Hee! Hee! Hee!

Indeed. That would lead to a situation like Iraq, where the military commandeered school buildings.

Almost as annoying as the semi intellegent types that come up with those hare brain ideas. :(

--
The movie \'Deliverance\' isn\'t a documentary!

Yeah, he donates it his favorite charity, the IRS.

Ain't that the truth :-(

Although, in this downturn, I've been scraping by on my retirement income, and essentially zero tax... which probably infuriates the leftist weenies no end ;-) ...Jim Thompson

--
| James E.Thompson, CTO                            |    mens     |
| Analog Innovations, Inc.                         |     et      |
| Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC\'s and Discrete Systems  |    manus    |
| Phoenix, Arizona  85048    Skype: Contacts Only  |             |
| Voice:(480)460-2350  Fax: Available upon request |  Brass Rat  |
| E-mail Icon at http://www.analog-innovations.com |    1962     |

  Liberal, Leftist and Democrat are polite aphorisms for YELLOW.

Not working? ...or are you already off-shore. ;-)

All of my earned income is now off-shore. So I need to sit down with my attorneys and figure out how to play it. ...Jim Thompson

--
| James E.Thompson, CTO                            |    mens     |
| Analog Innovations, Inc.                         |     et      |
| Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC\'s and Discrete Systems  |    manus    |
| Phoenix, Arizona  85048    Skype: Contacts Only  |             |
| Voice:(480)460-2350  Fax: Available upon request |  Brass Rat  |
| E-mail Icon at http://www.analog-innovations.com |    1962     |
             
Obama thinks the term "bully pulpit" actually means "pulpit bully"

"Joel Koltner" wrote in news:Lj2Km.193776$ snipped-for-privacy@en-nntp-02.dc.easynews.com:

Tracfone has economical deals for low volume users,and their reconditioned phones are very low cost,if not free.I saw one Tracfone priced at $8.

--
Jim Yanik
jyanik
at
localnet
dot com

I can just see it now. Your house is burning down, so you call your fire insurance to come and put the fire out. Meanwhile, the fire spreads to the two adjacent houses. Your fire insurance refuses to put the other two out and they don't have fire insurance, so the whole street, including your house, ends up burning down anyway.

No free lunch where profit is involved and some things are better handled on a community / state / federal level. The argument will always be where to draw the line, but the more civilised a society becomes, the more the overall burden for any service will to be shared as it should be (not saying that it always is) cheaper that way due to economies of scale.

So what happens in a conventional or nuclear war ?. I guess we all build our own icmbm's ?...

Regards,

Chris

Good to know.

AT&T "GoPhone" plans are "pay as you go" with your choice of... $0.25/miunte (period), $1/day (but only on days you make calls) and then $0.10/minute, and $3/day (on days you make calls) and then free minutes. You do end up spending at least $8.33/month on average, though, based on, e.g., $25 credits lasting 3 months before expiration. Still, $8.33/mo minimum without any contracts, credit checks, etc. is pretty darned good, and for people who really don't talk much they could realistically keep their bills to, say,

No, just your own fallout shelter. Quite popular back in the '50s/'60s, as you're probably aware. :-)

I liked your post and agree with the philosophy -- being a proper society involves everyone sacrificing (effectively, being taxed) to some extent, even though those sacrifices often won't directly benefit particular individuals, and the Big Question is just how much sacrifice is reasonable to require of your fellow citizen for the good of the whole. Most people are pretty generous, but they're concerned that others will take unlimited advantage of that generosity (the "why should I pay for a lazy bum's food stamps?" argument) and that their generosity is largely wasted (the "look how inefficient government is relative to private industry!" argument). With advances in communications, it's now easier than ever to find plenty of support regardless of how far towards crack-pot you are (on *any* edge of the political spectrum)...

---Joel

So, it's cheaper to call someone in Washington to ask whether it's okay to water your lawn, or get permission to buy a medical device, or would it be simpler, faster, and easier to ask local authorities?

Economies of scale don't always scale. Central control inherently adds people between the guy with the need and the information, and the permission-givers.

Nothing our government does is cheaper. They've got the wrong incentive structure: bureaucrats can't be fired, get no reward for innovating. Politicians' incentive is to spend as much money as they possibly can: every cent dispersed pleases someone somewhere; every cent cut makes someone mad.

By contrast, private industry is a group of innovators fiercely competing to best one another on all fronts--cost, service, quality, etc.

Government is needed, but less is more. The government that governs least, governs best.

-- Cheers, James Arthur

Only if the guys "down the line" don't have any authority to give persmission.

