Gloom And Doom Hits Home.

[Flyflinger]

Everyone wants to talk about changing the color of the cage...all I want to do is get rid of the cage altogether.

[mixermarkb]

I'm sorry Flyflinger. Abolishing government, ending the Great Democracy Experienment that our founding fathers put together, and having an every man for himself, lets all arm to the teeth and run to the hills, survival of the fittest kind of country, is not something I want to see happen.

I like our flag. I like what I stands for. I love my government. I'll keep it, and just try and make it better, a little at a time.

I'm out of this one too,

Tight Lines to all!

mb

[mixermarkb]

Hey, one more comment to Jeb.

Yes, he might be better if those programs were administrated by a church. I know over the years in western culture, the church has done the heavy lifting on most social issues, from feeding the poor to education and many many others.

My church does a lot of good.

The problem I have with programs like head start being replaced by church programs is twofold. First, churches suffer from greed and misuse of their funds as much as any other human organization. People don't always tithe, and churches doesn't always spend the money as well as they could.

Second, and way more important to me, is what church is going to oversee these programs?

Is being a convert to that brand of church a must to get the services they provide? Jesus never taught that, He taught us to love all equally, but again, we humans don't always listen.

What if, say, an Islamic temple wanted to oversee a program, because they had a presence in the neighborhood where the services were needed?

Or a Catholic group?

Or Baptist?

Who draws the lines between ministering to the needy, and evangelizing to folks who may not agree with your "brand"?

For me, there is a whole can of worms to open there. As a Christian, I'd rather see Luke get help from Uncle Sam, and be taught at home and by family about God. I'd also like to see more Christians showing more love to kids like Luke, and helping him in ways that government can't... But thats a whole other thread topic, for a different forum. As for schools and preschools, and various other social programs, I'm all for public funds staying in public systems.

[mixermarkb]

I should add, if there are ways for faith based groups to work with government, and not fall into the traps that I talked about above, I'm all for it. It seems real hard to me, but hey, let's look at it and talk it out as a nation.

I surely respect the idea Jeb has.

[Flyflinger]

None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free.---Goethe

[Flyflinger]

I'm sorry Flyflinger. Abolishing government, ending the Great Democracy Experienment that our founding fathers put together, and having an every man for himself, lets all arm to the teeth and run to the hills, survival of the fittest kind of country, is not something I want to see happen.

I like our flag. I like what I stands for. I love my government. I'll keep it, and just try and make it better, a little at a time.

I'm out of this one too,

Tight Lines to all!

mb

I'm sorry mb, but your "Great Democracy" died long ago. As you keep trying to "make it better, a little at a time"..they'll keep selling your children and grandchildren into debt slavery.

[Outside Bend]

Great posts, Mark- I think a lot of folks forget or ignore the human component of these cuts. There was a pretty nice article I was reading about the cuts, about how they affect children's programs far more dramatically than programs for seniors.

http://www.npr.org/2013/02/27/173054385/old-triumph-over-young-in-federal-spending-and-sequester-makes-it-worse

There's a lot of good in these programs, and I think that often gets lost in the rhetoric.

[Al Agnew]

So what's your solution, Flyflinger? We don't live in the world our forefathers did. We have 300 plus million people in this country instead of 500,000 white men and who knows how many slaves and Indians. We have ways and means to alter and destroy our living space, and each other, that they never dreamed of. Letting everybody pretty much govern themselves went out with the advent of tribes and city-states. The Constitution was written to institute a form of government, not to escape any form of government.

With all the stuff we keep complaining about, we're still more free than most countries, and have a lower tax burden, by the way, than most Western style governments have instituted. If the great experiment in representational democracy (not true democracy, that happened in ancient Greece among other places, including some Indian tribes) has failed, it has failed because the people with the money control the government and hence are "more equal" than the rest of us. They make sure they are taken care of, and then the rest of us get taken care of by representatives who want to make sure they get reelected so they can continue to do the bidding of the corporocracy. But it's really not entirely that way, if for no other reason than that there are still intelligent people among the voting public. We the people still have SOME power, and the answer is not to abolish government, but to stop listening to the corporocracy and their minions and start thinking, and voting, for ourselves. And that doesn't mean the corporocracy is bad, either. We need them. We just need to limit their power, because what's good for them is sometimes not what's good for us.

We pay taxes to pay for things we can't do for ourselves, that can only be done collectively. The trick is to understand what it really costs, and what we really need and are really willing to pay for. If you feel you're being forced to pay taxes, and don't want to, well, your choices are to go live a hunter-gatherer nomadic existence somewhere where the government can't find you and doesn't care if you're there, or go try out some other country...where you'll surely pay as much or more taxes.

[Wayne SW/MO]

Cuts have to be made and the fact the legislators and the administration took the cowards way out doesn't alter that fact. What one can hope for is that this will force those responsible for budgets to become more realistic. As long as people welcome pork in their area, but complain about it in others nothing will change there either.

We need to go back to what the forefathers envisioned, a national government primarily focused on defense, diplomacy, and interstate laws. There is no reason that any government official can make at this time in history that will allow a budget to keep increasing, especially in light of many printing.

As far as faith based charities, they have been hard at work doing what the government doesn't do because the federal government will never be able to fine tune laws and help like the charities and state and local governments can.

[Quillback]

The ONLY way this changes is if somehow, there is something that energizes the middle class job market. The last time it happened in any sort of real way was in the 1990s with the tech/dot.com boom. It created a whole new class of industries, with a whole new job market. Can government stimulus do this? Not by just throwing money at existing industries. That's good enough to stave off further depression sometimes, but it would take far too much money to really get things booming again. But that doesn't mean the government can't encourage the creation of new industries. They tried with "green energy", but the problem was that they bet on individual companies at the same time that China was willing to steal the developing technology and outcompete (with massive Chinese government subsidies) those same companies. The key to stimulus money, in my opinion, is to spend it on basic research and development, and green energy is a perfect place to do so. It might take longer, and it might still fail, but there's still a chance that green energy could be the next big development that would result in a huge new economic boom, one that would sustain itself for many years.

So you've basically said corporations are in it to make profits, not create jobs, not support infrastructure, etc., but if we would just fund your favored sector "green energy" then the folks who will profit from the government money tossed thier way won't act like the other greedy corporate barons in other industries because they are "green"? And I can't see it causing a huge economic boom, if anything the trend has been towards higher energy prices as we attempt to become more "green". I also find it ironic that as oil prices have jumped it's now become profitable to use very non-green sources of oil such as oil sands. And who gets hurt by high energy prices? The poor do, they still have to heat their homes, drive to work etc., it's also ironic that the green energy types who are likely to be the ones constantly advocating for the poor, are screwing those folks by supporting policies that are driving us away from producing cheap energy, high energy costs are extremely regressive. I guess we could spend more government money ahd heat the homes of the poor and fill their gas tanks (better yet buy them a Prius), course we don't have any money to do something like that, but that fact seems to escape everyone.