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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Steve Lokness who wrote (51615)	3/4/2008 3:20:43 PM
From: TimF	Respond to of 540985

I dislike government funding of anything - but at least SS pays its way. I've always found that to be a very useless idea. You can create a tax, give it the same name as some category of spending (say "the bridge to nowhere tax") tie it to a program (like bridges in Alaska where there is apparently insufficient demand to justify building), and then walla, the program "pays for itself". The reality is that every dollar spent is just as expensive as a dollar spent somewhere else, and every dollar comes from tax revenue. You can break up tax revenue in to a million different special taxes if you want, but that doesn't all the sudden mean that a million programs are "paying for themselves" in any meaningful way.