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Originally Posted by The cute widdle wesbian
Here's something else little to think about. I'm a well-earning person, I have a pretty big paycheck, so to speak. But I'm working class, just like the whole of my family. Our hard-earned money is being taken away from us in order to pay (in a lot of cases) people who simply don't want to work. I understand that there are people on wellfare who honestly can't work and need help. I'm all about helping the poor and people in need, but don't deny that there are plenty of people out there who gladly take mine and your tax dollars to sit on the couch and smoke weed all day. I'm in tough times to, why the hell do I want to pay for them? The way my mind works, I have to think of myself and my family first. But here's the other side of that: There are rich people who, like someone else said, barely pay a fraction of us working class people's taxes because they can. So the government wants to take a bit of money from the people earning 1 million bucks a year to help the starved. I could easily live off of 75 hundred bucks a year, trust me. We're in a tough spot. My only question is, why in hell are we arguing? Why are we making such a big deal out of the right and the left? Right now no one has jobs, no one has money, many don't even have food to put in their children's mouths. Why are we worried about the rich or the poor in particular, why aren't we worried about the honorary citizens of this country. We need to balance each other out.
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See, I can't live on $7,500 a year. Keeping a roof over my head--no food, no clothing, no utilities, just the roof over my head--runs me around $14,000 a year. My utilities run another 6K a year, or so only one of those (the cable TV) is optional. Fuel for my car runs me about ~$2400 a year if ALL I do is drive to and from work and shopping trips.
The reason we are making a big deal out of the right and left is that these are meaningful distinctions. Having a right-leaning government or a left-leaning government makes a world of difference! It's the difference between public schools and libraries (favored by left-leaning government) or a gutted public education system and no public libraries (favored by right-leaning government).
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How about dumping all that money into all those countries who've never done a damn thing to help us?
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What is a better return on investment, one-half of 1% of our GDP going to foreign aid or a several hundred billions of dollars to clean up after a terrorist attack? I'm going to argue that the former is a better investment. Btw. of the G-8, we spend the least amount on foreign aid. Japan, which has a population only slightly larger than the state of California, spends every year what we spend in five in foreign aid. Japan. Which has ten percent of the population of the United States.
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Again, I may sound terribly unamerican when I say this, but we need to think of ourselves and ours first. Feed your people, not theirs. When we can aford to dump billions of bucks into the sea, let's do it. But we need to quit the spending as well as quit the rich people money hogging. So the democrats want to dump all the money at the poor, and the republicans want to dump it at the rich (basically speaking). So what goes to us?
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The Democratic party is trying to preserve the middle class, the Republican party is trying to dismantle the middle class. What's more, modern American conservatives are not conservative. The more I read conservative thinkers (not Limbaugh et. al. but real thinkers like Russell Kirk, Edmund Burke, etc.) the more I realize that *I* am a conservative and that what passes as conservative is actually more along the line of libertarian-theocratic. The Democratic party are the real conservatives in American politics. The Republican party is the party of right-wing radicals.
Cheers
Aj