Reagan said: "Government is the problem". That isn't accurate

Oh, but it does.

 

Limited government.

 

It's not about you, or me.

Per the US constitution, the fruits of your labor is LIMITED to your income minus the portion to which the government has a claim.


That has nothing to do with me, or you. It has only to do with what the constution declares IS the government.

 

Enron.

The Madoff's of the world.

Etc.

 

So what was the income tax rate at the time?

 

Your thread title: Reagan said: "Government is the problem". That isn't accurate

is incongruous with your conclusion.

That is not relevant nor is it a problem.

You claim to have worked in government, yet don't understand that private enterprise is reluctant to do business with government because of the information government requires private enterprise to fork over to the government.

For example, so-called homeless veterans (snicker) can voluntarily choose to go to a VA Domiciliary. After getting free medical treatment, free psychiatric treatment, free psychological counseling, free alcohol and drug-abuse intervention and treatment, free relationship counseling, free financial literacy counseling, not to mention a free safe, nice place to sleep and free food, they're allowed to work through a program called CWT.

There are many employers who would love to give those veterans and a second chance and hire them on a temporary basis through the CWT program, but the reams and volume of data they have to turn over to government to participate is a huge freaking turn-off, which ironically, the VA laments.

Had you worked in the legal field, you'd know there's something called a "subpoena" which is a FOIA request.

Now you have something new to think about.

Your lack of economics training is obvious.

In perfectly competitive marks as in monopolistic competition, ultimately there is ZERO economic profit.

Then what is the purpose of down-sizing?

When does government down-size?

Business often go through organizational restructuring.

When does government go through organizational restructuring?

Businesses either use their human resource manager, along with management, or hiring an outside firm to evaluate and audit their organization to find dead-weight jobs.

When does government do that?

We'll wait with great anticip-p-p-p-p-pation while you fumble about trying to explain that.

That is a grotesque generalization not supported by facts.

That is a patently false statement.

The average CEO salary is $248,610 annually.

Like so many, you got swept up in the propaganda and disinformation because you don't know what you're talking about.

Only 3% of US businesses are publicly-traded corporations allowed to sell stocks.

For the not-too-bright, that means 97% of US businesses are not publicly-traded corporations that sell stocks.

That means there are ~680,000 publicly-traded corporations that sell stock.

Out of those ~680,000 publicly-traded corporations that are allowed to sell stocks, propaganda artists cherry pick the Fortune 400 or perhaps the Fortune 500 and sometimes the Fortune 100 or the Fortune 50.

Let's say it's the Fortune 500.

The story so far....

Propaganda artists cherry-pick 500 companies.

That's 0.074% of all publicly-traded corporations.

That's 0.0022% of all companies in the US.

And then they claim this cherry-picked group of 500 CEOs are representative of all CEOs and earn 300x more than their workers.

Can you not see how you were lied to?

In addition to failing show any evidence that big business is the problem -- except for the sniveling about excessive pay which I debunked -- you have intentionally distorted and falsely characterized Reagan's statement while taking it out of context.

You have little understanding of bureaucracy, which is really sad given the wealth of information you can find in peer-reviewed sociology journals that study bureaucracies that have been published in the last 150 years.

You fail to understand that business bureaucracy is acted upon by both centripetal and centrifugal forces.

The business bureaucracy wants to expand, but it can't and even if it does, it is paired back in short-order.

On the other hand, government bureaucracy has only centripetal forces acting on it.

Government bureaucracy continually expands and there's nothing to stop it.

Note that the expansion of business bureaucracy doesn't harm you, but the expansion of government bureaucracy does.

Government bureaucracies exist to justify themselves, and to gain ever increasing amounts of power and control at great cost to you.

What Reagan was saying is that you don't need a Department of Agriculture. You don't need to subsidize farmers. And seeing how States had food stamp programs decades before the federal government did, you don't need a federal food-stamp program that is useless and harmful.

Do you need to collect statistical data on agricultural land usage? For example, Ohio has 3.5 Million acres of fallow farm land. It might be useful to know that, and there is an Office within Agriculture that collects info like that, but you can merge that with the Department of Interior or the Commerce Department.

The US and French both subsidize their farmers, albeit differently. The US wastefully pays farmers not to produce anything or to destroy corps or livestock or the products of livestock, like milk. The French set a price floor. As a result, French farmers are more productive and there's far less waste.

