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

To: Lane3 who wrote (90261)	10/16/2008 8:45:57 AM
From: thames_sider	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 541957

If you are taxed on your income and the money is spent on, say, an aircraft carrier or the Supreme Court, that's not spreading the wealth. "Spreading the wealth" is when they redistribute YOUR income to SOME OTHER CITIZEN who the government thinks is deserving of it. I disagree. Firstly, money goes into a central government pot. It's not tagged so that your portion goes only on aircraft carriers and none for Medicare. But more importantly, all government spending is spreading the wealth. It's taking some money away from the original possessors and distributing it elsewhere - which means sending it ultimately to different people or bodies. It's spreading the wealth whether it pays for low-paid people, sick people, civil service people, or Boeing workers and shareholders. And its spending is (nominally) on behalf of the entire country. If you view "spreading the wealth" as some kind of income-only earmark, relating purely to direct payments to other individuals, then we'll have to disagree on definitions. But yours seems to me unrealistically narrow.