AMERICAN CONSERVATISM IN 2008 AND BEYOND

Let it be recollected that the proportion of these taxes is not to be left to the discretion of the national legislature, but is to be determined by the numbers of each State, as described in the second section of the first article. An actual census or enumeration of the people must furnish the rule, a circumstance which effectually shuts the door to partiality or oppression. The abuse of this power of taxation seems to have been provided against with guarded circumspection. In addition to the precaution just mentioned, there is a provision that "all duties, imposts, and excises shall be UNIFORM throughout the United States.

Let it be recollected that the proportion of these taxes is not to be left to the discretion of the national legislature, but is to be determined by the numbers of each State, as described in the second section of the first article. An actual census or enumeration of the people must furnish the rule, a circumstance which effectually shuts the door to partiality or oppression. The abuse of this power of taxation seems to have been provided against with guarded circumspection. In addition to the precaution just mentioned, there is a provision that "all duties, imposts, and excises shall be UNIFORM throughout the United States.

Your plan is for nobody to focus on anyone's specific needs at all?

I note that you didn't respond to my post last page or two outlining that 'special interests' are, in fact, part of promoting the general welfare.

Cycloptichorn

"constitutionally mandated responsibilities?

How did we get into our current economic mess?

Heidi is the proprietor of a neighborhood bar. Encouraged by her elected leaders to increase sales to the disadvantaged, she decides to allow her loyal customers - most of whom are unemployed alcoholics - to drink now but pay later. She keeps track of the drinks consumed in a ledger (thereby granting her customers loans).

Sales triple within a few days plus word gets around and so that increasing numbers of customers flood into Heidi's bar.

Taking advantage of her customers' freedom from immediate payment
constraints, Heidi increases her prices for wine and beer, the
most-consumed beverages. Her receivables significantly increase again.

A young and dynamic customer service consultant at the local bank
recognizes these customer debts as valuable future assets and increases
Heidi's borrowing limit.

He sees no reason for undue concern since he has the debts of the
alcoholics as collateral.

At the bank's corporate headquarters, expert bankers transform these
customer assets into DRINKBONDS, ALKBONDS and PUKEBONDS. These
securities are then traded on markets worldwide. No one really
understands what these abbreviations mean and how the securities are
guaranteed. Nevertheless, as their prices continuously climb, the
securities become top-selling items.

One day, although the prices are still climbing, a risk manager
at the bank decides that they are at the upper end of their borrowing
ability and advises that the time has come to demand payment of the
debts incurred by the drinkers at Heidi's bar.

However they cannot pay back the debts so the bank fires the
risk manager.

Heidi cannot fulfill her loan obligations, plays herself a bonus from the remaining borrowed cash, declares bankruptcy, and retires in Tahiti.

DRINKBOND and ALKBOND drop in price by 95 %. PUKEBOND performs better, stabilizing in price after dropping by 80 %.

The suppliers of Heidi's bar, having granted her generous payment due
dates and having invested in the securities are faced with a new
situation. Her wine supplier claims bankruptcy, her beer supplier is
taken over by a competitor.

The bank is saved by the Government following dramatic round-the-clock
consultations and rescue bills by leaders from the governing political parties who also compassionatelyauthorize subsidies for alcoholics who have had their supply cut off.

The funds required for this purpose are obtained by a tax levied on the
non-drinkers.

Finally an explanation I understand !

This email - origianally, Heidi has the bar in "Berlin"/Germany [or "in any European country"] - circulates since months.

Comparing people who are having their homes foreclosed on to alcoholics is ... well, some kind of argumentation.

Those with no imagination or sense of humor and numbnuts, please scroll past this post.

Inside Cover:
Gingrich: Obama's Bipartisan Sham
Sunday, March 8, 2009 8:20 PM

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich said Sunday that the controversy surrounding Rush Limbaugh is nothing more than a political maneuver orchestrated by the Obama White House to distract from its economic failures.

