As liberals, we MUST destroy the myth of "small government"

We will never have "small government" that pipe dream promoted by Conservatives unless they are successful in their corrupt plans to sell off part and parcel the assets and services that are rightfully governmental to their lowest bidding friends, co-horts and co-conspirators.

Our tax dollars are currently used to fund misbegotten wars and enrich the connected at every turn. I am not advocating more taxes, just better use of the money we already pay. I would like to get something more tangible than constant warfare for my dollar

My friends, what we need is Big Government. Our fiscal resources are enormous and in the gazillions of dollars every year. They are just misdirected every year. Americans SHOULD be living in crime-free, environmentally friendly towns and cities with great mass transit systems, beautiful and affordable housing and fantastic public education. We should have six times the schools and 10 times the health care and long term care facilities, staffed by your fellow Americans and you and your family who are making salaries that make the rest of the world green with envy. Our children should know that public scholarships to University are available to every academically qualified student. Alternately, vocational and trades schools also have scholarships. Every American should have great, free, accessible Universal health.

Now, would you rather fund that vision or 20 years in Iraq?

They would rather turn over control of their lives to corporations.

...or "the commons" in "Thinking Points." You can find the book online here:

http://www.rockridgenation.org

NGU.

n/t

...there were high paying jobs created for senator's and congressman's kids and/or nieces and nephews. There was actually once a government office where people counted the number of chips in different chocolate chip cookies.

really. :crazy:

It's called the "Pentagon Catalog" and it's about all the $400 hammers, $1500 ashtrays and $2000 nuts and bolts. That's in 80's dollars too. If you're lucky you can get a used book with the free $2,043 nut attached to it. In this case it was the defense contractors paying back said senators and congressmen by hiring their relatives to work in their plants picking up screws and bolts that fell on the floor. But how do you justify paying someone $30k a year (again in 80's $) to pick up a $0.05 screw? Make the screws cost $2000 plus instead.

The whole "small government" mantra (first pushed hard by Reagan) was just an expression of the really really big money people (think the remnants of Robber Baron families) and their desire to make government so ineffective that they could do whatever they wanted, whenever and wherever they wanted without any legal constraints.

It is the world where lawyers exist to find loopholes and grease lawmakers, where everything can be bought and nothing nothing is "public", or "national".

Not a school or a road or a cop or a fireman or an army or a park or a library or a hope should exist that doesn't have a dollar sign on it.

They object to taxes so violently because taxes force the thieves to spread the booty around a little. The sad thing is that they have gotten millions of people who rely on those very things to echo the mantra, "no more taxes - it's our money". The hyper-rich would hoard all goods and services for their own use exclusively.

When sir Ronny was king, a term emerged as companies jettisoned employees. It was called downsizing. To soften the blow of this term, it became right-sizing.

The exact same should used in determining the size of the Government. It should be right sized based on the current conditions. It is all about finding out what works and keeping it, and finding out what doesn't work, and getting rid of it.

The right has the same answers every time. They apply the same solution to every situation (which as we know has a horrible track record). The left tends to analyze the situation, and come up with a plan that is appropriate for the situation.

The Government needs to be right sized. Find the programs that work, and maximize their effect. Find the programs that don't work and either fix them or eliminate them.

Cheers
Drifter

Recently I had a business meeting with a rich Repugnican...Southern California variety. Somehow the discussion got to government taxing and regulation and he let go with the typic right wing drivel about how the Democrats are now going to tax and spend this country into oblivion and regulate everything to hell. In the past, I would have swallowed and let the dude rant on so I could take some of his cash...but now I don't care...I let him have it.

First, I asked him how well the booshie regime is doing in making government smaller? Then I asked him about the defecits and how much money we've borrowed from China in recent years. He started with the "but...but...but"...I kept on...asking him if the Repugnicans were in favor of "smaller government", there is now this clusterfuck knowns as the Department of Homeland Security and that no department has been shut down during the past 6 years...so what smaller government?

He then tried the old diversionary trick of "just you wait, the Democrats will raise your taxes...run and hide". I asked him how his property taxes had been in recent years and he bitched how they had gone way up. I asked him if he knew why...and helped answer it for him by mentioning how he was paying locally for many service the federal government used to assist with that now he's paying the full freight on. Also that the defecits have destroyed the value of the dollar and with it many of the very assets he owns that are becoming less valuable as the dollar fades into the Euro. That's when I first starting hearing the crickets. He had no come back.

Then I asked him if he had any clue how much money we've wasted on Iraq...and not on the military...but on no-bid contracts that some of his country club buddies probably got a piece of and he didn't. He was ready to move onto other business...

There's a huge bill to be paid for the greed and corruption of the past 6 years...and it's gonna be as major an issue for the next President as getting our troops out of Iraq will be.

...or the corporations will rule us. Easy choice.

I think that's important to stress. Maybe Reagan was ushered in by the "proto neocons" to cripple our country.

the Warfare State and it's roots stretch back to Harry Truman and the Militarizing of every aspect of American Life. The DoD last year received 900 billion, when all the emergency Support the Troops hysterics were applied.

I don't like it. The problem is with who controls Government and who controls you. But the real issue is the Government has never been controlled by the people and it isn't today.

Originally rules were set into place to ensure the Plutocratic Rulers made the decisions. They picked the Senators and Presidents, they restricted women, the poor, the non-landholders and African-Americans from voting up into the 20th century.

Today they have devised more subtle means of control than the direct use of violence to exclude voters.

First make running for office a task which can only be handled by the extremely wealthy. That will get the right type of person running for office.

