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Politics : The Castle -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Neocon who wrote (433)	11/13/2002 4:33:08 PM
From: The Philosopher	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 7936

That requires some thinking. I don't have pat answers. One reform that I think would go a long way, though, is the repeal of the 16th Amendment. Lest you have forgotten your civics, that's the amendment authorizing the income tax. IMO there are two basic reasons why there is so much corruption and waste in the federal government system. First, there is so much money there. Where there is that much money, there will be that many people trying to get their hands on it. The second reason is that it is so removed from the view of the average taxpayer. The reasons there are is no corruption on our local school board isn't because our school board members are inherently more honest or less corruptible than the average senator or representative. It's because a) there isn't enough money to attract major league corrupters, and b) the people making the monetary decisions are our neighbors and if we don't like something they've done we don't just fire off a letter to a city 3,000 miles away, we buttonhole them in the line at he grocery store and let them know our view. Our Constitution was never designed to control a country as large as this one, a budget anywhere near the size of this one, etc. It's like trying to patch the Wright Brothers plane with enough add-ons and fixes to take us to the moon. It's not going to work. Take the money out of Washington and put it back in the hands of the most local groups you can find, bring it down to the block or street level if possible, and you cure a lot of the ills of our government in a hurry. These are, I realize, principles, not proposals. But there is, IMO, simply no way to effectively reform a system which has so much money that it provides huge rewards to people who learn to manipulate it, and who therefore have a very strong vested interest in its continuance. And now I have to go get some work done!