Diatribune - infrastructure - Comments

Republican governance =

epppie — Sat, 18 Aug 2007 17:30:35 -0600

Republican governance = contradiction in terms.

"Waste" is a red herring.

Jacob Freeze — Sat, 11 Aug 2007 12:34:01 -0600

"Waste" is a red herring. Every nation that provides a decent social safety net for its citizens pays more taxes than we do, in terms of the percentage of the GDP. It isn't because all of them are wasting enormous sums of money.

"We just haven't had a

Jacob Freeze — Sat, 11 Aug 2007 11:43:38 -0600

"We just haven't had a government that cared enough about those things to do it."

The government that cared enough was the progressive faction of the Democratic Party, last represented in a national election by Walter Mondale, and the people chose low taxes and a senile actor instead, in 1984. 49 states went for Reagan, who had nothing to recommend him except cornpone blather and a free ride for the middle class. There weren't enough of his rich friends to elect him mayor of Omaha, much less President, but he was able to buy off the middle class with a few crumbs from the table of tax cuts, and that's been the paradigm ever since.

And we all thought 1984 was just another number!

I would agree in principle

kerry — Sat, 11 Aug 2007 10:58:45 -0600

I would agree in principle that Americans need to be willing to pay more in taxes in order to receive more in government services. Europeans accepted this premise a long time ago. However, this is not the only problem we have. During the Reagan administration, the government wasted at least 500 billion dollars having to bail out the S&L industry because of the irresponsible way that Reagan deregulated the industry. Today we are wasting at least a trillion dollars in Iraq. We have had money to spend on infrastructure, healthcare, education and other services. We just haven't had a government that cared enough about those things to do it.