path of a hurricane. The $500 would mean for most of poor that the public school would still be the only choice, except now it would be funded to the tune of $3000 per student, a $2000 drop, and would be attended exclusively by children of the poorest. To the great improvement of the quality of it, no doubt.
I am not sure that was the case. Constitution, Article I, Section 2: Representatives and direct Taxes shall be apportioned among the several States which may be included within this Union, according to their respective Numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole Number of free Persons, including those bound to Service for a Term of Years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other Persons
The federalist papers also speak of taxes in great extent, See for example Fed 11 or 12.
Yes that's the sales pitch. And it would be somewhat related to reality if it were not for the fact that there are only two types of schools where the vouchers can be redeemed by a low income family: public and religious. And because the school voucher program is coupled with reduction of funding for the public schools themselves while the religious stay funded by their respective cults, that reduces the choice to one category. A typical neo-con charade: pretend that something is an improvement for everyone, while making sure that it only benefits your backers.
School vouchers, if done right, enable all people to pay for schooling and enable them to go to any school that they wish (as opposed to full privatization).
School vouchers are full privatization in disguise.
Since students can attend any school that they wish, the schools will now compete on a market system in which the schools that offer the most programs and has the best performance gets the most voucher money.
If the "competition" was restricted to public schools only, you might have had a point. But it is designed to destroy them altogether.
In the current version of primary and secondary education, poor people get stuck in underfunded public schools while rich people get to go to excellent public schools or private schools. Which is more selfish to you: poor students forced to go to poor schools, or an environment where schools compete with each other for students based on a market system?
They are both fucked. The solution of course is to fund the public system properly, as it is done nearly everywhere else on the planet, including here in Canada. How is that the richest country on the planet has the most fucked up public school system? Never mind, I know the answer, it is also the country where selfish greed rules more decisively as each year passes.
I guess your belief that the government solves all social problems can be a religion, too. Government schools, government checks, government medicine, government subsidies, government cheese, government this, government that. Government needs to stay out of most of these issues and let the free-market do its thing.
No, government must handle things for which the free market is not an acceptable solution. There is no problem for example with private industry and the like. But even then the market must be regulated. Less important the segment of the market, less regulation. Truly free market is only possible for a horde of small companies trading in bolts and the like. That is because free-market, left to its own devices would simply devolve into a set of oligopolies and gouging cartels sprinkled generously with vast scams.
Hell no. The government needs to exist for protection, law enforcement, infrastructure, and some other very basic things.
It all depends what one considers "basic". Education, Healthcare, social safety nets and market regulation are some of those "basic" things.
as if your utopian collectivist government can do any bette
No one is proposing any "collectivism". But one has to acknowledge reality of human failings. Greed and selfishness are some of them.
I'm not rich, but I'm also tired of all rich people being lumped together as Mr. Scrooges that need to be forever taxed because they are sinful, selfish creatures that need to be forever punished.
The alternative is for all practical purposes feudalism. Accumulation of wealth beyond one's contributions to society is the anathema of capitalism. That is why Adam Smith was for nearly 100% estate tax and anti-cartel regulations. Unchecked accumulation of wealth perverts the market mechanisms and skews the workings of the system meant to create wealth via
That was not my claim. I merely indicated that the government officials were cowed by this attitude instead of being strong when strength was being called for. That cowing is the result of "government is the evil to be destroyed" attitudes of the people in power in Washington as well as the predominant political culture where Rove, amplified by the likes of Rush Limbaughs and O'Reilly, gets to dictate the agenadas. It is a state of political paralysis. Witness the frightened Democratic officials all over the country and their meek "criticisms" of the administration. Very few of them have spine enough to actually opose forcefully the right's agendas. This is what I speak of, not the litigious nature of society, which was something that could have been pre-empted on the basis of national emergency.
The neo-conservatives aren't good and should be fought against. But let's at least maintain a realistic view of what they are--and more importantly what they aren't. (i.e. some nefarious group responsible for all of the world's ills)
No such claim is being made. There are certainly other causes of all sorts of other problems and in politics frequently multiple causes exist for the same phenomenon. But in this case, the outrageous weakening of the government functions, the primary cause is the neo-con ideology. And that is on top of their kleptocratic ways, of treating vital agency appointments as rewards for political operatives.
Specially when the territory turned hostile when you were already in it and you are crippled or sick and unable to get out...
By the way, in your example, it is always the fault of shooters. Always. Were it not so, Iraqi civilians could be blamed for being "stupid enough to live in a warzone". And you are a "self-made, pulled-himself-by-his-bootstraps" idiot.
Perhaps the general state of education in the US has something to do with it?
All they should need are two obvious facts to trump all the shills: * New Orleans is below sea level * Water flows downhill Just from that it's easy to conclude that sooner or later, New Orleans would be flooded!
Again it is more complicated then it appears. Even if the people had understood the information, you assume that the situation was the same over the last five or so decades. It was not. A number of canals were built which severely increased the danger. Wetlands which constituted buffer zone to the levies were drained. Most people had no say in this and were in fact oposing these developments. But many of them were unable to get out of town due to their job prospects, poverty and other situations. So you buy a house in a city which is reasonably protected by an existing system and which then proceeds to get more and more dangerous. Life is not black and white, I think that majortity of those who stayed behind could not be reasonably blamed as having the sole, or even the majority, of the responsibility for this if you combine all the factors.
