I haven't posted in 4 months and now there's a twofer today.
I have an idea about a way to save money and apply it in a more useful way.
#1 Did you know that the US spends 5 times as much on the military budget ($711 billion) than its closest competitor (China at $143 billion)? Do you know how much of that is needless spending according to an old Cold War mentality? Yeah, billions.
So how about we only spend 4 times as much as China? Then we can use the rest of the money to help the soldiers that are coming back. We can give them job training. We can apply better funds to physical recovery. We can apply significantly more money to help soldiers recover mentally from the horrors they've seen. Maybe this way we can drastically cut back on the suicide/day rate that the military now has. We can apply money to stop the rampant sexual trauma that women--and not a few men--suffer in the military.
Could you imagine if we did that?
#2 (This is based off the previous post)
For people like the person that I mentioned that pay so very little in taxes yet have exorbitant wealth, how about we draw things a bit more close. This family friend of ours pays about 40% in overall taxes, referenced wealthy person pays 13.9% in federal on some of his money--not all of it--and pays maybe 1% or 2% more on some of his money for other state taxes. Considering his $250 million in overall wealth, and that he only pays taxes on some of it, makes you wonder. Anyway:
So how about we don't even make numbers match? How about we have this wealthy group of people pay their taxes, use their loop holes, pay state taxes, etc., AND THEN we have them pay up to 75% of what middle class America pays? So then these wealthy tax dodgers end up paying only 30% in overall taxes. And it's still less than my family friend.
Now with all of this money, we can easily afford things every year like money for education and teacher training, money for job creation, money for research to develop 21st century industries so that we can compete on a global scale like we used to back when this type of money was applied to research.
How about we start with these two ideas?
But, you know me, I'm just a 1980s Republican. Or, in modern parlance, a socialist.
Thursday, June 14, 2012
A follow-up
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5 comments:
Tee hee! Venom the Republican. :D
hah. Not really. But my political stances would be embraced by the majority of Republicans from the 1930s on thru the early 90s. So... ???
I also have missed your posts! Also, I don't see how this is a complex issue. I actually think most Americans would be okay with something like this. Even the down-with-government Republicans I know favor an easier tax system without so many loop holes and incentives and such (granted, I tend to avoid angry people on both sides of the aisle, so I might be missing a large chunk of idiots).
Also, I'm a bit offended by your blog. What if I AM a robot? Is this saying that robots cannot make meaningful contributions to this discussion?
This depends, Kim, are you more like Data from Star Trek, or the Cyborgs from Battlestar Galactica?
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