USA Politics

SinisterMinisterX said:
As for property tax... sure get rid of it. You're going to fix your own potholes and home-school your kids, right? In most cities, those are the two things that most property taxes go to.

I own my house - and I mean I own it, free and clear, not some bank holding a mortgage. Paying property taxes doesn't make me feel like I don't own my property. In fact the opposite: I'm required to pay because as a property owner, I now have an obligation to contribute to the area I own that property in. If I wasn't the owner, they wouldn't be asking me to pay.
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Then you don't own your home free and clear. stop paying property tax and watch what happens. Try upholding your second amendment right to bear arms to defend said property and watch what happens... seriously.

You might argue you are being a good, obedient, contributing citizen supporting your local community, but at the end of the day all it means is that nobody really owns their property. Sorry, it is that simple.
 
Income tax is constitutional. There's an amendment that specifically makes it constitutional.
 
Now you're making me curious. Who is going to provide for education, energy and healthcare if it's not the taxpayers, and who is going to guarantee they are all up to the same standards everywhere if it's not the government?
 
That's in my humble opinion indeed the core question one could ask: Does one also care about other people, or does one only care about one's own wallet.
 
I was actually deliberately holding that question in a neutral tone. I don't want to judge or suggest anything, I just want to know what the answer is.
 
Good. Because right now, I simply want to know something I do not know, and not judge something I do no know.
 
My opinion, and really limiting this to the US and to able bodied people. There are a few issues, one there are some deep flaws in both parties public policy arguments.

The Democrats seem to judge compassion based solely on money spent and the number of people on some type of government program. That ignores the results of the money spent and to me a more compassionate would be more people off government programs because they do not need it. Also, they tend to want these programs run from the federal government. The Feds can play some sort of role in programs, but there involvement is not always needed and in many cases is just a flat out waste of money. The Education Department is the best example of this, and by waste I am not even evaluating the purpose of the program itself, but the actual dollars that go to it versus eaten up by bureaucracy.

The GOP argues for cost cutting, but honestly looks too short term and ignores the fact that rightly or wrongly, many people have become dependant on this aid that there needs to be some sort of soft landing/transition away from it and that government should play at least some role.

An other issue is where the money needs to come from, I would argue that in many cases, it is best left at the state level with the Feds there to ensure compliance to the Constitution. Obviously this would require much lower federal and higher state tax rates. State and local governments are in better positions to solve what are essentially local problems (unemplyment, road projects, welfare, etc).

Also, I think we need to redefine what welfare is and is for. I doubt many Americans have an issue with the concept of "we recognize people will hit hard times, lose jobs, have major medical bills, etc and we are okay helping though these times" What I think many people do have a problem with is the entitlement society where people accept public aid for years and years at a time with no effort to get off of it and reject the notion that they are a burden on society (again, only speaking of able bodied people). The US welfare system is a series of cobbled together programs, most I am sure started with good intentions, that duplicate and/or contradict one another and have no cohesive goal or plan to get people off of welfare. Most of the Great Depression welfare programs for example, required public work in exchange for benefits. I thin that is what we have to get back to, if someone has been on welfare for years with no job, it is obvious they are not going to get one and I think society has a right to expect some return on it's investment.

It is almost similar to the file sharing debate where an entire generation is being brought up thinking music is free so long as you see it on a torrent site, people are seeing what is owed to them by the government without a responsibility component to these programs. I do not think it is compassion to doom yet another generation to live barely above the poverty line with their role models being people who can best fill out federal and state forms and dish out food stamps. If the US wants to show true compassion, they will add a level of responsibility to these programs and if need be spend short term money to get people trained for actualy jobs, end the demonization of service industry jobs and being worse that public funds, and revampt the unemployment sytem to recognize that some jobs are not coming back and let people take lower paying jobs that can lead to new careers withougt completely eliminating benefits.

Briefly regarding taxes, I have a serious problem with a system where the government has a preemptive claim on 100% of your income and only through their graces you are allowed to keep a portion of your efforts and that based on your behavior you can keep more or less (deductions). My preference is a locked in flate tax (perhaps with a few tiers) or a consumption tax and zero income tax.

I do care about people but I do not measure compassion in dollars spent, it should be measured in people that get off of these programs and live on their own.
 
You can call education or healthcare programs or not, but don't you agree that money and a certain amount of quality is needed? That brings us back to the original question(s).
 
