Republicans & Conservatives: Archives

Look, liking taxes is like liking having to brush your teeth. You’d just as soon go to bed. But you know what? You want to keep your teeth clean, because that means you will continue to have teeth for years to come. And you want those teeth around, because oatmeal doesn’t quite have the appeal of a juicy steak.

We expect things out of our government, right? Defense, social services, law enforcement and the like, correct? Taxes allow us to keep the teeth that allow us to chew on those problems. They brush those teeth, and keep them nice and together. Because we really want to avoid those days where we end up with a government that doesn’t have the teeth to bite back at those who try and take chomp out of us.

I don’t mind paying taxes at all. I just hate the thought of people who owe more than me working the system to pay less, or even no taxes at all. It makes me feel like a chump.

You are a chump Lee & Stephen D. If the Government would stick to National Defense, law enforcement, roads and infrastructure, that would be good, but, relating to your tooth brush analogy, the government wants to brush the teeth, and we know that brushing the tongue and gums is good too, but it is brushing the face and now it is brushing down the throat and heading for the lungs. It is out of control and if we get our lungs brushed it’s going to kill us. THe Government is into serious social engineering, social engineering, entitlements, etc and our people are becoming weak and feeling like victime. We are loosing our rugged individualism, our ability to stand on our own two feet. A great example: Many Americans don’t plan for their own retirements anymore or buy health insurance, choosing to fall upon the system. With our good intentions, we have provided too much security, so much that we can’t afford it and it is going to break us. (Social Security is preparing to go bankrupt, All of those who lived for the day and beyond their means, are going to be a great burden on their countrymen.) The things that made this country great are becoming things of the past. Things like personal responsibility and not relying on the government to take care of the people. THe people should take care of the people. It keeps them alert, prepared and fit and it strenghtens us all. Independence is a virtue. Dependence is slavery. As we become dependent on the government, we wind up being co-dependant… a pitiful place to be.

Con’t from above… One way we can minimize this is to try our best not to overfeed the dog of government. Many ligislators, as well as our president, at times, have enacted tax cuts that makes it diffficult for the government to spend unnecessarily and to be socialist. We should support this. In this respect the dificit is good, even though it is only three to five percent of the economy. It makes it harder to justify frivilous spending or extensive socialistic spending. When a person is on a tight budget, they don’t buy many luxuries. You see, Lee, legislators make tax breaks for many reasons, but one of them is to keep out government from getting too fat. The legislators want you to use the laws they write, spend so much time on, and approve. Get a good accountant, read a “how to pay your taxes book” and help our government to keep in shape.

Now I’m no fan of Government overspending, but unfortunately, your people (I’m assuming you’re a conservative, correct me if I’m wrong) have been all too willing to cut good programs and leave all the market manipulation and pork in there. And social security is a good thing actually. I doubt people who can plan for their retirement are failing to, in the expectation of their social security windfall. those who can afford it buy into pension plans and 401Ks Those who can’t, those who would not be able to retire, would fall below the poverty line, or would end up being a burdern on their families don’t end up as such, at least not to the extent they could.

Look, you guys are so phobic about taxes that you’re running deficits. You know what deficits are? Deficits are wasted money just waiting to happen. The biggest waste of all in our government right not is the 300 billion dollars we’re having to pay on treasury bonds that have come due. Every year, tax payers have to pay that much money to the government just to see it do nothing. It’s the same kind of bill our president is currently running up. It’s the same kind of waste future generations are going to be forced to commit with their tax dollars.

And your people are a party to that. You’re also a party to the reduced enforcement power of the IRS, with the result that the rich are getting audited less than the poor, and the trully expensive tax cheats are getting passed over for their just deserts for nickel and dime stuff for the EITC.

And you’ve done that with nearly every government agency that was of some use to the American people, cutting funds for enforcement, then decrying government waste and bureaucratic ineffectiveness that your people cause by not giving other people the resources to do what’s necessary.

It just seems you want to govern without really governing. You want to fund without really funding. You want to enjoy the fruits of your labor before you have them in hand. You apply these blanket judgments to the whole system, and then expect such an ideologically driven, vague, poorly worked out portraits of it to function as a guide to changing the system for the better.

If you don’t know or care to find out how the system really works, chances are, you’ll only do harm with these generalizations, as this Republican congress has done for almost ten years now.

Dave said: “Many ligislators, as well as our president, at times, have enacted tax cuts that makes it diffficult for the government to spend unnecessarily and to be socialist.”

Sorry, Dave, I have to dampen your optimism. There is this thing the President and the Republican Congress are maximizing their use of, even more than the Democrats ever did, it is called National Debt and Deficits. If what you said was true, this 7 trillion dollar debt would not be anywhere near what it is, and the Deficit would about 1/2 what what it currently is.

I left the Democratic Party but, it is still a fact that President Bush and the Republican Congress are spending more than Clinton and his Democratic Senate did. In addition, the Clinton and the Democratic Senate had no deficits the last two years, and they were paying for what they were spending with taxes. Yup, tax and spend Democrats.

