Or I could go to sleep.
Go ahead, use your superior conservative logic to figure that one out.
Oh, yeah!
elucidator…I’m a farm chick. Those was tractors I was pulling out of snowbanks. 
Sorry to repeat myself, but why on earth do you think that you have the right to dictate what other people do?
Please answer, I want to know.
The imposition of beliefs as laws is what politics is, Milly. A conservative seeks to preserve the order of that imposition, to keep wealth and power in the hands of the deserving, and to keep it from being frittered away on the unworthy.
Now as long as wealth is nothing more than trinkets and luxury cars, and better tables in restaraunts I dont want to go to, then, fine. A nation that cannot provide a decent life even for the least of its citizens is not necessarily a failure, there are limits.
But a nation that can, should, indeed, must. And if that means “imposing our values” well, so be it, tough noogies.
This land is ours, its wealth is ours, it belongs to us. Just because a child pulls a toy out of the toy box and screams “Mine!” doesn’t make it so.
I swear, this is the last one, then I have to sleep so I can actually, y’know, go to work in the morning.
I want a cite showing where I claimed I have anything resembling any right whatsoever to dictate anything to anyone else. I want it in your next post, or I want you to tell me why I am wrong. I do not care which option you choose. If you choose a third option I am checking out of any further contact with you in this thread because your lack of sense has given me a headache.
Hey, at least you got it in the right forum. Wonder why your friend Col couldn’t?
I’m sorry, up to this point I haven’t been able to find a cite for the program I saw, but that doesn’t mean the program doesn’t exist. I post this link only to demonstrate that I’m not the only one who has seen this type of report before. ctrl-f, search for ‘refuse’.
http://csf.colorado.edu/mail/homeless/dec97/0128.html
This link demostrates that homeless people who turn down jobs and refuse counselling (among other things) can be evicted from city shelters in NY. In the story I saw the issue wasn’t about people refusing to take mandatory jobs, but not utilizing the voluntary services that are easily accessible. If some people refuse to do what is required of them, as in getting a job, to keep necessary services, what do you think will happen if there are no restrictions on those services? Maybe people sitting around all day, playing cards, while the guy next door at the employment agency twiddles his thumbs like in the story I saw?
http://www.nynewsday.com/news/local/bronx/nyc-home0611,0,7609028.story?coll=nyc-topheadlines-left
That’s your cite, Uzi? Newsgroup shit with people calling each other fuckwits and saying “Fuck the lazy bums! let 'em starve”?
So what? You found another person as idiotic as yourself, who has seen and values the same idiotic journalism as yourself.
I thought you would at least have had the decency to give me a Rush Limbaugh transcript or an Ann Coulter rant, instead of this pathetic shit.
Your other cite is a news article, that while interesting, doesn’t provide evidence of the disdain for work that you accuse the homeless of possessing.
milroyj, your issue seems to be with taxation, so I’ll address that.
I feel that a taxation system is reasonable because your work and business are conducted in a forum that consists of more than you and your money. You live in and take advantage of a society, and hence must contribute to the costs of maintaining that society.
(What costs should be considered important is an entirely different matter altogether, and something that conservatives and liberals will argue for the rest of time about, I’m sure.)
After all, calling yourself an American citizen acknowledges that you belong to and wish to continue belonging to this society, right? But you’ve gotta help out to gain the benefits. Hence, tax.
Should you not wish to belong to that society, you could always declare the Republic of milroyj as an independent state, but don’t be surprised if the USA decides that this upstart rogue country in its midst requires regime change and decides to enact this policy forcibly. And if they did, you should think yourself lucky. Saddam had to deal with the defence forces, you’d only have to deal with the IRS.
Milroyj, you’re just as interested in imposing your will on others as you claim chique is.
If the collective will is to support the other members of the society you live in, then a liberal society is not the imposition of an individual’s will, but an agreed consensus; YOU’D be the odd man out then, wanting to impose YOUR will of no public resources on the society as a whole.
Just because someone works to foster a liberal majority makes them neither a communist nor a fascist, despite your oversimplification.
Y’know, I’ve been thinking about this stupid thread all day.
I was wrong, Milly. Utterly and completely wrong, and for that I offer my utmost apologies.
I do have the right to dictate what I believe. As a matter of fact, I have not only the right but the responsibility and duty to dictate my beliefs. I refer you to (at the very least) Art. I Sec. 2, Art. I Sec. 3, and Art. II Sec. 1 of the Constitution of the United States of America; and the relevant clauses of the Minnesota State Constitution.
Of course, whether my dictations are taken verbatim is always a crapshoot.
At this point it’d be nice of you to apologize for your lame attempt at accusing me of denigrating the Navy (did you ever serve, by the way?), but I won’t hold my breath.
I apologize for my lame attempt at accusing you of denigrating the Navy. Sorry.
