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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Tenchusatsu who wrote (476854)	5/1/2009 12:58:42 PM
From: i-node	Respond to of 1574005

The airport continues to be funded with taxpayer money. If it shut down tomorrow, it will only affect a few citizens and barely make a dent in PA's unemployment rate. Does it really matter? In the end? I doubt it. At this point, the fiscal provisions of the Constitution have become totally unmanageable. We're voting for the guy who can promise us the most -- whether it is Obama or our state Senators. About 20 years ago, Lord Rees-Mogg and James Davidson wrote an excellent book, The Great Reckoning. In it, they refer to an "incentive trap". As an example, they discuss a "joint" American Express card with 500 cardholders -- with the only restriction being that each cardholder has to pay 1/500th of the bill each month. What will happen with such a credit card? Of course, the monthly bill grows without bound until such time as the participants cannot pay the bill. Obviously, such an arrangement provides an incentive for each of the 500 to spend as much money as possible, with zero fiscal restraint. The goal becomes one of outspending all the other cardholders. This is where we are in this country. Our government is an "incentive trap" -- where the goal is to get as much government largess as possible for your self, your state, or your locality. Eventually, the democracy will collapse under the weight of public spending. I don't know if I agree with Tytler's statement that it will by necessity end in a dictatorship; I'm not sure how that was deduced. And I don't know how close we are to that time. While it is easy to blame the left as they're the ones demanding the largess, if it is in fact an incentive trap, the question is, "Could there be any other outcome?" Probably not.

To: Tenchusatsu who wrote (476854)	5/2/2009 4:25:52 PM
From: tejek	Respond to of 1574005

Ted, > Little late.....the airport exists. I am not happy about it but it is what it is. The airport continues to be funded with taxpayer money. If it shut down tomorrow, it will only affect a few citizens and barely make a dent in PA's unemployment rate. If we really want to keep Murtha's constituents employed, why not build, say, solar or wind farms there? Or factories making parts for said solar and wind farms? Do you honestly think I disagree with you? I am perplexed as hell as why things work the way they do out East. When I was in grad school at Syracuse, I wrote a paper on why Syracuse suffered from economic malaise. As far as I could tell, corruption and good ole boy politics played a key role in keeping things from going forward. You don't see that kind of garbage in places like Minneapolis or Madison; places that are very prosperous and growing. The answer should be obvious. "Pork is stimulus" say the liberal hypocrites. I disagree. Stimulus is stimulus. Right now, its what the country needs...pork is always extraneous. And btw the Murtha airport is not the only one like it.....there are many in this country esp. in places like Alaska, MT and Wyoming that get huge sums of federal monies and very little air traffic. Hopefully, the media focusing on this crap will help reduce it: bermanpost.com