God bless the Salvation Army Doc,my favorite is the Salesian Missions were they claim $10 for every dollar sent them as good as the Red Cross is the organization itself consumes 90% of the money sent them(When they paid Elizabeth Dole 100K a year to be its president-I can see were the organization itself is expensive) Caveat Emptor-Kevin
@Docnick
US military spending is higher than the NEXT 13 COUNTRIES COMBINED!!!
I’m kind of torn over this. While one half acknowledges that that military bases abroad seems to be a big wealth transference, another acknowledges that given the state the world is in, who else will do things like, provide safe passage through the shipping lanes for international commerce.
Who else will take on protection for the world at large from all sorts of influences. One thing I was particularly interested in hearing from Richard Clark (not Dick Clark) was his assessment on what was the biggest threat to our national security. He (the mighty terrorist expert) thinks it is climate change. Compare the hardships both past and potentially to come from climate change and he is probably right. What have we done to enlist the support of half of our citizenry ?
Not enough. A good part of the expense in the military is directly related to dealing with this phenom. Not much is said because it’s a political football. But regardless of what is said publicly, conservatives support this very expensive military endeavor.
So yes, there are reasons we can only suspect why a presence is necessary abroad. Climate change I’m sure is a valid one.
@irlandes well I googled Tenaha and what a disgrace. Where in the world is the Texas Attorney General or the Governor in all this? These guys should have been stomped on fast. Taking kids away for heavens sake? Intereting how household income has grown from $18K to $30K in the little dust bucket. Looks like there has been a settlement anyway.
Well Dagosa" Atlas Shrugged" we just as well implement the NWO,that Mr.Bush spoke about in 91,if we would have finished the job then,the world would be a bit better now I imagine.Lets scrap our old antiquidated ideas and let societys evolve on thier own a bit,stop dealing with the Devil,you will always get burned.
Mr.Powell and Mr.Swartzkoff ,had the right idea(but dont have an opinion on capitol hill(do as you are told)
I t came to me this morning ,during a period of wakefulness,we used to have one man(the Sheriff) who take care of the whole county,not so long ago,now we have a Sheriff and 17 deputies,whose main function is to compete against the private sector on the taxpayers expense and I can assure that we arent a bit safer,while we havent a Paramedic or salaried firefighter.
I think we have it backwards pay the ones who are really needed and have a volunteer deputy force(bet there would be plenty of takers)-Kevin
“if we had finished the job…”
I guess what “job” is the real question. Bush thought that killing more then 100,000 innocents and displacing over a million people turning them into wandering popers was enough revenge. To heck with who actually was responsible. Keep killing someone till the money runs out. I have as much sympathy for our military; Irag is Vietnam all over again at a slightly smaller scale. There are some good articles written that comparing the casualties between the two as startlingly similar when you discount the the advanced protection offered and look at the actual “battles” and survival rates of each. Iraq is more deadly…
I must disagree that we aren’t a bit safer. Your chances of dying at the hands of someone else from a gun is more a function of the color of your skin then whether you carry one. With all due respect, my good friend, my good Libertarean friend offers complaints but no solutions that haven’t been tried. Been there, done that and letting capitalism control our personal liberties has shown to be an abomination instead of a central government, democratically elected.
Volunteer police ? Like the volunteer fire department ? You can’t get good qualified volunteers to commit to the time necessary for proper training when they can actually support a family doing something else. You treat hiring people for public service the same way you do in business; you offer a good competitive salery, train the heck out of them and put the customers first. But that is where the similarity ends. The difference is, you do it non profit. This is where capitalism for jobs like fire and police protection fails and central govt. is necessary.
Shaking down motorists has been a great bonus for state, county and city police in Mississippi for years and lately their most lucrative clients have been Mexicans. We are assured by officials and the pollyanna press that the problem is minor and only involves isolated individual officers, who are pursued and punished to the full extent of the law. A few of us are skeptical but most Mississippians are soothed to apathy by the local press and media that keeps assuring them that they live in “Mayberry South.” It seems outrageous to think that law enforcement can lure in qualified, ethical officers for $25,000 to work rotating shifts. This is the REDDEST of the Red states and the hard core conservatives that I most often meet would be content if they could live like they did in the “Good ole days,” when Jim Crow was in charge.
No Dag,I dont disagree with you.I think the turkey shoot was uneeded as was burying those Iraq troops in the trenches alive.What I meant was we should have taken Saddam and his wicked kids out and paid a visit to Tehran.And I was referring to our situation here in this area,when people work hard and are raised right they tend to be good citizens.(we simply dont need that many deputys here)
I meant there are enough meddling,nosy people around to do plenty of snooping(I also meant it facetiously).One thing I noticed while in prison there are a group of people that come there voluntarily everyday,I came to suspect that G Gordon Liddy was for the most part right.
