| rocketpig said: Defense spending serves many purposes. It provides high-quality jobs and keeps America at the forefront of technology through its innovations. It, of course, also provides defense of the nation. It's a bad comparison to social programs, which provide little or no tangible benefit to the economy and often heavily detract from it. Of course, this is excluding wars, but that's a different subject altogether. Your second paragraph all boils down to opinion. Where you see a government institution, I often see the possibility of a lightly regulated private institution doing the same work for less. It's not always possible to contract work to privateers but in many cases, real savings could be found if you removed the "government tax" overhead. It's a difference in principles and I'll leave it at that. No offense but I don't feel the third paragraph is worth responding to. All of those problems could be fixed with a better education system, which is held back from making progress by those bastards in the Teacher's Union and the education infrastructure at large. Don't get me started on them. Your fourth paragraph is related to the third. No, not all government spending is bad. People fall down and need help getting back up. How much help is where our opinions are sure to differ. Also, comparing business to government is downright wrong. In most cases, if a business fails, they are acquired or go under and are supplanted by a more efficient model. If a government system fails, they generally throw more money at it in hopes of the ship righting itself. There is little or no benefit for a government employee to work harder or save money. They simply don't give a shit and are virtually assured a long-lasting job provided they don't do anything insanely stupid like rape a farm animal. |
Regarding defense spending, these days it seems more like offense spending. I'm all for us spending what's necessary to defend ourselves, but it's not like you can pretend to not understand why many of us would want to move as far away from Bush's foreign policy and "defense" expenditure as we possibly can.
I will agree that it's a difference in principles as well. Not much to say there.
And I take no offense that you won't respond to that paragraph :)
You are right that there are some problems with government employment. There are little to no incentives to work harder or save on expenses and there really should be. I don't know why we can't turn government jobs into more dynamic positions with performance and savings incentives (wait, yes I do... because our leadership sucks, both Dem and Repub). That is the one best argument I feel you have for private institutions to handle what should be government jobs, and an area that really needs to be changed. Maybe I'm optimistic in believing that one day we'll get it right.
|
|
|