I agree that the response was unacceptably slow. But it is a looong stretch to blame this on the supposed nature of government in general. If it were so, all prior disasters, some also on a major scale (California Earthquake) would be dealt with similarly. But they were not. Furthermore, most of the governments with far less resources then those at the disposal of the Federal, State and Local governments in this case were capable of handling immediately a vastly more devastating disaster: the Tsunami, where governments of impoverished countries reacted with speed and level of effort far exceeding that of the Bush Administration in regards to New Orleans. Cuba evacuated all their citizens out of the path of their last major hurricane. And so on. The failure has nothing to do with "nature" of government as you would have people believe and everything with the ideology of government being in the way of raking in money to which right-wingers subscribe. If it were otherwise, Cuba, with its outright socialist government, would be the one with people crammed in a convention center begging for food and water.
It's not because a conservative is in office.
I disagree. FEMA was nearly completely gutted and turned into an adjunct of Homeland Security, which itself was obsessed with defense contractors and ways of spending vast sums of money to counter-act a small band of idiots with box-cutters or perhaps with an RPG or two. These actions are directly responsible for the performance of both of these federal agencies.
And what is so "selfish" about free-market ideas that libertarians and conservatives champion, such as school vouchers, privatized social security, privatized health care, negative income taxes, limiting inflation, and more?
Free-market ideas are all fine and dandy as long as one remembers that free-market is a limited and narrowly applicable tool to make sure that certain types of economic activity are efficient. It is not a religion nor a philosophy.
Free-market is perfectly applicable to 50 small businesses trying to compete while manufacturing soap.
Free-market is not applicable to medical care because one of the cornerstones of free-market, one I am sure you are familiar with, the "competition" is absent. One does not do "price/performance analysis" when one is dying of a heart attack. You go to the nearest ER and at that point you do not have any control over prices you are being charged. Only selfish people, who are wealthy enough to have transportation arrangements with their private clinics, or who simply do not care about the price, would claim that putting free-market into such a scenario is "not selfish". The result is 40 million uninsured Americans with no health care. A situation worthy of Congo or Angola. But that is OK, because the top 10% is luxuriously served. Selfish. As in caring about your own lucky ass only, while claiming that everyone else should be left to their own devices.
Similarly with education, in science at least, there is only one group of schools which is capable of delivering the goods: secular academia. The rest are various flavours of medieval religious zealotry masquerading as "science". Very much as the Madrasses in the Middle East. Allowing them to brainwash people until they start believing and acting on superstition and all sorts of nonsense in order to
The old saying misses the possibility of malice being combined with stupidity, which is the way I see the Bush Administratiom.
Let me put it this way. Cuba managed to evacuate their people before the last big hurricane hit. Ponder that while you compare their resources with that of the richest country on the planet. Where was their "hubris" and disbelief at the climatologists?
This is quite disenginious since the views which would be considered "left" in most of the world constitute a tiny minority within US politics. Taken indivdually or as parties, US politicians are at best center-right to far-right from the point of view of most of the world. What you term "left" bears no resemblance to the typical "left" elsewhere. I think this is a part of deliberate extreme right wing strategy, to loudly label and denounce even most miniscule deviation from their agenda as "liberal" and "left". And soon after that, center-right viewpoints, such as the ones represented usually by CNN are labeled "liberal". So the witless victims of this try to be more "balanced" and "receptive" and move further to the right. Never sufficiently enough though to cease being called "liberaly biased". That would only stop if they were to hand out scripts written by Karl Rove himself to all their staff to read.
You are defending this of course because it suits your own particular bias, that of a far right wing, and you have no use for oposition to it because you see democracy as a system for hammering out minutia of implementation of right-wing policies.
Which obviously helped a lot. They were far more concerned with dancing to the tune of defense contractors in order to defend the country against a scruffy band of box-cutter wielding malcontents who had to work diligently for 20 years before they managed to finally stage successfully one major attack. As oposed to the remote, never before seen danger of a hurricane in the South.
Note that they did not use that construct anywhere in the sentence. Instead they kept coming up with a new verb for each of the items, such as "secure" Liberty instead of "insure" which they used with "domestic Tranquility". They could have used "secure domestic Tranquility and Liberty". But they did not. I think it was all merely a literary style.
I don't want to be a nit-pick but it is my understanding that in those days it was considered a bad literary style to use the same word more then once in an oratory statement. Note that they used "establish", "insure", "provide" and "promote". None of them appears more then once. It is possible that your interpretation is the correct one, but I am somewhat skeptical of reading the wording with such detail.
Not if some shills-for-hire for the devlopers are pretending that the experts are really "liberal partisan hacks" and out to rob you of your beautiful new and cheap house. And look, the Johnses are moving in next door. And our experts are saying the levees will hold, dont you worry about a thing...
The term is "social darwinism", one of the avenues of bottomless stupidity on the glorious way to fascism (or possibly feudalism). The poor all should die because they dared to get born poor or with debilitating illness or got old and lost their earning capabilities. The rich are God Chosen to prosper and multiply. God should kill all the poor to make way for the afluent. Etc and so on.
Sigh.
You, Sir, are one of the half-digested pieces of poisonous, rotten meat in the vomit of a dying democracy.