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OMG Improve our roads. This needs to be a priority.
CITY streets are the issue. STATE roads are generally OK. Larger cities all over Indiana need more money to fix their streets.
Rainy day fund…. How about filling all the potholes holding all the rain? Oh wait, perhaps climate change will dry up all the rain, and the itsy bitsy spider will die along with the rest of the wildlife, and then my broken axle will melt itself back together. Thanks GOP!
Interstate/highway potholes are state DOT. Streets are local. If the state would stop taking from local governments we.might be able to fill those potholes.
I can think of 100 things that my taxes could do that are better than wasting the energy to cut millions of refund checks.
Betteridge’s law of headlines is an adage that states: “Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no.”
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge's_law_of_headlines
In 1956 the press of Johns Hopkins University released an important compilation of essays by H. L. Mencken under the title “A Carnival of Buncombe” edited by Malcolm Moos. An essay called “Sham Battle” was published in the “Baltimore Evening Sun” on October 26, 1936, and it has been reprinted in this collection. Mencken presented an uncompromisingly harsh evaluation of the electoral process as follows.
“The state—or, to make the matter more concrete, the government—consists of a gang of men exactly like you and me. They have, taking one with another, no special talent for the business of government; they have only a talent for getting and holding office. Their principal device to that end is to search out groups who pant and pine for something they can’t get, and to promise to give it to them. Nine times out of ten that promise is worth nothing. The tenth time it is made good by looting A to satisfy B. In other words, government is a broker in pillage, and every election is a sort of advance auction sale of stolen goods.
Government, of course, has other functions, and some of them are useful and even valuable. It is supposed, in theory, to keep the peace, and also to protect the citizen against acts of God and the public enemy.”
Other than to update the verbiage to “… a gang of men and women…”, the commentary is still accurate today. Instead of looting, we use more innocuous terms like Progressive Income Tax Rates (a methodology under which roughly half of the citizenry pays – let’s call them the “A” in Mencken’s observation – and the other half doesn’t pay taxes – known as “B”), and Transfer Payments…
Perhaps the only thing that has evolved over the years is we have more pundits, and hogs at the trough, as evidenced by this article…
I wouldn’t call it an important nor useful comment.
It’s simple to complain about government waste and fraud. Anyone can do it. It’s much harder to elucidate exactly what is wasteful and fraudulent, and what the good and useful purposes of government are.
And for all those who make that complaint, they do nothing about it. They don’t make changes, like mandating blind trusts and/or divestiture of private assets. They don’t make campaign contributions illegal or banish lobbyists. They don’t institute effective cooling off periods for politicians. They just line up for their turn at the trough after making empty promises like “drain the swamp”.
Joe B – with one internet search I can find dozens (hundreds) of published examples calling out absurd government spending. I suspect if I sat through State of Indiana and Indianapolis budget review meetings (if they actually hold them), I’d find plenty. The issue isn’t what I can find – the issue is why don’t the bureaucrats do it. I think the answer is well identified in the relevant H.L. Mencken’s comments. Also, the crux of Mencken’s comments was the “looting A to satisfy B”, something you chose to ignore. Perhaps because you support the looting (oops, I mean “redistribution”).
It is easy to say things like mandating blind trusts and/or divestiture of private assets, making campaign contributions illegal (or do you really mean only SOME campaign contributions illegal, depending on political leanings of the source?), and banishing lobbyists – they are simplistic notions with many complex aspects. Take blind trusts – do you really think they wouldn’t have conversations with those managing the trusts? Do you tap their phones? Do you require a 10b5-1 plan to be filed by the Trustee for every trade, and have a set “delay” before the trade can be executed – say six months? Heck, Nancy Pelosi says she doesn’t talk to her husband Paul who just happened to invest in chip manufacturing when Congress is likely on the verge of passing legislation the bolster the chip manufacturing in the U.S. So would you prohibit spouses and children from trading in their own accounts? Where you draw the line on the prohibitions? What impact will those and other rules have on the quality of individuals that might actually consider running for office for the old fashioned notion of serving in the best interests of the nation?
Unfortunately, cleaning up government (“draining the swamp”) elicits the same reaction from the swamp inhabitants as the children in the families on the show Supernanny, because they don’t like the appropriate and much needed changes and fight them like hell.
Ah yes, I’m a flaming liberal. Tax the rich at 99.8%, give it all to the poor. Why don’t we just make it all state-owned property while we’re at it? Great assumptions there.
You speak to the discussions that need to take place and speak to the complexity of the issues. And when I say ban all campaign contributions, I meant ALL. I’d ban them from individuals. Money corrupts regardless the source.
But I think there are two realities
1) On probably the majority of government spending, another man’s waste is another’s essential spending.
2) No one is really interested in “draining the swamp”. They just want their turn at the trough.
I like the idea of directing money to pension obligations. Doing so should reduce the future cost of government.