I mean, "central control" is exactly how most businesses traditionally operated, you know? -- You might have signature authority to spend, say, $500, your boss might have signature authority for $10,000, etc. It's quite reasonable, though, that if you want to spend a million bucks, you're going to need to wait for the board of directors to meet and not get a quick decision.

It's difficult to make a fair comparison, though. E.g., you want parcel delivery: Well, UPS doesn't cover everyone out in the boonies -- they just hand off to USPS to do that! Hence, while UPS operates more efficienctly than the USPS -- and while I wouldn't claim there isn't plenty of unnecessary inefficiency in the USPS -- to an extent government-run programs are inefficient because they try to provide for EVERYONE rather than just "those who will be profitable." The same idea applies to government-run health care (no one is refused care due to pre-existing conditions, which can be quite unprofitable to cover, obviously), schools (just try to get a private school to take a retarded child or those with behavioral problems...), phone/Internet service (the government largely subsidizes those out in the boonies), etc.

I agree that this is a problem.

OK, but at the end of the day they have to get re-elected, and I think everyone realizes that tax dollars come from their own pockets, so the more you tax people, the less likely you should be to gete re-elected, all else being equal. While it often doesn't work this way, that's a failure of the people and not the system.

You might be surprised just how woefully inefficient much of private industry is. Particularly when it comes to things like, say, waste management where there isn't exactly a lot of competition...

---Joel

No, actually. Not when everyone realizes & expects that today's tax dollars come from someone else's pocket. Obama-bucks, from the Obama- stash.(*) That's what Mr. Obama promised: to only tax the few, not the many. That's what they voted for.

(*) Detroit:

so the more

I wouldn't be surprised at all--I've lived it. (One source of inefficiency: I spent more than 1/3rd my time just planning for and complying with government regulations. Another 40% went to paying my taxes.) But private industry's a gleaming pinnacle of perfection compared to the government I've dealt with.

But let's not deal in abstractions--there's no need.

The preamble on the first page of the health care bill just passed, H.R.3962, reads: "A BILL To provide affordable, quality health care for all Americans and reduce the growth in health care spending, and for other purposes."

It does none of those things.

Just skim the 1rst 300 pages of the bill--it doesn't take long. It's the most complicated, convoluted, un-debuggable untested spaghetti- code, all pasta, cooked to mush, with no sauce and no meatballs. The algorithms are recursive without limit, fallacies, wrong implicit assumptions & contradictions abound. It's fuzzy logic.

And yet I have no trouble understanding it. Ugly.

Nuts, frankly. And it costs a fortune.

Defend it. Explain how that's more efficient.

Or, alternatively, explain which medical breakthroughs, medicines, procedures and devices Barney Frank and Nancy Pelosi will innovate, lowering costs and paying our mortgages?

-- Cheers, James Arthur

Well, you first have to define "efficiency." Certainly it's no problem to find one individual who couldn't get health care insurance previously and who will now (potentially) be able to, so for them personally certainly the efficiency of healthcare has just increased dramatically.

Will it end up making more people overall as healthy or healthier than they are now for less money than is spend now on health care? That's the billion dollar question, right? ...and clearly there's great disagreement about the answer. Even, say, a decade from now, when there'll be lots of historical data available people will be arguing about it since, again, it all gets back to how you define the terms.

Those guys at Bell Labs -- funded through a government-controleled monopoly (AT&T) -- seemed to do just fine in innovating all sorts of cool technology.

That Salk guy was working on the government dole (the University of Pittsburg) when he came up with his vaccine for Polio. (Although it is notable that much funding for polio research came from the -- 100% voluntary -- March of Dimes rather than taxation. And while I'm getting off topic here, how absurd is it that Salk often had a hard time finding schooling and jobs only because he was a Jew? Sheesh!)

---Joel

Efficiency: the ratio of the output to the input of any system.

Please name _ONE_ instance where government meddling has actually produced a better result for less money.

Hope This Helps! Rich

It's largely an impossible comparison: I could say something like, well, it's a lot cheaper for me to pay my county taxes and obtain fire protection in the process than hiring my own private fire brigade, but you'd counter that, well... maybe it wouldn't be, because certanily my neighbors would help out with the fire brigade's cost (I wouldn't be funding it single-handedly), right? -- But it's difficult to know exactly what the numbers would be for the path not taken.

