Republicans are the flag-wavers of low-cost citizenship, but if you look back at 30 years of neglected infrastructure, you may notice that most of the Democrats who managed to get elected played more or less the same game. The last Democratic national candidate who threatened to raise taxes on everybody was Walter Modale, and he only won one state in the general election. The people don't want to pay for the blessings of citizenship, and politicians of both parties are just riding the wave of irresponsibility.
The great seismic event of no-tomorrow low taxes wasn't some neo-con cabal. It was Proposition 13 in California, which passed by refendum in 1978, lowered property taxes by 57%, and turned California into a crumbling zoo. Twelve other tax-rebellion referenda were approved elsewhere the same year, and all the political weather-vanes who want their names on a ballot have been pointing in the same direction ever since.
The Republicans didn't turn the USA into a nation of greedy, short-sighted idiots, and Democrats couldn't make citizens out of a selfish mob even if they tried, and they aren't really trying.
It may be funny when Obama calls Hillary Clinton "Bush-Cheney lite," but Obama is also running a low-tax campaign for everybody except the wealthiest 1%, and even Edwards is promising tax-breaks for his base.
But you can't blame the leading Democratic contenders for doing what they have to do to be contenders. If they preached responsibility, all three of them would be at zero in the polls.
We're going to put a low-tax President in the Oval Office in 2008, Republican or Democrat, and we're going to make a few cosmetic improvements in high-profile infrastructure while everything else continues to crumble, and we're going to get exactly the President and exactly the infrastructure that we deserve.
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I would agree in principle
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.
__________________________Work and struggle and never accept an evil that you can change -- Andre Gide
"We just haven't had a
"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!
__________________________http://jacobfreeze.com
"Waste" is a red herring.
"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.
__________________________http://jacobfreeze.com