Ah yes. I’d missed this piece of work until a little while ago.
The usual claptrap, I see, is being trotted out, a la liberal hatred of freedom (the First Amendment, obviously, doesn’t count. It’s only number one on the Bill of Rights), and the fact-resistant canard that social spending is the source of our debt and our allegedly high levels of taxation. Typically, milroyj has gone into an infinite loop. Someone really ought to check the wiring in his head for that short.
Facts are not going to get in the way of these conservative arguments, but still, facts you’re going to get. Sorry.
The history of the increase in the debt has almost nothing to do with social spending, and everything to do with war. Let us examine the actual facts:
in 1791, the first year available on the Bureau of the Public Debt (http://www.publicdebt.treas.gov/opd/opd.htm#history) site, the debt was: 75,463,476, a leftover from the Revolutionary War, obviously. By 1812, this had been reduced to 45,209,738, but the War of 1812 increased it by 1816 to 127,334,934.
By 1835, this debt had been completely paid off.
By 1846, the debt had risen again, to 15 and a half million. I can’t trace a reason why anywhere, but this is still a fraction of the post-1812 debt.
The Mexican War increased this to 63,061,859 by 1849, a fourfold increase.
In 1860, just before the Civil War, the debt stood at an almost identical 64,842,288.
By 1866, it had risen to 2,773,236,174, an increase of 42 fold. That’s not a misprint.
There the debt remained until 1914, at which time it rested comfortably at 2,912,499,269.
By 1919, it was at 27,390,970,113, an increase of nearly nine and a half times. But you know, it was worth it, because that was the war to end all wars, and we made the world safe for democracy. (Sound familiar?)
Here, finally, we come to the first substantial increase in debt that can be laid at the feet of economic reasons: by 1930, the debt had been whittled down to 16,185,309,831. By 1941, the eve of WWII, the New Deal had succeeded in increasing the debt fourfold, to 48,961,443,536.
WWII showed the New Deal how to get it done: in half the time, the debt increased by five and a half times, to 269,422,099,173 in 1946.
There was a relatively gentle increase after that, by 83%, to 492,665,000,000 by 1974, the end of Vietnam. In between we had Korea and Johnson’s notorious (to conservatives) Great Society, but for all that huffing and puffing, they couldn’t even double the debt. Pikers.
From there to 1982, you get the second big increase due to economics, a result of the stagflation/recession of the times, to 1,197,073,000,000, an increase of nearly two and a half times over those eight years. Not much in comparison to the Depression, but times weren’t as bad either.
Then Reagan decided he was going to beat the Russians at the Cold War, and Bush followed up with Gulf War One. The debt increased fourfold, to 4,411,488,883,139 by 1993.
In the peace that followed, the debt plateaued for the next eight years, rising by 31.6% to 5,807,463,412,200 by 2001. Such a tax and spend Democrat, eh?
Now, we’ve got the War on Terrorism, and the debt is rising at a faster rate, not surprisingly.
Militarism is far more costly than social spending. And just to get this in, I will remind one and all that the writers of the Constitution never intended for the republic to have a permanent standing army. And they’d be mortified by today’s process for setting the defense budget, where the amount is set by the Executive and then the edges modified slightly by the Congress.
To quote from the Constitution, section 8, the power of the Congress to raise money for an army:
“To raise and support Armies, but no Appropriation of Money to that Use shall be for a longer Term than two Years;”
To quote from Hamilton, Federalist No. 26, “The legislature of the United States will be OBLIGED, by this provision, once at least in every two years, to deliberate upon the propriety of keeping a military force on foot; to come to a new resolution on the point; and to declare their sense of the matter, by a formal vote in the face of their constituents. They are not AT LIBERTY to vest in the executive department permanent funds for the support of an army, if they were even incautious enough to be willing to repose in it so improper a confidence.”
So improper a confidence now reposes with the Executive, of course, regardless of the restraints of the Constitution. And we’re paying for it, quite literally.
First you pretty much call me a liar because for some reason you can’t believe that people would rather sit around and play cards than work if they had the choice and now you call me an idiot for believing journalism that demonstrates that people would rather sit around and play cards than work if given the choice. No, it is not I who am the idiot here, Hairball Boy.
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I have never heard of this Ann Coulter person other than on the SDMB, and the only thing I have heard about Rush Limbaugh is he is deaf, or something like that. I would suggest that if these people offend you then don’t listen to them.
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I never said they had a disdain for work, shitfuck. I responded to the question that people were starving in the streets. Many people work for the simple reason that if they don’t then they don’t eat. If you are given free food and shelter with no conditions on them, then why bother to work? If the choice is between sitting around in the shelter all day or out in the park with your buds, vs. heavy manual labour for 8-10 hours in the hot sun and you are going to get fed and sheltered in either case, what do you think the majority will pick? Or, are you going to start denying basic human nature now, too?