We also are blessed around here with serious,caring people who work with the fire dept and rescue squad,heres a shout out for them.GOD BLESS! and by and large its a caring though sparsely populated community-Kevin
I guess what "job" is the real question. Bush thought that killing more then 100,000 innocents and displacing over a million people turning them into wandering popers was enough revenge.
There was a great bumper sticker years ago…
“Bush is making more enemies then we can kill!”
By being a military bully does NOT make our country safer. We are nothing but hypocrites. Our government didn’t invade Iraq for defense or any noble reason. There were no weapons of mass destruction. How many Americans were killed from American weapons that we furnished Iraq because Saddam was our friend. We knew back then he was a ruthless dictator…yet we supported him.
Irag is Vietnam all over again at a slightly smaller scale.
Being a Vietnam Veteran I’ve told many friends and coworkers that the Iraq war was EXACTLY like Vietnam. We had no reason being there. The war in Vietnam and Iraq has weakened our ability to defend ourselves. Sure our weapons have improved and our military has become more advanced…but we keep making new and more powerful enemies. We can’t keep making enemies. If we kept president Bush’s (I mean president Chaney) for the next 200 years it would be the US against the rest of the world. Our greatest strength is NOT our military might…but our relationships with other people and countries around the world.
I stand by my assertion that all levels of government are full of waste and corruption and I could post examples until the cows come home.
OK,I support you 100%-Kevin
I stand by my assertion that all levels of government are full of waste and corruption and I could post examples until the cows come home.
I also agree 100%…But I think it becomes less and less the closer to home you get. Our town in small enough that we don’t have a mayor or town council. Everything in the town is voted on. While there has been corruption…it’s much less then when I lived in NY where we left everything to the town council to vote for us (representative type of government).
But it also doesn’t mean that EVERYONE in government is corrupt. The system is corrupt. And the only way we can keep it in check is to question EVERYTHING. And vote the scums out of office.
Democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time. - Winston Churchill
Full of waste and corruption ? That happens when fewer then 52% of the voting public show up for elections. You want better govt ? Demand it. When corrupt polititions know they only have to convince 27% of the voting public to get into office, and we sit back and let them disenfranchise large numbers of voters because low turnouts favor them, you reap what you sow. Apathy does that. You feel you have poor representation ? Look in the mirror.
The countries with the most satisfaction in their political system, are those with the most active voting public. Demand "run off"elections so third party candidates actually have a chance and we get winners with more then 50% of the vote in a high turn out. Get off your duff and support those who actually support you.
Personally, I have found waste and corruption to be just as prevalent locally as on a national level.
While serving as a town council member we voted on everything also. Not a single month went by that I did not have to fight tooth and nail over wasteful spending (and in most cases outvoted) or doing something illegal or self-serving.
In one case the town was going to pay a lawyer 750 dollars and no one knew what for or worse; they didn’t even care. When I asked the lawyer on the phone what is was for he never could come up with an answer over a 3 month time frame. I stonewalled that bill for as long as I was in office and immediately after leaving office it got paid. Go figure.
Conversations with a few people in other towns led me to determine that we’re all being screwed by the same lawyers, consultants, and contractors.
As to voting on things, I found out after taking office that our city council had borrowed a substantial sum of money (and it’s illegal for a public body to borrow money) at 8.5% and parked it in an account where it was drawing something like 2% while it sat. Everyone was told the town “was making money on this” but the entire populace didn’t know about the 8.5%.
All of this is the norm.
On a local level, back in the 80s a whistleblower complaint led to an FBI investigation of county commissioners in OK. The state has 77 counties with 3 commissioners each for a total of 231. When the FBI was done, 180 sitting and recent out of offfice commissioners were indicted with a fair number going to prison; along with some suppliers. And that’s just the ones in which there was enough evidence to indict them.
The one who lives not too far down the road from me was pardoned by President Clinton on his way out of office.
On another, larger note a new story earlier this year stated that the Feds have lost 60 billion dollars in Iraq and quote, “will likely never be able to determine what happened to it”.
Unfortunately our county has a group of supervisors thet vote on everything for us and now it seems thier just intent on getting along real well with each other. The vote used to be 3-2 all the time with our supers dissenting from the the other supers on the other side of the mountain(I wish we could secede from the “west side” our requirements and needs are very different from the otherside/it used to be said that 90% of the county,paid for 10% of the countys water(good water is pretty scarce where I live)-Kevin
Personally, I have found waste and corruption to be just as prevalent locally as on a national level.
