Answer to all those Republicans advocating cutting taxes [View All]

and cutting services.

You don't get something for nothing. Either you cut services or you cut taxes. People come together in government to solve problems that affect the community and to obtain services that they can not afford by themselves.

You benefit from entitlements more than you are willing to acknowledge. Government support for the mortgage industry makes it possible for someone making 30K even in Oceanside, CA to aspire to owning a house someday. Countries that do not support their mortgage industry do not have high rates of home ownership. In other countries, people pay for their house in cash -- their are no mortgages. Remember about 1/3 of this country are not homeowners and never will be. All these renters will be helping you out when you buy your house. You are planning on owning a home someday, arent you? Even if it's not in CA, you are probably going to buy a house somewhere.

Your college education was an entitlement paid with the help of many people who will never go to college. Only 42% of the people in the US have a college degree. There are a lot of people who paid for your school loans and grants as well as all the state and federal funding for community colleges and universities.

So you've got yours and you don't want other people to get theirs. Remember this is a democracy and you are in the minority of people who use these above benefits. So in order to give you yours you must convince most other people who aren't getting any of this to pay for it without getting anything from the government. It's an awfully hard sell. That's why there are entitlement programs.

I question your motives in cutting entitlement programs. I find much of this is really closet racism. In your mind, the beneficieries (sp) of these programs are poor brown-skinned people who are trying to get over on the rest of us. These people are cheating the system. The entitlement programs are mostly frauds to help non-white cheaters. Unfortunately, the facts are quite different -- nationwide, welfare recipients are poor white women with children. But you do not wish to deprive poor white women with kids -- you really want to get at the non-whites. You want poor non-whites to pay for middle class and corporate entitlements without getting a slice of the pie.

Bush and his cronies screwed this state. Davis was left holding the bag. Bush is not helping out the states by sending federal money like every administration has (both republicans and democratic) during times of recession in order to help states balance their budget.

So you don't want to raise taxes. Good. Cut services. There's not much to cut from the government these days. (BTW, you obviously have no qualms with RIFS during times of high unemployment. Adding government workers to the bread lines doesn't bother you in the slightest. There are no jobs for those who get RIF'd. ) We are cutting programs.

Unemployment will rise in the next couple years. The Bush tax cuts are set to go into effect in '05 and '06. More layoffs of government workers and government contractors will occur without any increase in industry employment to help soak them up. Manufacturing and software going overseas regardless of the tax burden. We can't give enough tax breaks to compensate for an 80% cost advantage. As a result, government revenue is set to further decrease.

Somehow the budget gap must be closed. The solution is unfortunately the worst of both worlds: increased taxes and decreased services. The average American is not willing to face this. He also does not want to live like TX or Mississippi -- low tax, low service states. It'll be interesting to watch the cutting of middle class services under Arnold and people's reaction to this when they realize that even an extra 5-10K decrease in taxes will not allow them to purchase the services they are accustomed to on the free market. My fiance and I calculated that it would take us a 300K income in PA to totally "privatize" and have the same middle class benefits that we took for granted growing up.