It is "a deliberate strategy by the White House," to distract from the massive, $410 billion Congressional spending bill laden with 9,000 earmarks, Gingrich said. He specifically cited the "intense partisanship" of Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel as the mastermind of the Limbaugh/GOP attack. Earlier in the week, Gingrich compared Emanuel to the dirty tricksters who ran the Nixon White House.

"I think what they did with the whole Rush Limbaugh thing - they can't defend signing the 9,000 earmarks, they can't defend an energy-tax increase, they can't defend [Treasury Secretary Timothy F.] Geithner's failure to pay his income taxes, so they decide, 'Let's have a fight over Rush Limbaugh.' It is the exact opposite of what the president promised ... to focus on large things, not small things," Gingrich said.

“The president promised to focus on large things, not small things; he promised to bring us together, not divide us,” Gingrich continued. “… It has to trouble you to have that level of intense partisanship as chief of staff if we're going to in fact come together as a country. And I just think either Emanuel's got to change, or the president's got to understand he is--he is going to have a very partisan regime.”
http://www.newsmax.com/insidecover/gingrich_limbaugh_gop/2009/03/08/189696.html?s=al&promo_code=7BBF-1

Cycloptichorn wrote:

Your plan is for nobody to focus on anyone's specific needs at all?

I note that you didn't respond to my post last page or two outlining that 'special interests' are, in fact, part of promoting the general welfare.

Cycloptichorn

No, my plan is for each community/state to tax its own citizens for its own special needs and take care of those at a much more local level. All citizens should share in the common duty to fund the government for the common defense and GENERAL welfare and other constitutionally mandated responsibilities. If New York City needs a transit system, then by all means let it save, budget, tax, borrow or whatever it needs to do to secure necessary funding and build one, but do not fund it by confiscating funds from that guy in West Texas who has no stake in it, who will most likely never benefit from it, and/or who has no way of knowing what sort a system is needed in order to build it.

Keep government small and closer to home, and there is much more incentive to elect good people to run it and less opportunity for waste, graft, and corruption. If its the local leaders who are asking for tax dollars, you can bet they'll have to come up with a solid justification for asking for them and can be held accountable for how they are spent. Add on a gazillion layers of bureaucracy up to the federal government and much if not most or all of th money will be swallowed up by that bureaucracy.

You must have missed the into

Quote:

Those with no imagination or sense of humor and numbnuts, please scroll past this post.

Foxfyre wrote:

Cycloptichorn wrote:

Your plan is for nobody to focus on anyone's specific needs at all?

I note that you didn't respond to my post last page or two outlining that 'special interests' are, in fact, part of promoting the general welfare.

Cycloptichorn

No, my plan is for each community/state to tax its own citizens for its own special needs and take care of those at a much more local level. All citizens should share in the common duty to fund the government for the common defense and GENERAL welfare and other constitutionally mandated responsibilities. If New York City needs a transit system, then by all means let it save, budget, tax, borrow or whatever it needs to do to secure necessary funding and build one, but do not fund it by confiscating funds from that guy in West Texas who has no stake in it, who will most likely never benefit from it, and/or who has no way of knowing what sort a system is needed in order to build it.

First of all, West Texas does not pay for NY; it's the other way around.

Second, I think you miss out on economies of scale this way and ensure a patchwork nation. Large projects require more money sometimes than a small community can come up with by themselves, yet they often pay back for decades or centuries of continued growth thanks to the new infrastructure.

Quote:

Keep government small and closer to home, and there is much more incentive to elect good people to run it and less opportunity for waste, graft, and corruption. If its the local leaders who are asking for tax dollars, you can bet they'll have to come up with a solid justification for asking for them and can be held accountable for how they are spent. Add on a gazillion layers of bureaucracy up to the federal government and much if not most or all of th money will be swallowed up by that bureaucracy.

This is untrue. Do you have any evidence that the US buereaucracy swallows up 'most if not all' the money put towards projects?

