Some may choose to accept them but they will have to swallow them as lies.

The rest of us, and thank heavens the internet, know better and are willing to call a lie a lie.

There is no logic in making the people pay for the education that they are told growing up that they will not be successful without, especially when the cost of that education is spiraling so far out of control that fully 2/3 of the population can’t even consider going to college, and those that do are saddled with so much debt for so long that saving for their kid’s college is impossible, thus continuing the cycle.

There are only two options for most in this society when it comes to college – either don’t go to college, get a crappy job, and stay poor forever, or go to college, get a decent job that doesn’t really warrant the enormous cost to get the required degree, stay poor for at least 10 years, and then be moderately less poor forever.

FREE COLLEGE. A successful and self-governing populace is an educated populace. An uneduated, stupid, or ignorant populace gives us a President who’s sole qualification for the job was that it seemed like he’s be a fun drinking buddy.

So, those who want the govt to provide healthcare for people who can’t afford it are extremists? Or is it wanting the govt to take as limited a role as possible while providing that care that is extreme?

If you’re willing to go for public health care, then I may have misjudged you. And the other stuff.

But complaining about “big government” untethered to any specific proposal on its own merits and making slippery-slope arguments about Marxism just serves the extremist cause.

So you thought you were making that point by showing that the founding fathers didnt take the promote the general wellfare provision to institute Marxism? Ok so you had a point you just didnt come within miles of making a cogent argument in support of it and assumed we would read your mind and figure out what it was and how it didnt really have anything to DO with Marxism is that about it?

June 8th, 2009 at 4:46 am
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Sorry, Deb, I didn’t see anyone advocating Marxism. You’re off base with that one. You know, just advocating a few ideas that are similar to Marxism doesn’t necessarily make one a Marxist. ;)

If your only argument is where to draw the line then A) GOOD. That is exactly WHERE it should be lets despence with the idiotic mantra I keep seeing, though not so far from you, that any such promotion is unconstitutional. Actually that is EXACTLY the public discussion we should have where do we draw that line. And B) you do THAT argument no service by talking about giving everyone the same amount of land or any other such thinly veiled conflations of promotion with Marxism

Of course there was a point, deb. Don’t assume that because you missed it, it’s not there, bud. The point was that we need to be careful about giving the government too much power and becoming too dependent upon it. If we broaden the idea of promoting the general welfare too much, we may end up with a government that makes the Patriot Act and Telecom Immunity
<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<

So you thought you were making that point by showing that the founding fathers didnt take the promote the general wellfare provision to institute Marxism? Ok so you had a point you just didnt come within miles of making a cogent argument in support of it and assumed we would read your mind and figure out what it was and how it didnt really have anything to DO with Marxism is that about it?

If we broaden the idea of promoting the general welfare too much, we may end up with a government that makes the Patriot Act and Telecom Immunity seem libertarian.

I can agree with that, but my definition of “too much” is actually at the point where it becomes too much, where as your idea of “too much” is any. No matter what the tax rate was, I’ve never heard an economic conservative say that it had reached the appropriate level, or be willing to state what an appropriate level would be, with the sole exception of anti-tax extremists like Grover Norquist who flatly say 0% is appropriate.

You’re an absolutist – an extremist, in fact – at the opposite end of the scale but using the same ideological approach of the most die-hard Bolshevik.

Your economic utopia amounts to crumbling, useless infrastructure, an uneducated and unemployable populace, legal cheating and shoddy goods. Basically ecomic anarchy.

Ross Perot used to say “let’s run government like a business,” and y’all seemed to warm to that message. While the analogy isn’t perfect, no business ever managed to thrive by refusing to invest its money into improved operations. The same holds true for the American economic environment in which businesses operate.

June 8th, 2009 at 1:09 am
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Spoken like a true partisan; anyone who disagrees with you on something must be diametrically opposed on everything.

So, those who want the govt to provide healthcare for people who can’t afford it are extremists? Or is it wanting the govt to take as limited a role as possible while providing that care that is extreme? Perhaps extremist means wanting to help those who can’t afford college (help, not make a free ride an entitlement)? An extremist must be one who wants education programs to retrain those whose jobs are disappearing as opposed to wanting the govt to keep those jobs even though they aren’t profitable. And extremists would willingly accept a tax increase to reduce the debt? If that’s your idea of an extremist, I can live with that. ;)

If we broaden the idea of promoting the general welfare too much, we may end up with a government that makes the Patriot Act and Telecom Immunity seem libertarian.

I can agree with that, but my definition of “too much” is actually at the point where it becomes too much, where as your idea of “too much” is any. No matter what the tax rate was, I’ve never heard an economic conservative say that it had reached the appropriate level, or be willing to state what an appropriate level would be, with the sole exception of anti-tax extremists like Grover Norquist who flatly say 0% is appropriate.

