VPILF!

[G.Irish]

That's just it. How much money have you given to charity this year? How much have you donated to public education? Have you donated to Planned Parenthood? Why not? What about Focus on the Family? Why not? What about people that can't take care of their families. Do we not all collectively benefit by raising the overall standard of living? Does capitalism require a huge gap between upper and lower classes?

You're opening up a lot of arguments along a lot of lines there. Clearly there are some government services that contribute to the overall health and wealth of the nation like education. But when you talk about 'people who can't take care of their families' you're starting to get into equality of ends. So you're basically saying no matter what value you contributed you will get the same as the guy who contributed little or no value.

If someone has a family that is too big for their job to support whose fault is that? Not saying children should have to suffer in that case but at the same time the government should not be enabling people to exceed their means.

What you want ideally is equality of opportunity. People who want to work their way with an education or come up with a genius business idea or whatever should be able to move upwards if they're good enough. What you don't want is a crippling tax structure that makes it difficult for anyone to make the climb, or a broken education system, or a country so weak in skilled industries that everyone is stuck doing menial jobs.

There are a lot of factors that have to be balanced when talking about what the government should be spending money on and conversely how high taxes should be. It's not a simple, "RAISE TAXES!" or "LOWER TAXES!" argument like politics in this country likes to reduce things to.

Personally I think both parties have their own form of the same specious populism. Republicans always say they are going to lower taxes but when they don't lower spending we end up with huge deficits like the one we have now. We've spent somewhere around $1 trillion on this phony war and we are going to have to pay for it sooner or later. Oh, but we're supposed to believe we can keep lowering taxes and pay for our debt. All of this spending into a black hole is what has turned the American dollar into the American peso.

Democrats on the other hand want to level the playing field or provide a free lunch for everybody. Sounds great but as Ginger would say it is a moral hazard to enable people to not get off their asses. And you can only turn the screws on rich people so much before the pressure starts getting shifted elsewhere. By not letting the market work sometimes you end up making the problem worse than it would have been if the market had been allowed to correct itself.

Just like a lot of things with this false dichotomy of the two parties you are gonna get screwed one way or another. It's just a matter of degrees.