Did you ever bother to check the figures for that, or are you just quoting another ditto-head?!
Look here to see where the real "lion's share" of the money goes, and how little feeds anything remotely like your assumptions.
http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/budget/fy2008/summarytables.html
Besides... if we got to choose between banana slug research and nukes in space, I think the former is far more worthwhile...
I was mixing sarcasm with facts here. Entitlement spending (Including Social Security) IS the largest part of the federal budget.
Not quite, as Social Security is not part of the federal budget! Check with the Congressional Budget Office and see for yerself.
But rather than just making an only semi-serious, pedantic point here, I still challenge your basic argument. Social Security could not be called a "lion's share", but it would be--just barely--a larger percentage of total revenues than security. The difference is truly tiny; even the bloody Heritage foundation can give you the right figures on that.
But the programme itself remains the most popular one in the history of this nation, and it is still shamefully stingy by the standards of the rest of the Western world. I think the system should be fundamentally reformed: but to offer more benefits, not less. Providing for basic economic security in old age is terribly important in preventing another runaway economic downturn.
have personal property rights
On this one, you're going to have to elaborate please.
Environmental laws an zoning laws mostly. They are often corrupted and abused to prevent property owners from doing anything on thier own property (building or improving it) by using the excuse that they're damaging the environment by doing so. (The red-legged frog fiasco in California comes to mind)
Oh, heavens forbid we might actually want to leave a sustainable ecosystem for our children! I swear, arguments about how people should be able to do as they please with 'their property' just remind me of how thoroughly fucked up our species is. And of why I became an anarchist in the first place...
This statement seems a bit contradictory. How are private property rights and Anarchism remotely conflicting??
Err, by dint of fundamental principle! Anarchism, as a political philosophy, has always held to the conviction that private property is theft from the collective good. It is an area of anarchist theory that I disagree with, for the most part, but it has been present from the start and still defines the movement to-day. See esp. Pierre-Joseph Proudhon.
Did you read my original statement?? I was making the point of how those laws get CORRUPTED as in how the laws actually get enforced. The red-legged frog being a case in point where ranchers on the central coast can't even clean out drainage ditches on their property (proper maintenance) because red-legged frogs were everywhere where ther was water (Funny how an animal is both endangerd and thriving at the same time)
Yeah, but I have two problems here. The first is that I do not think environmental laws are strict enough or properly enforced. And examples like the one you give are usually exaggerated bullshit, passed along by the right-wing media in contravention of the facts. I would have to read up on your example to see what it really means, but I will note that frogs--as an entire class of being--
are in danger of extinction almost worldwide.
It's doubtfull that this worse-case scenario would happen. Our schools (at least in California) are some of the most expensive in the Industrialized world, and yet they suck and often lack basic supplies. What black hole is all this money going into?? Ask any California school teacher...... it pays for the 6 digit salaries of fat cat Admininstrators and Superintendents. A whole fucking TON of them. WAY more than is actually necessary to run the system. Teachers unions have seen to it that almost any tenured teacher who spends enough tim in the system, will get a cushy high paying Admin job to retire from. The teachers unions primary concern is the carrers of it's teachers. (suprize, suprize)
First of all, the worst-case scenario I outlined is the stated intent of many of the designers of the voucher proposal. It is a 'trojan horse' tactic, freely admitted by some more honest pundits. But to address the issue directly, I would have to say that vouchers are not a cure at all, as they mistake the problem entirely. Proponents of vouchers are suggesting that, since the system is laden with (in this instance) "fat-cat administrators", that the best solution is to pull money out of the system and let it fail. But a more reasonable approach--one that does not rely upon re-inventing the wheel--is to reform the bureaucracy of the school systems.
I would agree to comprehensive, non-political reviews of the way money is spent, and to changes where necessary to enforce good, conservative austerity. However, this is not what the right really wants: It is out to destroy the programme itself, as part of the Reaganite plan to shrink government down to a size where you could "drown it in your bathtub". If mis-spent money on salaries were really a conservative issue, your side of the aisle should look at how money is being spent in Iraq, where people are making more in a month than I make in a year just to sit on their asses and let Iraqis do the work. The right is only after fiscal austerity when the money is going to a social programme, and never seems to give a damn that the military contractors are happily fleecing the American taxpayers, and the Administration is handing out new, multi-billion dollar contracts to companies that have already been convicted of fraud and mis-use of government funds...
I was thinking of a particular incident in Massachusetts where a student was thrown out of the school for calling a group of black students "Water Buffalo" The school Admins took this as being a derogatory term meaning "Large animals from Africa" neglecting the fact that water buffalo are from ASIA. As it turned out, this student violated a campus speech code (common in colleges back East). Since so many schools were discovered to have simmilar codes, conservative commentators jumped on the fact that Liberals were the primary censors of free speech on American college campuses.
How awful. Well, when it comes to "political correctness", I stand with your side: free speech should not be abridged to make anyone feel more "safe". But I still think the issue is more of a canard than a principled objection, at least in the media's hands; the right does quite a lot to restrict free speech, too. No-one is an angel in this area.