You’re an absolutist – an extremist, in fact – at the opposite end of the scale but using the same ideological approach of the most die-hard Bolshevik.

Your economic utopia amounts to crumbling, useless infrastructure, an uneducated and unemployable populace, legal cheating and shoddy goods. Basically ecomic anarchy.

Ross Perot used to say “let’s run government like a business,” and y’all seemed to warm to that message. While the analogy isn’t perfect, no business ever managed to thrive by refusing to invest its money into improved operations. The same holds true for the American economic environment in which businesses operate.

June 7th, 2009 at 8:12 pm
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Of course there was a point, deb. Don’t assume that because you missed it, it’s not there, bud. The point was that we need to be careful about giving the government too much power and becoming too dependent upon it. If we broaden the idea of promoting the general welfare too much, we may end up with a government that makes the Patriot Act and Telecom Immunity seem libertarian. ;)

And it’s not McCain/Palin. Having a strong feeling or relief for 8 months is something else.

And, having written that preamble, did the founders immediately set up a system of redistributing income so that everyone had roughly the same amount of land, money, personal belongings, influence etc?
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>.

Was that strawman idiocy supposed to make a point? See anyone here advocating that everyone be given the same amount of land or make the same amount of money? Anyone here advocating Marxism because I dont see it. Still we HAVE promoted the general wellfare when we built the highway system established public education, rural electrification, provided police and fire depts. Social Security and so on. You had no point I hope you didnt really think you did.

According to the party of NO this must be their definition of socialism:

The Preamble to the United States Constitution

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence,[1] promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America. ”

Please take note, the only ‘provide for’ not beginning with a capital letter is common defense in the true form on the preamble. But…. there are many other copies online with common defense changed beginning with capital letters.

June 7th, 2009 at 3:17 pm
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And, having written that preamble, did the founders immediately set up a system of redistributing income so that everyone had roughly the same amount of land, money, personal belongings, influence etc?

June 7th, 2009 at 11:09 am
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“Why does this state-by-state disparity exist?”

Spending does lean red, but the reason is demographic, not political. Most federal money is spent on retirees, especially Social Security and Medicare. And of course the elderly have been moving south and west for years. Every large blue state saw its elderly population depleted during the late 1990s. As might be expected, red Florida and Arizona took in many of the elderly, but they weren’t alone. Almost every Mountain and Southern state expanded its elderly population.

Despite the red dominance of retirement destinations, the spending tilt toward red states isn’t extreme. The ten states where Uncle Sam spent the least money per capita in 2003 include three solid reds — Utah, Georgia and Indiana; two solid blues – New Jersey and Illinois; and five battleground states — one barely red, Nevada and four barely blue, New Hampshire, Michigan, Minnesota and Wisconsin.

Which brings us to the real culprit: high blue-state income taxes.
States with the highest incomes per capita — and they’re all solid blue — pay much higher federal taxes per capita. An income of $132,000 in San Francisco buys the same standard of living as $71,000 in Phoenix, but when it’s time to fill out the 1040, the San Francisco family pays 17.3 percent of its income in federal income taxes. That’s $22,812, almost triple the national median. Meanwhile, the Phoenix family pays $7,576, about $400 less than the median. A similar comparison could be drawn of Boston and Atlanta, not to mention New York and almost anywhere.

The income difference is illusory because it does not result in a higher standard of living, but the tax burden on that illusory income is real.
By forcing taxpayers who live in high-cost, high-salary areas up into higher tax brackets, the progressive income tax code not only redistributes income from the prosperous to the poor, but from middle-income blue to middle-income red. Part of this redistribution is caused by the Alternative Minimum Tax (AMT), once conceived by Democrats to catch rich tax avoiders, now rapidly eating away at the upper-middle class in blue states. Is this the progressivity that Democrats have been championing for years?

Actually, that works pretty well as a complete understanding of what the word “socialism” means to today’s plutocracy.

Ask our cousins in Europe or in Canada how they like their education and healthcare systems. Ask them how much they enjoy their vacations and living without the worry about how to send their children to college or how much that grandma’s hip replacement will cost.

Ask the workers there about how much better they feel about their CEO who only makes a few times as much money as the lowest-paid employee, compared to the US where a CEO can potentially make 1,000 times as much.

Socialism is only scary when you don’t really know what it is.

I would say this country has been headed toward unregulated free market capitalism since 1981. And that’s why the income disparity in this country has grown so much over the past thirty years.

In my day and probably most here, we memorized the Preamble to the Constitution in 8th grade and government classes were required later on in HS. It appears all of this has been dropped starting with the Reagan years and I suspect it was on purpose.