I’ve been on our towns budget committee for several years now. While there IS some town corruption…it’s no where near as what I’ve seen at the state level.
And our MAJOR fighting is fighting the businesses we do business with. Like the companies we’ve used for paving or plowing. While there is corruption…but we have a lot of systems in place to help keep that at a minimum.
I guess I’m just used to Minnesota where we have pretty good laws and procedures for public spending. A lot of the public ire I’ve seen is just plain a difference of opinion on what makes sense and not any kind of corruption. Such as is a road grader or truck and plow better? We did have one case where a surplus dump truck made it to a contractor without competitive bidding but the county attorney handled that. It’s all spelled out pretty clearly. Now there have been questions raised on bids when a local car dealer is $75 more than a dealer 20 miles away and really is not a significant difference and a case can be made for using a local dealer. The biggest problems are with minority owned or women owned real or shell companies under-bidding and then under-performing and screaming discrimination all the way. You try to help them comply with specs but its clear they either have no idea what you are talking about or have no intention of meeting specs. The state has over-sight on the county and city governments but one particular party has tried to gut the over-sight agencies at the state level. The same party gutted prison industries because they were cutting into local ma and pa operations. They’re gone now so we’ll see what happens.
In 1933 congress passed the Glass-Steagall act to prevent another great depression. The Act basically seperated home lending institutions from investment institutions. It was designed to prevent the type of unsupported highly-leveraged laons fro, polluting the lending industry.
In 1977, Congress passed the Consumer Reinvestment Act, basically mandating that lending institutions come up with ways to lend money to people who could not buy homes using conventional methods.
In 1979 Congress passed the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, which basically repealed the key provisions of the Glass-Steagall Act.
That opened the floodgates for lenders to offer low-doc loans, no-doc loans, ARMs, and countless other scemes to give away money, and to invest the revenue in high risk vehicles on the world market. “Bundling” and other devices were created to dilute the risk associated with the loans and sell them on the secondary market.
As it happens, in the late '70s, interest rates, inflation, and unemployment had all hit double digits creating a huge backlog of home buyers. When these three economic factors dropped to single digit levels in '81, a huge wave of buyers came through the market like a tsunami. There was cheap money readily available and all forms of creative financing. That tsunami drove demand well above supply and sucked the prices through the roof. Countless construction companies opened to jump on the gravy train, most highly leveraged with that easily obtainable money. Once the tsunami went through and demand dropped to more normal levels, the landscape became littered with highly leveraged construction that was no longer saleable at the inflated prices. Small contractors walked away from highly leveraged projects. Low demand and high supply caused the property values to sink below the loan balances, and small banks went bust.
The rest is history. The lesson here? Whenever the federal government messes in the marketplace to attenpt to manipulate market behaviors, they screw things up beyond imagination.
That’s my story and I’m stickin’ to it.
As regards “the cliff”, if we eliminated non-safety-net subsides to special interest groups, pork barrel projects approved to get political votes, the use of tax dollars to bailout favored blocks of voters, and givaways to unfriendly countries, I’ve no doubt the budget could be balanced. The pres doesn’t need an unlimited credit card. The problem isn’t lack of revenue, it’s far too great a level of unnecessary spending.
@Same…
I hear you. But the unlikely culprit that aided and abetted this situation was the low interest rates which forl years hid a failing economy. We are in a precarious situation now with the middle class still at risk. We have come full circle with home sales rising to Obstensively, get us out of a recession, still on the backs of many who still can’t afford it. Get the interests rates up while investing in people and infrastructure to force job creation. Get Wall Street’s strangle hold out of our daily lives and bring back the solvency and saving power to local banks.
We should at least be able to keep up with the cost of living with savings accounts. We should be able to make money with CDs. Unil that happens, the Madeoffs are still making off with our money.
We need a little wealth shifting…let’s all join hands and count. One, two, three…JUMP !
@Same…I agree completely about the damage that was done by repealing the Glass-Steagall Act. While it was not the only factor in the financial meltdown of 2007-08, it was surely one of the major factors.
And, here is an interesting factoid relating to this mistake.
Did you know that Phil Gramm, the author of the disasterous Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, was the chief economic advisor to Mitt Romney during his recent campaign? Many pundits believe that he would have wound up as Secretary of The Treasury if Romney had been elected.
Sort of makes you think…