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

To: cosmicforce who wrote (216447)	2/9/2013 12:31:15 PM
From: Wharf Rat	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 542117

"<I think the government CAN do things well.> Mostly at the smaller scale. The larger the project, the more poorly it is run from what I can see." What was bigger than Man on the Moon? What road system is bigger than the Interstate? Who made a bigger boom than the Manhattan Project? Why is Medicare and VA better run than the private health-care sector? Why does the government bail out private pension plans, but private pensions aren't needed to bail out SS? Who else would have funded AIDs research and produced the drugs we use today? "when debt for a country is 80% of what the whole country makes", it's time to make more. That means a jobs program. It also means raising revenues by closing loopholes and giveaways, as they say, since it'll be a while before the US raises taxes again. I don't care whether we increase Willard's taxes to 50%, or we tell him, "You can't have $100M in your IRA and we are taking 75% in taxes and fines." Revenue is revenue.

To: cosmicforce who wrote (216447)	2/9/2013 1:01:20 PM
From: Metacomet	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 542117

It is the trend since 1940 I find disturbing. Not sure how the data shows a "trend" Reading the accompanying article, it tells the story, pretty much, of how the increases in our debt levels are the result of war expenditures, followed by periods of reduction It looks as though the current trend accompanies the Reagan epihone to curtail that nasty tax thingy And of course Bush added the novel approach to initiate wars and cut those taxes at the same time And yes this trend is disturbing ..but not as disturbing as a political philosophy that says that rather than make the adjustments to balance income with outgo, we simply need to stop paying for anything not related to fighting or preparing to fight wars Cause even if we do that, we will not reduce the debt So the question is what do we need to do to get that trend in check? ..you know, reduce the debt