You don't need a Department of Education. The Men who wrote the Constitution certainly knew what universities and private and public schools were. They left education to the States, but the federal government commandeered it at great cost and expense and harm to you.

You don't need a Department of Housing & Urban Development.

HUD has wasted $TRILLIONs dumping money into cesspools like Detroit, Chicago, Milwaukee, St Louis, Baltimore, NYC and San Fransisco.

HUD -- along with the Department of Transportation that you don't need -- is responsible for the exorbitantly high cost of housing and rents in many of the 120,000+ housing markets in the US.

States, counties and even cities operated government housing decades before the federal government started doing it, and they did a better job.

Let's say you and I apply for HUD Section 8 housing benefits so that tax-payers will subsidize our rent.

You get $1,401/month in Social Security benefits.

I get a Social Security benefit of $2,788/month, plus a pension of $1,878/month, for a total of $4,666/month.

HUD denies your claim for Section 8 benefits on the basis that you earn way too much freaking money.

HUD approves my claim for Section 8 benefits because I don't earn enough money.

Let us review again: $1,401 is too much money, while $4,666 is not enough money.

Amusing how HUD takes Cost-of-Living in the more than 595 economies in the US into consideration while the Department of Agriculture pretends there is no difference.

We can quantify those extremes in terms of wage rates:

$26.92/hour - $6.93/hour = $19.99/hour

That is how widely the Cost-of-Living varies across America.

HUD is telling you that at $1,401/month or $6.93/hour, you can afford your own apartment.

Which brings us to the useless Department of Labor.

You don't need a federal minimum wage and how daft is it to assume the US is one single economy with a uniform Cost-of-Living?

Okay, BLS collects labor data, but the reporting of "national labor" info is pure propaganda from the days when the US was trying to prove the US world was better than the Soviet world.

Reporting national labor data is meaningless, because it doesn't tell you anything not to mention it is misleading since it hides the fact that some States might have poor economies (but we didn't want the Soviets to know that.)

If you wanna keep BLS, then fine, but you can move it to the Commerce Department and get rid of the Department of Labor.

The Department of Transportation can be eliminated since it has only caused harm. States are perfectly capable of deciding where their highways should go, and they did, and will do, a much better job than both Congress and Transportation.

So what if the federal excise tax on gasoline is rescinded? The States will just increase their State excise tax by the same amount.

The I-75 Bridge over the Ohio River has been a problem for 50 years because it's outdated.

Neither Ohio nor Kentucky have been able to get the Department of Transportation do anything about it, in spite of the fact it is the 3rd largest commerce corridor in the US, with $Billions per month in goods traveling over that bridge. Joe Hiden gave a lovely speech at the College of Mount St Joe, but rather conspicuously didn't commit to a new bridge and his budget doesn't include a commitment to it, either.

Political games is another way government bureaucracy harms people.

The bridge is double-decked originally with two travel lanes and two break-down lanes.

The Department of Transportation's solution was to eliminate the break-down lanes to add two lanes of travel in both directions.

If you run out of gas, or suffer a blown tire or mechanical problem, there is no place for you to go, and you will likely die as so many others have, and worse than that, you're likely to cause an accident that kills/injures even more people.

If the people of Ohio and Kentucky didn't fork over federal excise tax on gasoline to the federal government who spent it on things like The Bridge to Nowhere and the The Exit Ramp to Nothing and so many other pork projects, it'd have been fixed already.

That, is what Reagan was talking about.

 

Not a problem, supercilious nonsense is easy to ignore.

 

Nope, sorry.

 

That is not a policy recommendation. It's way too vague.

Be specific. Show some initiative.

 

Wrong.

Private schools must meet government standards and truancy laws will not allow you to disregard those standards.

You cannot functiion without a social security number and pay into the system

No you are not free to do so.

You are proven wrong do some reading

 

Yes and yes you are for bei

Yes and yes you are for being wrong

 

why ask me? Look it up.

 

You aren't being forced on any of those things.

 

so, goes to my point, 'management' problem, not a philosophical issue.

Well, if government is the problem, Reagan sure as hell didn't solve it.

You assert that a federal minimum wage isn't needed, which is wrong, we do need a federal base line, then I will view with suspicion the veracity of the rest of your post.

