Friar Bijou wrote:
Yes, I get your position. It's "money is more important than people".
No. It's "the closer the people making spending choices are to the people they are spending the money on, the better those choices will be, and the more people you will help with the same amount of money". It's about smarter use of resources. And hey. Giving the people in a local geographic area the power to make their own decisions with their own money rather than having it circle around through a vast number of layers of government before coming back to them, often with strings attached that don't make sense.
So, kinda the opposite of what you think. It's making the people more important than the money. Unless you honestly think that taking money from people and then making them dance to your tune in order to get it back somehow makes them more important in that scheme. Seems like the primary virtue of the top down system is to use people's money to control them. The lower level of government you use for your social programs, the more "the people" matter, and the less "the money" does. I just think you have it backwards.
Quote:
Robbing from Peter to pay Paul is fiscally unsound.
Except that in this case, what we're doing is giving Peter less money so that we can give Paul more, without increasing the total amount of money handed out. Which, if you're paying attention, is perfectly fiscally sound. You may not like the new distribution of spending, but it's not unsound from a fiscal perspective.
Quote:
You clearly don't really understand traditional GOP fiscal theory.
Really? Maybe you can expound upon what you think it is? Because
from what I'm reading, it sure looks exactly like what I've been talking about. Federal spending should be limited to what the constitution requires. Should be done only if necessary. Yup. Looks like I've got it nailed perfectly.
What on earth do *you* think GOP fiscal policy is about?
Quote:
Not "unfunded"...improperly funded.
Care to elaborate? They were funded the same way everything else is. Congress passed legislation and funded it. How do you think things get funded?
Quote:
gbaji wrote:
bijou wrote:
]So rich local areas get great schools and poor ones get crap schools with no money sharing from the first to the second because...liberty? Is liberty the right answer?
Um... That's how it is right now.
Not where I live.
Oh. Just to clarify. When I said "that's how it is right now", I was referring to great schools in the rich areas and crap schools in the poor areas
despite a massive amount of money sharing from the first to the second. We already do that sharing and it doesn't change the fact that rich areas have good schools, and poor areas have terrible ones.
What? There's a lot of things that liberals and conservatives disagree on, but the fact that our poor inner city schools are terrible places to get an education is not one of them. We disagree on the cause and the best solutions, but not the problem itself. Despite much greater tax dollars flowing to those poor schools, they still under perform. Massively. That's the point I'm making. We currently shift a large volume of tax dollars from the rich neighborhoods into the poor, and it doesn't seem to make any difference. At some point, one kinda should conclude that this isn't working and try something else. But the Left's solution is to just transfer more and more money, hoping that maybe this time, it'll work.
Conservatives are the only one's talking about actual public education reform. But because we identify the monolithic public school system itself as part of the problem, and that system supports and maintains the very powerful teachers unions, and the Democrats are tied strongly to said unions, the Left cannot consider those solutions at all. Thus, they stick to the "spend more money" approach. Which hasn't worked so far, and shows no sign of doing so in the future. But hey. They're the intelligent, educated, free thinkers, right?
Oh wait. Weren't we talking about government spending being influenced by special interests and industries? Well, there's one right there. What a surprise!
Quote:
gbaji wrote:
So yeah. Liberty. When you give people the power to make their own choices and then hold them responsible for those choices, they tend to actually make better choices than when they are forced to do what some other authority thinks is best.
Unless that choice is abortion, then interference from authority is justified.
You play that one note too many times and the string will break. Is that really your only response: But... But... Abortion!!!
You know what other liberties we're ok with infringing? Theft. Rape. Murder. Urinating in the city drinking water. Removing the tags from mattresses. You know, things that adversely affect other people (ok, not sure about the mattress thing, but you get the point). It's almost like there's a consistent pattern here. There is a massive difference between legislating the things people are not allowed to do, and legislating the things people
must do.
Quote:
gbaji wrote:
I'm not sure what sort of conspiracy theory you're spinning now, but do you honestly think those factors and forces are any less present under any other administration
I'll give you a few minutes (or hours or days) to take a look at the staffs of all US GOP presidents going back to Nixon ans see if a few faces keep reappearing. I'll wait.
Why not look at the staffs for the Dem presidents as well? You'll find the same pattern. I'm not sure what your point is here. I fully agree that where there is government money, there will be private industries (both for profit and not) that will attempt to use that money for their own benefit. This is the same whether it's a defense contractor, or a medical device manufacturer, a union, or a community organization. They all play the same game of taking money from various sources and using that money to influence government actions in ways that they want.
My point is that you (and many other people) obsess over this in just one area: Military spending. But you ignore that it is present in everything that government is involved in. Every Thing. So the best way to minimize this is the limit government spending to just those things it must do. Which gets us to the ironic issue of folks opposing federal military spending (which is something that the federal government must do), while supporting things like the ACA. And doing so with the whole "military industrial complex" argument. Um... That can't be your only argument. If it is, then you lose.
That undue influence argument is a great argument for exactly what we conservatives are arguing for: Limited government. But limited government means limiting it to just the things it has to do. It has to maintain a military. It does *not* have to fund public education, or health, or housing, or transportation. None of those things need to be done at the federal level. Certainly not to the degree of micromanagement that we currently do.
Quote:
gbaji wrote:
To be fair, we could also talk about his decision not to topple Iraq at the time. But that's a whole topic of itself..
Since everything else followed, it kind of is the topic.
Ok. But at the time that decision was made, no one knew that the cease fire would not be resolved for more than a decade. No one knew that a no-fly zone would be established as part of that unending cease fire. No one knew that this would be maintained via troops stationed in SA. No one knew that this guy named OBL would be angered by this to the point of organizing terrorist attacks on the US. And no one knew that this would culminate in 3000 lives lost on US soil 10 years later. It was only as time went by that these unknowns became known. Each one was a signpost, which could have been read, and to which adjustments could have been made to our course. But each one was ignored, which lead to the result of 9/11.
To blame the guy who made the first decision while absolving the guy who made all the ones after that is kinda silly. It's like blaming your drunk driving accident on your parents teaching you to drive. Yeah. I suppose technically, if you'd never learned to drive, you wouldn't have purchased a car, would not have been driving that car years later while drunk, and wouldn't have caused an accident. But I think we should place the bulk of the blame on the later decisions, and not the former.
The larger point here is that the interview of OBL occurred in
1998. Three years before 9/11. Three Years (and he actually wrote his first fatwa in 1996, which contained the same information, for those who bothered to read it at the time). OBL told us exactly why he was angry with us. He basically told us exactly what we could do to eliminate the threat. He was being interviewed because he was already an identified terrorist threat to the US, so this was not at all theoretical stuff. Did the Clinton administration do anything at all? No. So yeah. I'm sorry, but I place the massive portion of blame for 9/11 squarely where it belongs: On the head of Bill Clinton.
Edited, Jun 7th 2016 7:35pm by gbaji