But, I ask you, is this President’s and Congress’s borrowing from our children’s paychecks to pay for their sky is the limit spending today better or worse? The fact is we are getting short term modest tax cuts today, but with a $10 Trillion dollar national debt by 2010 and deficits through the rest of the decade at the very least, this President and Congress is give you a buck today and will be taking back $5 from you tomorrow to pay the interest on that debt and pay down the principal.

In other words, if you look at the fiscal situation over the next 10 years, the Republicans are raising taxes and spending today against your tax increases tomorrow. Even conservative think tanks are publishing that no amount of economic recovery will be capable of increasing the kind of revenues that will be needed to service and pay down the national debt currently being piled up.

As for preventing social programs - What was that Medicare Bill? A really bad socialized program that gets the least bang for the most buck by preventing the U.S. government from negotiating lower Rx drug prices. Even conservative think tanks can’t spin this out to the GOP advantage and remain credible, and they aren’t even trying, because they are very smart people.

> A great example: Many Americans don’t plan
> for their own retirements anymore or buy
> health insurance, choosing to fall upon the
> system.

LOL! You believe that America’s “social safety net” is the reason why Americans don’t save, why they don’t have health care, why (I am inferring) they are increasingly in debt?

Polls have shown that most Americans, particularly young ones, are less and less likely year after year to believe that there will be a social safety net for them at all. I don’t think that your premise makes sense when A

Also, if we accept your premise that Americans aren’t spending their money on healthcare, savings, and investments as they should (and spending the money on other stuff), then by Republican logic this shouldn’t be a problem anyway, since such spending (on luxury cars and expensive consumer goods, no doubt) will be pumped back into the economy anyway and will eventually benefit the original consumer in the long run.

I’m not blaming Republicans for this, but the truth is simply that people in America are getting poorer, in general, and this has been the trend for decades. Saving for retirement? Paying for health insurance? Many Americans simply can’t afford either.

But you are right to call attention to those Americans who can afford to be financially smart. Why do middle class Americans so poorly prepare themselves for downturns in the economy?

I think that there is a problem in America of irresponsible and indeed lazy citizens whose personal economic activities have the risk not only of pushing these people into the “social safety net” and costing the rest of us money, but also these people’s behavior has dramatic ripple effects across the private sector economy: interest rates rise as bankruptcies go through the roof, the housing market (i think) will crash in a few years, consumer spending will drop, people won’t go to college as much as they used to leading to a less educated American workforce for our corporations to rely on, people will miss work and be less productive due to poor health because they don’t have health care.

If one or more of these disasters occur (and many of them already are in the process of occurring) then not only will the least fortunate Americans suffer but, and I’m sure this is more meaningful to most Republicans, our country will be in very bad shape to compete internationally and our corporations will feel that pain.

These are they types of problems that free markets and free consumer behavior can potentially bring upon us. I do not oppose these freedoms, but I beleive that the potential disasters should be mitigated. This is why I think that the Democrats generally have the right idea of making sure that our country isn’t brought to economic hard times or even disaster by simple free market forces.

Republicans think that the market will automatically correct for these things (Adam Smith’s invisible hand), while Democrats think that the economy is something that needs to sometimes be guided through regulation and in general should be protected from wild downturns.

Perhaps Republicans think that wild economic downturns are okay, that if the economy swings high and low by the natural processes of market forces, then that’s just natural and it’s preferable to taxes and regulations. Even if it means that the people who get hurt at the bottom actually get hurt very badly (unemployment, poverty, sickness, malnutrition, crime). Democrats think that through intelligent guidance these wild swings can be mitigated so that the very poorest won’t have to die in the gutter just so Donald Trump can have the freedom to afford to have his skeleton gold-plated.

(Sure there are liberals & communists on the left that think the government should control all commerce, but there are also conservatives & libertarians who think the government shouldn’t even manage the highways. I’m talking about the mainstream ideology of both sides)

So getting back to the Americans who aren’t saving, etc: I want to look at some other social trends. Americans generally believe that they are somehow someday going to become rich. An interesting poll from a few years ago showed that something like a quarter of Americans thought they were going to someday be super-rich. And some similarly large number thought that they were already in the highest tax bracket (which is actually only paid by about 1% of Americans).

I can only assume that these people must be those same whiny Republicans who think of themselves as “tax victims” while living their lives as if the unrealistic hope that great wealth was going to be a reality.

By your logic, I could argue that upper middle and middle class Americans are wildly spending their money on expensive mortgages and SUV leases in the hopes that, if they don’t end up rich, at least their taxes will go down under Republican leadership and that they will get rich that way.

These people vote Republican, but when the sh*t hits the fan these people will also be glad for the Democratic safety net. I wonder how many Republicans benefitted from Unemployment Benefits in the past couple of years, and were able to find decent career-relevant jobs because of the benefits instead of being forced to take the first job that came along?

-Cf

It’s interesting that most Republicans I talk to don’t know why systems like Social Security and Medicare were needed in the first place. The same goes for regulating utilities and breaking up monopolies.