The government _does_ control our ability to acquire goods. Ask any retail store, ask any food supplier, ask anyone. Then attempt to purchase some cocaine.

The government _does_ control our ability to work. Ask people here illegally or on a student visa if they're allowed to work or not. Ask a 12 year old.

The government even can control our ability to 'eat' stuff we own. Purchase some spray paint. Read the label about how it's 'illegal to use this in a manner inconsistent with the labeling'. They're talking about huffing. Yes, it's illegal to inhale something that you own. While I can't think of anything it's illegal to 'eat' per se, if they can stop you from inhaling something they can presumably stop you from eating it.

I'm not sure exactly what point you're making there. The government pretty clearly _is_ our master, except where we're specifically excluded them from certain areas via constitutional rights.

What the government _can't_ do, what stops it from putting people in slavery, is equal protection under the law and the protection from bills of attainder. They can't make laws giving just some people a tax rate of 100%...they'd have to do that to everyone, at which point it's really not 'slavery' anymore, it's 'everyone starves to death while all their stuff sit in government warehouses'.

Worrying about that is akin to worrying about 'What if the government drafted every single person in America and the government ceased existing due to lack of people in it?'. Well, yes, in theory, that is allowed under the constitution. No one's going to _do_ it, though.

Well, yes, but it would have been just as bad any other way.

The problem is, for decades, local governments have decide the way to 'help the economy' is to participate in a race to the bottom where they try to bribe corporations to show up and build there, with lower and lower taxes, and it was sorta inevitable that at some point they'd just start handing them money and property.

_How_ they hand them money and property almost entirely moot. The situation would have been just as bad if New London taxed everyone to raise $100 million dollars or whatever, bought the property, and given it to developers.

The state has the power to compel you to give it stuff. Arguing about that is just crazy. What they must be stopped from doing is _them_ giving stuff to corporations in return for imaginary benefits, or hell, even real benefits.

Not being 'okay' with something and it being an infringement of liberty are not the same thing. I'm not okay with people yammering on their cell phone on a bus, but it's probably not a constitutional issue.

Although asking if I'd mind if they did it to _me_ is not the same thing as an infringement of liberty. Doing things to just _me_ is, in fact, an infringement of my liberty...it's a bill of attainder. (They could do it as punishment for a crime...which we _do_. It's perfectly possible to be fined to nothingness. We exempt things like housing as a matter of law, not constitutional rights.)

If the government decides to tax _everyone_ at 100%, though, no, that's not an infringement of anyone's rights. (I will point out that does not reduce anyone to 'slavery'...it reduces everyone to starving to death.) Just like if the government decided to outlaw wearing clothing or drinking liquids or walking instead of crawling.

Obviously, passing such a law and then enforcing it randomly would be a violation of people's rights...again, a specific actual right, called 'equal protection under the law'.

Just because something is epically stupid and would destroy the country doesn't mean it's an 'infringement of my rights'. The constitution protects us against specific problems where the leadership of this country gets out of control and tries to put things ahead of rights we've decided are always more important, regardless of what the government thinks...it doesn't protect us against actual attempts to blow up the economy or committing suicide as a country. (That would be pretty much impossible to protect us from.)

OTOH, thanks for stating the misunderstand that the right's been subconsciously putting in everyone's head more clearly.

Indeed, I just made that comment on some other site to someone who was saying 'Oh, almost all government spending is unconstitutional, and an infringement on our rights.' I replied something like this:

To infringe my rights, things have to actually harm me in some manner. Spending money on me, or on others, does not harm me. Arguing that food stamps harm me and infringe on my rights is crazy.

People on the right argue the taxes harm me...but the government _does_ have the power to tax. So 'Food stamps infringe the constitution' can't get from there to here....the 'tax harm' is from something the government _is_ allowed to do, even if they aren't allowed to spend it how they are. That doesn't change the fact they could have exactly the same amount of taxes and spend it on more ICBMs or something. (In fact, an argument can be made that the level of spending is, and has been for quite some time, entirely unrelated to the level of taxes anyway, so it would be hard to even show an indirect link to 'unallowed' things.)

Secondly, more importantly, why the hell would anyone who cares about 'rights' care about the government spending like 4 cents a year of 'their money' on food stamps? What about, I dunno, the people we're imprisoning without charges? The whole 'seizing property without proving any changes' thing the DEA's been doing? Indeed, the entire premise of drug laws! What about the fact that the police seem utterly unwilling to record their interactions with the public, despite that technology being there for decades?

There's hundred and hundreds of actual constitutional right infringing issues that come before 'Hey, the states are supposed to do that, not the federal government', which isn't even an _individual_ constitutional right anyway...the only entities who should complain about that are the _states_.

Getting worked up about 'the government taking a tiny fraction of my money and spending it on stuff they shouldn't be allowed to ' is the equivalent of being worked up that the armed robbers didn't let you fix your bed hair during a home invasion. Yes, that was, indeed, rather rude of them, but, um...

