Quote:
Originally posted by Not Bob
Um, "a few thousand bucks [a year] isn't anything"? QED, Richie Rich. Sure, you ain't in Gatesian territory, but who is?
And you sound like my Marxist Uncle Bill, talking about the unchanging laws of historical determinism. The laws of economics, like those of history, only work in theory. Reality has a funny way of intruding. Just ask the quants, if you can find any of them still willing to call themselves that.
You are both missing my point and making it for me. We currently don't "do what we can" for the working class harmed by globalization. And Lou Dobbs, Pat Buchanan, and the AFL-CIO may well convince enough voters that the daddy state *can* do something about it, and they will be right -- the US can opt out of the global market. Will it make things worse overall? Almost certainly. But the currently unemployed textile worker in South Carolina probably won't think so. A job in a struggling economy is better than no job in a booming one. It doesn't matter that cheap goods are readily available at WalMart if you don't have any income.
You can have the last word.
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We're in agreement, Bob, and you don't even see it. You think we should give the workers money. So do I. And it appears you've come around finally and given up the idiot idea of tariffs and instead opaquely support some sort of govt intervention to give these people cash.
OK, now whwre do we get the cash? I say cut into defense and pork and strip away all but non-essential programs. You - I think - favor soaking the investor class (meaning almost everyone). But that's unnecessary pain for no good reason. We don't have to soak the investor class. We have the tax revenues to provide a stipend to workers displaced by globalization NOW if we'd allocate them properly.
But we don't. We waste money on excessive defense and huge pork projects. Maybe if liberals like you would stop praying to the govt and realize the solution is reallocating the money it receives instead of taking more from the middle and upper middle class we'd actually get somewhere.
It isn't me against you, Bob. It's you and me against the government.
For the 50th time, I have no problem giving to people who need. I just want the govt to cough it up before I do. Is that unreasonable? To ask DC to behave like a fiscally sound business? Do you really think I should give up more money while people like Ted Stevens spend like drunk sailors on bridges to nowhere? Make them accountable, then soak me for the shortfall. What you'd find is you'd wind up giving most of us tax refunds because if run like a business, our govt would have 5X the money it needs.