If we go back to the USPS example for a moment, if it were all privatived you'd expect that those living in big cities would have substantially lower costs to send or receive a letter than those living in the boonies where it clearly costs more to get that mail picked up and delivered, yet somewhere along the line (centuries back) We The People decided that rather than those choosing a more rural lifestyle just having to make up that difference (granted, a lot more people lived rurally in the first place back then), we'd "level the field" and make regular letters the same postage for everyone, regardless of how near or far the sender and recipient were. On the other hand, you can only be generous to a certain extent -- no one would suggest that for those sending 100lb. parcels that the cost of shipping from San Francsico to San Diego should be the same as shipping from San Francisdo to New York City.

I've said this before, but it bears repeating: The government IS you and me. Sure, it's a huge system these days with plenty of problems, but you can see how it began -- groups of people getting together and semi-deomcratically deciding that it makes sense to tax all the citizens to pay for that local fire brigade, soon thereafter a militia to defend the borders, then deciding to pay for K-12 education, then some protection for those who are unemployed, then some health care, etc.

While you do have the option of leaving, it's entirely patriotic to instead stick around and lobby for what you believe in as well to try to reform the system to what you think would be best -- Jim's writing editorial columns in his local newspaper absolutely falls into this category. But reasonable people can disagree on just "how much is too much" when it comes to your freedom (...to bear arms, to go hunting, to get a woman pregnant and then leave, etc.) as well as your taxes and entitlements.

---Joel

"Joel Koltner" wrote in news:nICKm.164238$ snipped-for-privacy@en-nntp-03.dc.easynews.com:

But those companies fail more often,or their stockholders force changes,but government never fails. Lousy gov't programs endure forever,become "too big to eliminate".

there are no consequences for government waste and inefficiency.

--
Jim Yanik
jyanik
at
localnet
dot com

Oh, you mean like GM?

:-)

Although I don't imagine you were a supporter of the bailouts...

Many an office worker feels the same way about his co-workers...

---Joel

That's not the comparison at all. Consider collective retirement: Social Security, and the amount of money people would have today if they'd been allowed to save their own. Compare that to what happened: all their money is gone, given away to previous retirees.

Barack Obama has admitted that Medicare and Medicaid are breaking the bank--we can't afford them. In the next breath he says he'll cover the whole country and increase service, while saving money by eliminating "fraud, waste, and abuse." That's bizarre.

One difference is that some of those are specified by the Constitution as legitimate functions of the federal government, the others aren't.

Another difference is that those local compromises and decisions are made by a group of people who choose it, and if you don't like one particular community's choices you can go somewhere else and find people more in keeping with your philosophy.

That is, you have freedom of choice. You can go to a place with no fire dept. if you want. That leads to a healthy diversity of social experiments and conditions that keep cities and states in check--if people are unhappy, they leave. And wise policies attract new blood.

Enacting a federal law removes that choice, that incentive, that check on local tyranny; it's intolerant, exclusive of any other view, and imposes one draconian mandate on the entire country. It deprives people of their liberty to choose.

Since you're arguing it's more efficient, numbers matter. Medicare costs 7x what it was originally projected to cost. The prescription benefit costs 4x, IIRC. Pelosi-care's currently estimated at $1.5T. What's $1.5T x 5?

But even more importantly, it doesn't matter if it's more efficient-- you can't force people to buy things they don't want to buy. The Constitution doesn't allow it.

-- Cheers, James Arthur

Ah, but we can just tap the next working class for this generation's retirement, right? :-)

Yes, social security is broken, although it's not clear to me exactly why (i.e., how much is mismanagement, how much was raiding the funds for completely unrelated purposes, etc.).

That's creative accounting for you!

OK, but I'm one of those annoying people who consider the constitution a "living document" -- that the specifics spelled out in it are just as important as the *intents* of the authors. There's no way those guys back in

1787 could begin to predict the exact challenges we'd be facing 222 years later.

I'd grant you that, yes. This is an example though of the whole federal rights vs. state rights (and I suppose vs. city rights) debate that's been a Big Deal ever since the first drafts of the constitution were being written, and it'll never be solved to everyone's liking. Arguably today the federal government has as much or more power than any other time in the U.S.'s history; I attribute this to the fact that transporation and communications are now so advanced that most people no longer consider the state they're living in to be a large part of their identity, whereas they do still consider the country itself to be. At least in general... residents of certain states like, oh, say, Texas and Oregon still tend to retain a lot of the state's identity!

A lot. But many will argue that medicare is more efficient (yes, with numbers) than private insurance (see, e.g.,

(Another good point is how we in the U.S. overall pay markedly more for the same health care procedures than any other nation; there's definitely something wrong there.)

I don't think there's any readily definable line between "forcing people to buy things they don't want to buy" and "taxes"...

I've become a bit busy at the moment so I apologize that this isn't a more thorough response, but I do appreciate what you wrote and think you make some good points.

---Joel