Then make money=political speech that will allow right type of politician get the right type of advice.

Ensure you and a small cadre of the proper people are the controllers of the Media, this will keep the 4th Estate from ruining the message.

Use as many excluded middles attacks as can be devised to divide potential allies in the lesser classes. Have returning veterans be angry with each other and not the Masters of war who sent them into war. Make sure those working for peace are called traitors and are emboldening the enemy. And whatever other methods which can be devised to divide people using the Love it or Leave it attack.

So, what you really are asking for is a proper use of american tax dollars by politicians who represent your values. Where are they? Is Hillary one of them? She voted for War. Her husband used war on numerous occasions. Edwards voted for war. Kerry and Teddy voted for war in 2002 and back in 1990. Where is the accountability for those Democrats who consistently vote for war? And of course 99% of the blood-soaked Republicans have voted for war at every turn.

What I think is many have allowed themselves to ignore the recent war votes because no encounter proved very difficult (except for the few paltry lives of the lesser humans who died) until now. Now Democrats are seeing what the cost of supporting any old politician who places a D after his name gets them.

It gets them the Warfare State.

It's just something I've been thinking about a lot. I am pretty much a traditional liberal progressive who has believed that we need big government and big trade unions to offset the power of the corporate sector. That was basically the liberal consensus since the New Deal.

The problem is that the corporate sector and the militarists have "captured" big government and if there is no way to get it back, I really don't know what the progressive position should be. Right now, big government hands massive subisidies and out right graft to big pharma, the uber rich, Halliburton, arms manufacturers. They control the regulatory process, and they've bribed all our representatives.

I've come to believe we on the left need to starve the beast as well -- particularly starve the $400 billion plus military budget, somehow. It may be inevitable when we have a brush with national bankruptcy, but we've got to get military spending below the $75 billion range at the most. Problem is that if we "starve the beast" from the left, we are at the mercy of the corporate sector.

Obviously, the best thing that could happen is a citizen's coup through real elections and we take back big government and make it work. It's just that I'm becoming skeptical that we can.

but I really think there is a role for government.If we don't have an effective government then we really are at the mercy of the corporatists and the world of RoboCop.

I just wish people (in general, not you) would realize that we citizens are just being ripped off beyond belief. That is really the issue. Sure, people in Europe pay astronomical taxes, but at least they get healthcare and education. We pay a little less but get almost nothing. No security, no health, poor education, no mass transit. We just fund the wars the world over.

I'm all for a citizen's coup through real elections. I would be happy to vote out almost every incumbent if there were a viable candidate running. They have all let us down.

Unfortunately, most of the people would rather have "leaders" who will allegedly act in their interests, but seldom do. As a nation, we are adept at shunning our responsibilities by aligning ourselves with this or that party, and because "our" party wins, we can now delude ourselves into thinking that everything is going to be just hunky-dunky, and our part in "our" government is now over.

It is our responsibility never to "trust" government and those that run it no matter how benevolent or "liberal" they might claim to be. Every politician will tell the voters that he's working in their best interests. A statement that I put in the same category as "Spectacular Sale on Chrome Tomato Crushers".

The Cons say they want small government. If you look at how they practice it, it means privatization of services to benefit their supporters while actually expanding the size of government. The Brookings Institute has done a number of studies on the size of government and has found that the number of contractors performing services has greatly expanded. The problem with contractors is that there is less oversight as to how well they perform the services than with direct government employees. We've had horror stories here in Florida with contractors letting children fall through the cracks under child protective services. The contractors usually end up doing a poorer job and costing us more.

The liberal answer has to be efficient government. To me this means streamlining management layers, employing technology to increase productivity, reducing unnecessary red tape, eliminating duplication of services, eliminating unnecessary pork projects (mostly defense), and sometimes increasing government employment in low level positions. The problem with the Repug version of small government is that in addition to expanding privatization, they also expand top level positions. The only expansion that we really need is the bottom level positions. We need more social workers not more bureaucrats.

The best program in creating efficient government, IMHO, was the Reinventing Government initiative under Clinton. Gore was in charge of it and it helped reduce government inefficiencies more than any rhetoric from Raygun, Bush 1.0 or 2.0. I'd love for our Democratic candidates to fully embrace a concept of efficient government as a major part of their platform.

get, and i am in favor of having as small a govt as possible. it's all a matter of what the govt does, not its size, that is at issue.

was idiotic. The government should be as it has to be to accomplishment the goals we expect of it. Deciding on those priorities is up to the people through their elected representatives.

and, to restate my earlier view, I think "small" government is attractive to people who see themselves as getting little to no tangible benefits from the government they fund. Hey, I'm in that group too.

Is it too much for me to expect:

food safety- (our government is the one that FORBIDS a small beef producer to voluntarily and at their own cost test for mad cow)

affordable drugs (like every other country BUT us and yet we somehow believe the ridiculous line by the drug companies that the dollars are going to research and development when we all know the dollars are going to:profit, marketing, payoffs and giant salaries of the the top tier - and that somehow the rest of the world doesn't have to shoulder that part of the burden because their governments make sure that they don't.)

decent mass transit -(like every major city in Europe)

health care - access to and that the lack thereof won't drive me into bankruptcy

??????????????????????????????????????????????????????????

I hear what your saying, but it is getting damn hard to tell the good guys from the fascists(corporatists)

If we sell (or long-term lease) OUR assests for some short term gain, we will have to buy them back from the corporations. Why the hell are Dem governors proposing such extreme corporatist BS?

I don't give a shit how big it has to be to do that job right. But, then, I'm hardly conservative.