Cycloptichorn

Efficiency in the Public and Private Sectors

However, we needn't stop there, since we have the effectiveness of government versus charity itself to consider. James Rolph Edwards has an excellent paper on this in the Journal of Libertarian Studies.5 He reminds us that (p. 3),

"Some fraction of each dollar taxed will always be absorbed in wages and salaries of the administrative bureaucracy, costs of purchasing, powering, maintaining and replacing equipment, buildings, etc., and other overhead costs. Only the remainder will actually be received by the target population in the form of cash or in kind payments. Many advocates of compulsory income redistribution have tended to ignore this inconvenient fact altogether in their writings, however. Indeed, most of the public discussion proceeds with an implicit assumption of costless, dollar-for-dollar income transfers."

Given this, it is worth considering where the overheads will be higher and how much money gets absorbed in costs�in state welfare or in private charity. Edwards goes on to say that (pp. 3-4),

"Of course it is also true of private charities dependent on voluntary donations that they have costs absorbing part of their revenue, but there is a huge difference in the efficiency with which they operate relative to government� [P]ublic income redistribution agencies are estimated to absorb about two-thirds of each dollar budgeted to them in overhead costs, and in some cases as much as three-quarters of each dollar. Using government data, Robert L. Woodson� calculated that, on average, 70 cents of each dollar budgeted for government assistance goes not to the poor, but to the members of the welfare bureaucracy and others serving the poor. Michael Tanner� cites regional studies supporting this 70/30 split."

In contrast, administrative and other operating costs in private charities absorb, on average, only one-third or less of each dollar donated, leaving the other two-thirds (or more) to be delivered to recipients. Charity Navigator,6 the newest of several private sector organizations that rate charities by various criteria and supply that information to the public on their websites, found that, as of 2004, 70% of the charities that they rated spent at least 75% of their budgets on the programs and services they exist to provide, and 90% spent at least 65%. The median administrative expense among all charities in their sample was only 10.3%.

Edwards (p. 4) suggest that actually this two-thirds figure is conservative: Charity Navigator only records charities that are tax exempt 501 (c)(3) organisations required to provide informational tax returns. That excludes religious organisations. Such organisations often use donated labour, and so can exclude labour from their total costs. Why this difference in costs?

"The basic reason for this large differential in costs between private and public agencies is not difficult to see. Depending largely on voluntary contributions, most private agencies are under strong pressures to operate efficiently and keep costs low. Benevolent citizens naturally wish a large fraction of their donations to reach the needy, and many will not keep donating to an agency that does not accomplish that. Donors can select among private non-profit charities, and competition between charities for donations tends to insure efficiency. Public aid agencies, in contrast, are budgeted their funds by Congress, which obtains them through compulsory taxation. These agencies are not under competitive pressures to keep costs down that are remotely equivalent to those of private charities. Indeed, their incentives may be much the opposite, as Niskanen (1994) has argued. Yet another factor promoting efficiency of private charities is that those operating at levels of inefficiency comparable to the average government agency are often prosecuted�by the government (which never applies the same standards or threat to its own agencies)�for fraud. Pressure on private charities to avoid such prosecution, and the bad publicity and loss of public trust resulting, is strong."

Where does this leave our argument now? Mary Ruwart again provides the answer:

"Of course, public welfare gives over 2/3 of every tax dollar we give them to overheads (e.g., salaries of the bureaucrats who administer the program). Private charities, however, give 2/3 of every dollar to those who need help. By switching to private distribution, we'd cut overheads in half. In other words, we'd double the dollars available to the needy once again."
http://www.libertarianalliance.co.uk/lapubs/econn/econn110.htm

In 2008, the United States will spend 17 percent of its gross domestic product (GDP) on health care. It is projected that the percentage will reach 20 percent by 2017.1
Although nearly 46 million Americans are uninsured, the United States spends more on health care than other industrialized nations, and those countries provide health insurance to all their citizens.3
Health care spending accounted for 10.9 percent of the GDP in Switzerland, 10.7 percent in Germany, 9.7 percent in Canada and 9.5 percent in France, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.4