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I wonder if a tea party Party could be formed out of this
...yeah, right. This stuff happens every few years.... and never accomplishes anything, because in the famous words of Howard Ruff, Americans have figured out how to vote themselves benefits out of the federal treasury, and that goes double for the middle class white guys who are running these so-called "protests". They whine about lower taxes, but at the same time do not want to give back the generous government benefits that they themselves are getting.They drive to the rally on roads that are paid for by the government, they go home to their suburban tract homes which are subsidized by tax breaks on their interest, they complain if their public school has a smaller stadium than the next suburb over.
They whine if somebody breaks into their car and steals their stereo because of too few policemen patrolling the streets... it's a big scandal if the government ambulance or fire department takes five minutes instead of one, to get to their house when they have the big H from eating subsidized beef and pork... They drive to work on to either a Lockheed plant, whose profits depend almost solely on their ability to sell more and more complex weapons systems to the US Military or Space Program, or else to their job on an assembly line at the new Kia plant, which was built out in the country by generous industrial revenue bonds issued by the county, or direct subsidy by the local and state government, which they were happy to do in order to get people to work and pay taxes to keep the whole thing going.
On the weekends, they go to the local lake, an impoundment put up by the Corps of Engineers to generate power, so that their electricity will be nice and cheap.... they catch a nice bass that was stocked in the lake by the Fish and Wildlife department. It is nice out there, clean, because the state paid someone to go out and pick up the old beer bottles....and kept the chemical plant upstream from discharging its waste directly into the water supply.
They call their elderly parents on the phone that night.... their elderly parents that have been kept alive via Medicaid and Medicare the last couple of years, after their heart attacks, which were caused by smoking the government subsidized tobacco all of those years, and they are happy that the old folks are able to live in their own house, subsidized by social security and/or a variety of other public pensions, without which they might actually have to (ugh) move in with them....
Who wants to cut back on all of that stuff?
nobody.
They go shopping.... where do we begin? The produce aisle? How much government money went to irrigate all that land out in California to produce all of those beautiful vegetables.... The bread department? Farm set-asides and supports for wheat farmers, regulation of the product by the FDA to keep it from poisoning you, and naturally, easy transportation via the highway system.... The milk section? Lord knows how much a gallon of milk would cost.... or whether or not it would be thinned out with formaldehyde like it was at the turn of the last century without government resources.... Anyplace else in the supermarket, including the supermarket itself, which is inspected by the local health authorities on a frequent basis to keep rats from overrunning the place....You can look no farther than the nearest jar of peanut butter to know what would happen to the food supply without some sort of government review or regulation.... and it is a huge scandal if the health department lets some guy get something past them....
So, these guys can protest all they want.... but they would not think of walking away from some of these things...Better yet, they should spend some time in the so-called "developing countries" to see what life is like without a lot of this stuff....starting first with a minimum wage, and some labor and job safety laws, that keep you from getting your fingers chopped off in some piece of unsafe equipment.... all of that stuff takes government resources...laws, regulations, and inspectors.....I have been all over the world, including the so-called worker's paradise in China, and can tell you some stories....
Now to be sure, the tax system we have is bullshit, and I am second to no one in my desire to have some of this be common-sense such as not requiring 10 handicap parking spots in front of the local skating rink...but I would say that 99% of the fat white guys that are running this stuff have no idea how good they have it.
Since I am in a ranting mood.....That is not to say that the government, at any level, is organized in some kind of efficient way either....Billions spent on weapons systems, hardware, satellites and other crap for the military that is the next thing to useless....I just had to laugh at the following article on Savinar's site today....
http://exiledonline.com/the-war-nerd-this-is-how-the-carriers-will-die/Quote:
Seriously: why are there aircraft carriers? For asses like John McCain to crash on. Why do they keep getting funded long after they’ve been shown up? The same reason knights were galloping around pretending that the longbow hadn’t turned half their friends into pincushions: because it was a way of life for the richest and dumbest people in the country and they weren’t about to let it go.
A military that is designed to project power and protect our oil supply and keep the system together another year, which is unable to protect two of our three tallest buildings from attack by a seven-foot, left-handed, cave dweller on dialysis, and unable to conquer a nation of 22 million rug salesmen in five years, at the expense of a Trillion dollars....and unable to protect our southern border from an invasion by somewhere between six and ten million potential guerilla fighters....A school system in which the lowest paid people, the teachers, are the least respected, but simultaneously the ones in charge of performing the actual customer service, while the good old boy ex-football coaches, as Ross Perot used to say, are running the show, making the curricculum decisions to fit the economy of 1977, while the kids are going to have to earn a living in 2037, while the little kids in Malaysia are working their asses off to learn English so they can take our jobs while we sell hamburgers to one another.....
In our state, the two highest paid State employees are the two football coaches at the state universities... followed by the basketball coaches.
The ongoing catastrophe that is our "social welfare" system, that is anything but, and fails to produce anything except another generation of government-dependent thugs....and the development of a permanent underclass...
State and local agencies that are used as a jobs program, to fatten up a particular constituency, or tilt regulatory activities in one way or the other, rather than as a way to provide government services....
The Democrats used to be the prime proponents of this, as anyone who has waited in line at the DMV knows, but Republicans became expert in this by populating the federal agencies with of graduates of Liberty University and other similar places ref: Monica Goodling
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monica_GoodlingOur billion-dollars worth of jails are full of non-violent drug users, while our biggest growth industry, from various reports, is the importation of "illegal" dope from places such as Afghanistan, which is ostensibly under the control of the US Military, and one or more of our Southern neighbors.....
Our bridges fall down, our levees break....one thunderstorm in Chicago sends our air-traffic-control system, if you want to call it that, into complete chaos....
we have a massive bureaucracy in charge of preventing 75 year old ladies from carrying on more than three ounces of &^#$& toothpaste aboard an airplane flight...and containerloads of dope and other contraband coming into the country via the highways and ports....
But, we keep spending the money. In fact, we spend much more than we take in, because the coward politicians will not go to the public and ask them to pay for the government services...I don't blame them. They're probably embarrassed, the system being in the condition that it is in. They might be held accountable.
And accountability.... that's a joke. A politician's popularity is more linked to how much pork he can bring back to the state.... and congress still has a 90 percent re-election rate, despite the chaos.The bailout thing... that adds a completely new dimension to the problem....an unprecedented taxpayer reward of incompetence.... or corruption... or some combination, never before seen in human history. Ironically that whole thing has an excellent chance to swamp any of the above in terms of the sheer magnitude and audacity ....
I can come to only one conclusion: We are stupid.
I guess people are people.... maybe it's human nature. Individually, we can all see that there is a problem, but collectively, we are a bunch of idiots. I am afraid there is going to be a lot of chaos, and there is no way to make it any better with the system the way it is, and no guarantee that any other system will make it any better.
But, it's unsustainable, at the scale at which we are now trying to run it, in the way we are trying to do it.
Sorry to tell you this close to lunchtime. It's enough to make you sick.
That's just funny given that Edf turns a large profit every year selling electricity and that money is turned in to the French General Fund to be spent on other government expenditures.
