A Dream Country?

[ugonow]

"It has among the lowest tax burdens of any major country: fewer than 2 percent of the people pay any taxes. Government is limited, so that burdensome regulations never kill jobs.

This society embraces traditional religious values and a conservative sensibility. Nobody minds school prayer, same-sex marriage isn’t imaginable, and criminals are never coddled.

The budget priority is a strong military, the nation’s most respected institution. When generals decide on a policy for, say, Afghanistan, politicians defer to them. Citizens are deeply patriotic, and nobody burns flags. "

[ugonow]

This Utopia? Pakistan.www.nytimes.com/2011/06/05/opinion/05kristof.html

[ugonow]

" I spend a fair amount of time reporting in developing countries, from Congo to Colombia. They’re typically characterized by minimal taxes, high levels of inequality, free-wheeling businesses and high military expenditures. Any of that ring a bell?

In Latin American, African or Asian countries, I sometimes see shiny tanks and fighter aircraft — but schools that have trouble paying teachers. Sound familiar? And the upshot is societies that are quasi-feudal, stratified by social class, held back by a limited sense of common purpose.

Maybe that’s why the growing inequality in America pains me so. The wealthiest 1 percent of Americans already have a greater net worth than the bottom 90 percent, based on Federal Reserve data. Yet two-thirds of the proposed Republican budget cuts would harm low- and moderate-income families, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

For a country that prides itself on social mobility, where higher education has been a traditional escalator to a better life, cutbacks in access to college are a scandal. G. Jeremiah Ryan, the president of Bergen Community College in New Jersey, tells me that when the college was set up in 1965, two-thirds of the cost of running it was supposed to be covered by state and local governments, and one-third by students. The reality today, Dr. Ryan says, is that students bear 78 percent of the cost.

In fairness to Pakistan and Congo, wealthy people in such countries manage to live surprisingly comfortably. Instead of financing education with taxes, these feudal elites send their children to elite private schools. Instead of financing a reliable police force, they hire bodyguards. Instead of supporting a modern health care system for their nation, they fly to hospitals in London.

You can tell the extreme cases by the hum of diesel generators at night. Instead of paying taxes for a reliable electrical grid, each wealthy family installs its own powerful generator to run the lights and air-conditioning. It’s noisy and stinks, but at least you don’t have to pay for the poor.

I’ve always made fun of these countries, but now I see echoes of that pattern of privatization of public services in America. Police budgets are being cut, but the wealthy take refuge in gated communities with private security guards. Their children are spared the impact of budget cuts at public schools and state universities because they attend private institutions.

Mass transit is underfinanced; after all, Mercedes-Benzes and private jets are much more practical, no? And maybe the most striking push for reversal of historical trends is the Republican plan to dismantle Medicare as a universal health care program for the elderly.

There’s even an echo of the electrical generator problem. More and more affluent homes in the suburbs are buying electrical generators to use when the power fails."

[billisonboard]

[Deleted]

Liberals start almost every social program to protect & save that mythical baby. Yet they are all for cutting defense spending that saves American service men & women's lives. Seems odd to me. I can't figure out if they love babies (if that were true why would they be pro choice) or just hate adults.

Then there's the almost complete lack of understanding of how America works. It's based on a person being able to work hard & make something of themselves. They might even become rich, the sky is the limit. It's all based off of each individual having free choice to do what they want & to reap the rewards that they have earned. Liberals want to throw that away & create a society where the successful are taxed for being successful & those taxes go to someone that is a failure. They don't care if that person is a failure because of not trying, mismanagement of funds, or any reason that a person can think of to become a failure. Reward bad & punish good. I don't get that either.

There's a lot more that I don't understand about them. I guess the biggest thing is how they keep coming up with terrible programs that are poorly conceived & they never address the problems with them. It's like the program is the aim & once that's achieved they move on to the next poorly conceived program with out ever facing up to failure after failure. Reminds me of a spoiled little kid who's parents let him get away with anything because he's basically good (much as they look at their programs as basically good). Well that kid might turn out ok in the end or he might cut people up & eat them. Either way he's basically good.

My dream country is what we used to have (for the most part). Not this socialist garbage that we are headed into.