You are probably correct on some points, government needs to be made more efficient, and I don't think anyone disagrees with that point, and yesa, private enterprise has command line advantages in the real world insofar as reorganizing, downsizing, etc. But, they have to, because they must earn a profit. But I worked in a department in Ralph M Parsons back in the 70s, and I swear that the dept I worked in was very inefficient, and no one really fixed it during the time I was there. Now, I wasn't privy to the big picture, but one only only imagine. But of course that means a government entity won't need to downsize because it doesn't have to earn a profit. The only question that remains is whether or not what is being done is needed. I don't doubt there is room for those things that are needed for them to be done more efficiently. I think it would be wise in the setting up of any department of government there is a department whose function is to propose efficiency proposals for the overseers, and all government entities should have something like that ( if they don't already ).

the question for government is this: Is it needed?

YOu say it isn't. Whether or not, in fact, some of the big entities of government you indicate are needed or not is a point that is simply beyond the scope of yours or my post.

I'm open to the idea they might not be needed, but I'm not convinced on that point based on the very limited information you provide. If you want to nitpick around the edges where something can be improved, fine, but that doesn't prove the entity, as a whole, is needed or not. Perhaps parts of it are not needed, wtfk, but overall? That needs investigating.

Yeah, the government needs to be more efficient, fine, but I really am not interested in going into the weeds of, say, for example, the department of agriculture ( it's big department and they do tons of stuff. I don't know that all of it is needed, but a lot of it is, but I'm not interested, here, at this time, to go into the weeds with you on that point, I would have to research it to even formulate an opinion and I just don't have the time, it's a big issue ).

But, what I would like to 'get into it' with you, is on the issue of minimum wage.

You wrote;

You don't need a federal minimum wage and how daft is it to assume the US is one single economy with a uniform Cost-of-Living?

Well, it depends on what the baseline is. In my view, it should be set so in the lowest COL regions, whatever the rate is which would be right for basic living costs, so any other city or state can adjust it up from there.

So, it's a baseline.

But there should be a baseline, to prevent exploitation ( just in case some corporations are tempted to pay not enough to live on , and they do do that, Walmart, case in point, where they had to have a drive to give food [in one particular store] for their employees because walmart wasn't paying enough ).

I disagree with my liberal brethren who want $15 an hour. As a baseline, that would be burdensome in a number of cities where COL is a lot lower, than, say, in Seattle or Los Angeles. The fed minimum in the 60s was about $10 per hour in today's dollars, and unemployment bck then was under 4%, so that's where I think it should be. I mean, $15 an hour in Galveston TX would be too big of a burden for some fast food outfits, but $10 would be about right in that city, but I'd have to research it more.

You have to have a baseline to prevent exploitation, and I believe the base line should be determined by COL in the cheapest cities and regions, ( so other regions can adjust their minimums up from there, as CA has done ) and I don't see any argument that is sound against it.

Feel free to rebut it, though.

 

"Supercilious"? Okay, now there's a super-silly-ass characterization if there ever were one.

 

So, they are regulated. Your point is?

You do realize that when you drive and approach a stop sign you must stop. We are a civilization, which has rules, regulations.

Or would that offend your 'freedom' issues?

Well, read this:

So what? Is this a 'freedom' issue with you? It seems so, so let's take a deeper look...

SocSec cost is a tax. Tax moneys do not belong to you, they belong to the government.

Taxes are the government's claim on income, per the US constitution. Taxpayers pay them because the the money belongs to the government.

"Pay' is a misnomer, because the term has a transactional connotation. "Provided to" would be more accurate, but the things is, there is no word in the english language that is precise enough to describe the act of providing taxes to the government, so we use the term 'pay'. But, make no mistake about it, when you pay income tax, thee is only ONE thing you are paying for, and it is this:

American civilization.

Why? Because civilization is the collective thing. Taxes are a collective effort. The quid is the tax, and the pro quo is civilization. And that is that.

Yes, you are require, by force, if necessary, to pay a tax. This is non negotiable, and for damn good reason. Those who don't pay ( and who can afford to pay ) are placing a greater burden on everyone else, and that is theft. To NOT pay a tax is to STEAL from other tax payers. the money is not a transaction. Or, it is only the sense that you are paying, collectively, according to ability pay, for the civilization you live in.

We are a civilisation, which costs money, and we are required to chip in, according to ability to pay ( more or less ).