Briefly, need to get to work,monry certainly needs to be spent on education, a good public education system is the key to the future success of the country. However, adding more money does not mean better education. I think this is where dollars spent is equated to quality and that is not the case. I would like to see those dollars be spent more wisely and improve the quality before blindly throwing money at the problem. I see the Department of Education as a huge waste of money, perhaps minus things like Pell grants and some small information clearing house duties. Beyond wasting money itself, it causes districts to spend tons of money to stay in compliance with grants to the point where scholl districts spend millions a year on compliance/grant officers. That is the biggest boom in the education industry and provides little or no benefit to actually educating children.


In college (admittedly some time ago when HillaryCare was the issue of the day) I wrote a lengthy paper on health care ... have more thoughts on both of these and will expand later, but a summary is I think there is a government role, in some cases it should be at the state/local level, but we also need to define what our goals of these programs actually are (and all should be along the lines of getting people off assistance as quickly as possible because they will not need it).
 
LooseCannon said:
Income tax is constitutional. There's an amendment that specifically makes it constitutional.
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Huh, what do you know, damned 16th amendment... I'm not forgetting that one.

Forostar said:
I am sure Onhell will see the differences between us two, and our two posts.
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Bearfan already beat me too it and much more eloquently than I could have ever phrased it, but essentially I'm merely playing devil's advocate and frankly the main reason I like Paul, whether he has a chance in hell or not, is he's like what an old Tyler Durden would sound like: "Let's bring this mother down!" Does it need to be that extreme? No, but revamping is needed.

As for sharing and caring... I grew up in Mexico. Let me tell you a little bit about my 3rd country. I am sure you have read at least a little bit of Marx and when Marx wrote about the bourgeois and the proletariat and the petite bourgeois joining the proletariat and blah, blah, blah... well, he might as well be writing about my country. The Mexican independence and later its supposed revolution are text book Marxism, except that nothing changed. We still have a small ruling class with a practically non-existent middle class and a HUGE working/poor class. While social movements were a fad back in the 60s practically world wide they are still a reality in Mexico and most of south america. The guy in my avatar? He is known as Sub-Comandante Marcos, leader of the EZLN. A revolutionary group supposedly fighting for indigenous rights and declared war on "the Mexican State." He cropped up in 1994 and has not gone away.

The contrast between uber rich and filthy poor is blatantly obvious so revolutionary writings are very popular and motivational. People think Capitalism is evil and I don't blame them, most of Latin America operates on an oligarchical model that would make the 19th century proud, so they think Socialism will be their savior. I grew up on this crap. Ate it up. After living in the U.S for close to half my life, learning about Marxism, Smithian Capitalism, the Cold War, etc in context and aftermath it is blatently obvious that the way people have decided to apply Marx's ideas have failed miserably and it does NOT improve peoples conditions, definitely does NOT share the wealth and Capitalism is FAR from evil. Flawed? Of course, what isn't, but it is the best we got and since Weber wrote, "The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism," it is obvious no other system has enriched peoples lives more or more consistently.

Now, to answer the question as to who should pay what. In the U.S it clearly states that "we the people" are the government, so when people say "the government should do this, pay that, etc." while they mean the FEDERAL government, they fail to realize it is the citizens duty to take care of things. I wholeheartedly agree with SMX in that I would pay (when I finally own a home) property tax, not because I have to, but because it is my responsibility as a member of my community and society to put in my 2 cents. We need an educated citizenry and an invested citizenry, a difficult task given the size and diversity of the U.S population.
 
Perun said:
Now you're making me curious. Who is going to provide for education, energy and healthcare if it's not the taxpayers, and who is going to guarantee they are all up to the same standards everywhere if it's not the government?
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Forostar said:
That's in my humble opinion indeed the core question one could ask: Does one also care about other people, or does one only care about one's own wallet.
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Wasted's 2 cents:

As to Per, we as Americans have a tendency to want our government Ala Carte- we want the gov't to do 'this reform' but not 'that reform'. Personally, I think paying for education is great. However, I get frustrated when my kids come home and I find out that the USA won the Viet Nam war. I don't think I'm getting what I'm paying for. If I had paid cash for this type of eductation, i'd ask for my money back. Also, I really don't like a National Healthcare Plan. Just me. But, to answer your question, we should pay taxes to pay for these things. Property taxes to pay for schools, income taxes to pay for Federal programs, sales tax to pay for state/city initiatives. It is just unfortunate that so much of it gets wasted to overpaid politicians who don't know how to weed a garden.

