Quote:
Originally Posted by Hasbinbad
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You're smart until your last sentence.
I guess everyone is going to have a different line, but since you quoted me, my line is right about here (in approximate order of importance):
Shelter. Food. Medicine (really great healthcare for all people). Defense (actual defense, not "defense" as a euphemism for being a colonial empire). Education (preschool-doctorate). Infrastructure (better roads, highways, bridges, public transit, emergency services [police, fire, ems, disaster response], better water & power systems). Public works & entertainment (monuments, spectacles [4th of July, NYE], speeches & debates).
I'm probably forgetting something, but that's the jist.
Most of these are things that #1 we already provide in some form, or at least purport to provide, and that #2 are provided in countries with higher (flatter) taxes on the rich, which are still somehow able to provide enough incentives to corporations to stay there despite the higher taxes (defeating the argument which states that the money will run if taxes are raised).
I'm not proposing to put Shaquiniquila - mother of 9 children - up at The Ritz. I agree that it should be uncomfortable to ask for assistance. I agree that the current systems in this country have failed miserably. That is no fucking excuse for letting people go hungry but for the charity of strangers. Those people shouldn't have to beg on the streets while the fat cats cruise their helipad-equipped yachts on Uncle Sam's dime.
That shit is fucking ridiculous. We hook the banks up with billions, and that's cool, but when it comes to obtaining enough money to scrape by, you bitches wanna cry foul. It's cool to throw hundreds of billions of dollars on the military so that they can go do some shit in some other country, but it's near-impossible for someone who has worked their entire life in the trades and has ended up actually disabled and poor in this country to get any assistance for being really disabled or really being poor. I know lots of stories like that, and I'm sure if you think about it you do too.
I'm not talking about trailer trash freeloaders or EBT trading crackheads. They actually have an easier time of it because there are so many private outreach programs set up for abused women etc. to supplement the shitty government program.
No private outreach programs set up for 45 year old blue collar guys without the ability to work.
Meanwhile the CEO's apply their cost/benefit analysis to whether or not to squeeze every dime out of the customer through engineered faults (WHY THE FUCK AREN'T CELL PHONES WATERPROOF???) and planned obsolescence or actually try to provide a good product that will last. They decide fuck you, put some colored lights on it, you'll buy it anyway.
..and thus the people take the streets.
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I don't disagree with 99% of what you say. I'd nitpick your idea of defense, because I do believe that the US plays a dominant (and massively advantageous) role within world politics as a unipolar power with prohibitive military might, but let's not get into that.
The fact is that the government already has more than enough money to achieve everything you've stated. Read your complaints -- they're almost all government-focused. Like I just posted above, we already spend more per-citizen on health care than any other nation in the world. We could feed every homeless person in America 3 meals a day every day for less than what we spent on foreign aid to Egypt this year. It's not about the revenue. It's about the priorities. Whether you see them as representative of their constituencies or not, the leaders in government do not particularly care about infrastructure or public works. Education? Meh -- that's what the internet is for. Shelter for the impoverished? Not a huge concern. In fairness, food they do provide. If you're starving, you're not using the public funds and programs at your disposal. You may not be well-fed, but you won't starve to death. But the point is that more taxes are not going to magically fix this. Do you realize how much our government spends? We literally are so deep in debt that if you had spent $1 million every single day since Jesus was born, you wouldn't be as deep in debt as the United States. They're not strapped for cash. They just genuinely don't care all that much. There are a million things they're trying to juggle and pursue, and in the grand scheme of things, they don't care how well the bridges hold up, or whether homeless people have a place to sleep every night, or whether your kid knows that dinosaurs didn't build the pyramids.