Now, right about here I can hear some nitpickers pettifogging my point by zooming in on 'fees' specific taxes, taxes which have a designated purpose and try and argue they are 'transactional'. NO, they are not. All taxes are collective efforts because your tax does not go into an account with your name on it for which you draw funds from to pay for services commensurate to the amount you paid. All taxes are collective efforts. That is the nature of taxes. "Collective' is the operative word. Love it or hate it, that IS what it IS. So, to nitpick on more specific type of taxes, fees, etc., is to pettifog the overall point being made. It doesn't change the essential point I'm making.

Yes, that is a forced thing. No question on that point. But that is not 'tyranny'. Not by a long shot. Your freedom isn't curtailed because of taxes. You wouldn't have a country without taxes, America is just too darn big, and do go '1913' on me, and it doesn't matter why the income tax was created. Maybe it wasn't necessary in the 19th century, but they are needed now, and that is that.
( you could argue a point your tax is too much not leaving you enough to live --- and yes, we can argue on 'how much' but that --the oppressiveness or lack thereof of a tax--is a separate issue, I'm just referring to the subject, philosophically in this post ).

But, you are not forced to do much else but pay the tax.

You can give your soc sec benefits back to the Gov. if you want.

You can enroll your kids in private schools, if you want ( yes, they are regulated, but asserting that fact is a red herring ).

You can purchase insurance from a private enterprise, any number of them, you are not forced to choose one over the other.

For autos, you are required to purchase insurance. So, let's take a look at this, for all you tyranny/ fear mongers.

There is a reason for that, because it is for the greater good.

See, if you didn't, and you got a head injury, let's say, and had no insurance to pay for medical expenses, you wind up in the emergency room at a cost to taxpayers much more than if you had insurance.

So, the required insurance will actually cost each of us less than if we were to support emergency rooms for the non insured.

Either way, we wind up paying, ahd the required insurance is the cheapest solution and the most just.

That's not 'tyranny' that's common sense.

Any other 'freedom' issues you care to discuss?

 

Trunacy laws are not regulation they are statues forcing one to accept government schools which are pathetic.

Civilization is not rules and regulations it is freedom from others.

The govenment fails at everything b ut forces you to accept their failure which is why you are wrong and Reagan was right.

 

Y

Yes you are that is fact deal with it

 

School, nope homeschool.
Roads, nope don't drive.
Ultilities, nope, don't use them
SS, nope, get paid cash.

 

Nitpicking over semantics. It's called 'pettifogging the debate'.

A civilization, in order to be free, must have order.

Anarchy is not freedom, it's a fool's paradise.

Where there is order, there are rules, regs, laws, codes, tort law, case law, noting that no one is suggesting
anything unreasonable in this regard.

Philosophically speaking, it's all the same, and your 'freedom' argument, is a red herring.

You don't even know what your argument is, you don't even know what freedom is, for obviously, you unable to articulate it.

 

I stand corrected. I read the post too quickly. I agree that the government does not force anyone to buy a government product. Come to think of it I can't think of any product that the government sells..... maybe park passes........

 

A valid point, but Enron is a bad example. The government destroyed one of the largest accounting firms in the world and tens of thousands of jobs in the Enron case.

 

Homeschool requires meeting state standards. Trunacy laws require school.
Dont use utilities freeze to death or die of dehydration;/
ss one cannot life without it it is forced through coercion.

You are wrong and that is fact

 

Law is always about semantics.

People make their own order and noone need be ordered by others how to live.

Nlo one is advocating anarchy government control is worse than anarchy

No my argument is accurate yours is based on mental gymnastics.

 

This is fundamentally correct (and significant), but it glosses over two fundamental problems. One is the federal government versus state or local government. For very good reason the Constitution strongly limits the rules, regs, laws, codes, tort law, and case law that the central federal government is allowed to get involved with. But we have long since institutionalized tons of unconstitutional federal actions, and this is clearly a big part of "the government is the problem." Second, you say no one is suggesting anything unreasonable, but in fact that is the major problem -- not the suggesting part but the actuality part. An orderly free society should have the bare minimum of rules, regs, laws, codes, tort law, and case law required to maintain civil order. But unchecked governments (is there any other kind??) -- federal, state, and local -- make rules, regs, laws, codes, tort law, and case law by the millions. Every one of those that goes beyond the minimum required destroys a little bit of freedom and liberty and moves government a little closer to tyranny. Of course congresses, legislatures, and city councils rationalize their encroachment by simply redefining the "minimum" to meet their own view. For instance a law against murder would obviously be required to maintain civil order. But a law that requires a plumber to get a state license certificate? In the absolute, of course not, but there are millions of such laws and regs.