As to Foro, sometimes it really isn't as black and white as you would like it to be. I can care about other people and care about my wallet at the same time. I feel for other people and will help whenever I can-- however, I need to be able to pay for my own kids food and medical needs as well. If I made enough money to give to a charity, damn skippy, I would. But, I don't make that much. Yet, I care for both. The world is a very grey place, and black and white lines is what makes our two party system a sad thing with more time and money spent on denouncing the other guy than it is on fixing the problems that need to be fixed. But, hey, that's politics.
 
Hmm, guys, I feel like you didn't really answer my question. You became defensive and told me why you are unsatisfied with the system as it is - which is fair. But I really didn't mean to imply anything with my question, but wanted to know precisely what I asked. Let's just take education and leave the rest aside for a moment. Who is going to build a new school building or keep maintenance on an old one? Who is going to buy teaching materials and buy new ones when they become outdated? Who is going to hire the teachers and supervise them? Who is going to answer for parent's concerns and student's complaints? Who is going to create, revise and update the curriculum? And who is going to guarantee that schools are up to comparable standards across the country? How are you going to make sure that, everything considered, a kid from an LA ghetto will have access to the same level of education as a kid from a Minnesota suburb?
 
I thought I did, clearly government needs to run schools, but (at least in the political arena), the debate always comes down to "if you spend more money you care more" Government (in the case of the US, state government) needs to handle this. We should expect them to do better and be good stewards of the money they take from citizens. Right now, we spend a ton of money for some fairly poor results, throwing more money into the same system that has become bogged down with union rules, federal mandates, and various social experimnets really does us no good.
 
I don't know what things are like in the United States, but if it's anything like here, then I suppose the real problem is the lack of attention given to the field of education. If I look at the agendas of individuals or parties, I always get the feeling that education is on the second or third tier of their interest. For instance, I just looked up some of Ron Paul's views, and found that he seems to have spent an enormous amount of time talking about liberty, big government, taxes, foreign policy, defence, drugs and so forth, and education for eample almost disappears in the mass; health care is only adressed, or so it seems, because it is such an important topic for Obama and Clinton. I think the underlying problem is one of perspective for the importance of the individual fields. You could say that the attitude is that if enough money is pumped into a particular department, people will shut up about it. So for that matter, I agree with you, but I don't think there will ever be a significant change for the better in a topic such as education if it continues to be treated as of second-rate importance.
 
That is exacly right. Education should be our number one expense as a nation, but it keeps getting dropped down the scale. I remember all the talk of how Lottery was going to fund education, but the money bucket kept getting 'borrowed' from to pay for other things. Just last year, I belive, you could drive by many schools in my neck of the woods (Western Illinois) with a dollar figure designating what the state owed the school (I believe out district was owed around $275k.)

I hope I didnt sound defensive, that wasn't my intent. What I do believe is that 'we the people' should be paying for our education and our materials. Unfortunately 'we the people' seem to find other things to spend our money on.
 
Wästed The Great said:
That is exacly right. Education should be our number one expense as a nation, but it keeps getting dropped down the scale.
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I don't think there's anything I could agree more on. Without proper education, nothing else would work - including health care. Privatised or not, health care is not going to be worth anything if the doctors have had a bad education. Education isn't just primary and secondary schools, it goes up to college and university levels. And having been a university student for aeons now, I can tell you, there's a lot that can go wrong there.
 
Wait until you get into the age when your body starts breaking down, or you are forced to take care of your aging parents.
How about when your wife gets cancer or your kid gets a brain injury?
The smartest doctors in the world aren't going to matter if you can't afford them or they don't have the proper equipment or drugs to treat you with.
I have found one of the problems tied with the education world (here anyway) - and this feeds into some of Bearfan's points - is that it believes it should be rewarded simply for being knowledgeable, rather than for the practical application of that knowledge. For example, it rewards teachers on how much they know, not on how well they teach.
Public education is hugely important, but it should for the betterment of society, not self-improvement projects for the academic elite.
And the same philosophy should hold true for pretty well anything that is publicly funded.
That's why in my book health care is clearly number one.
 
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