You could operate a gulag and rape rooms for a measly hundred thousand a year, in fact. $20 a year for 4 guards to rotate shifts, and a rented warehouse for the remaining $20,000. That stuff is _cheap_. I've been trying to point this out for years to people on the right: The 'size' of the government is not the problem. That is a nonsensical measure of liberty.

If the government employed 200 million people to each hold one library book and read it aloud to any of the remaining 100 million people who came up to them, well, that's a pretty stupid and wasteful government, but everyone is still utterly free.

If the government employs four people who wander around breaking into houses and imprisoning people they don't like, you are not free. (Although admittedly with only four people, the situation would rapidly spiral out of control and the people would fight back.)

What the corporate right has managed to do is define 'free' as 'taxless'. That's it. That is what 'freedom' now means, at a subconscious level, to a good portion of the population. The lack of taxes makes you free. Taxes are the only possible infringement of liberty.

Oh, and property, which is why the right got all worked up about Kelo, where there was outrage directed at entirely the wrong thing. The government can use eminent domain to take property for basically whatever reason, just like it could collect taxes for whatever reason.

Kelo would hardly have been better if New London had decided to tax everyone to the poorhouse, _buy_ the land, and then sell it undervalued. Or if they'd just keep all tax revenue the same, defunded everything for a few years, and saved enough money to buy the property. The problem there was a city giving handout to corporations, not how it happened to _gain_ said things to hand out.

Taxes are not an infringement on liberty. They are not a 'compromise of liberty' we make to find the government, because they are not related to liberty at all.

Indeed, this is just dog-whistle nonsense.

It's functionally impossible for someone to be endangering the life of an a fetus without endangering the life of the woman carrying it. At least, if they're endangering it in a way that a self-defense claim would work...they could poison it or something, but you don't normally have to kill poisoners to stop them, and that wouldn't work in court.

The only way this important is if you believe this is happening. Maybe pro-lifer believe that abortion doctors are drugging women and doing abortions without their consent?

Although that still doesn't make a lot of sense. Legally, if someone drugs someone else, and starts cutting them up, you can probably just shoot them in justifiable homicide anyway, even if they claim they were a doctor and just committing _really_ aggravated assault that they intended the person to live through. (This whole thing is surreally unlikely, though.)

Does anyone else find it odd that the 'defense of other' clause only lets you do it for family? Surely, if someone is about to murder a total stranger, you can legally shoot them too.

Then they're very very confused.

In the 1925, the Christians were _progressives_, and exactly the people arguing for changing society for the better. The overlap between the Temperance and Eugenics movement is pretty large, and the Temperance movement almost entirely Christianity based.

Meanwhile 'Conservative' didn't mean _anything at all_. Conservativism didn't appear in the US until the 1950s, and didn't solidify until 1964.

So claiming 'Christian conservatives' had anything to do with the opposition to eugenics is just utter and complete nonsense, historically, as such a group did not, and could not have, existed in any shape at all, and it was the Christians attempting to social engineer society and, if not actually in favor of eugenics themselves, were at least standing right next to people who were.

Also, note the eugenics movement, despite the quotes above, never even slightly suggested killing children as any sort of actual policy at all. It was entirely about castrating 'defective' adults so they couldn't reproduce. Which is, indeed, a pretty horrible policy, but not anywhere near as bad as people seem to think they were suggesting.

Oh, sure, individuals will, but there are two sorts of people in charge of the pro-life movement: a) Those that are anti-women and would like the law to go further into anti-contraceptive, which is why the movement isn't in favor of those either, despite that being an obvious way to reduce abortions _also_. b) Those that are using the movement for political gains, which is why the plan, for the longest time, was 'keep electing Republicans and eventually we'll replace the Supreme Court', which is possibly the most inane political plan ever...unless you're a Republican running for office.

At this point, the straight-up Republican control of the anti-abortion movement has been lost, (Just like the anti-tax people hijacked the other half of the party, and named it the Tea Party.), but, like that just left, basically, the anti-women people in charge.

No one running any of the pro-life groups has ever, as far as anyone can tell from the POV over here on the left, has even been actually in favor of actually doing anything to reduce the number of abortions. It's either political posturing, or (and now entirely), a way to rail against loose women and even imprison them.

Call me cynical if you will, but as a 'less abortions' member of pro-choice position, no group has done more to _stop_ the reduction of abortion than the pro-life movement. And when the pro-choice movement has an idea on how to reduce abortions, ideology on the right, not 'pro-life ideology' but _economic_ ideology or 'freedom' ideology or something like that, utterly stops that idea from being considered on the pro-life side.

Again, this is people _running_ the groups...plenty of pro-life individuals are utterly on board with these plans. One can only imagine what they think when the plans go nowhere.

(For some reason I can't reply to your comment, so I am replying to mine.)

I completely apologize if you thought I was, in any manner, attempting to say the stupid-left was smarter than the stupid-right.

If anything, the stupid-left is stupider, because they actually, at some level, accept science, and understand it, and then come up with crazy superstitions like 'vaccines are bad' and run around trying to justify them. This is _epicly_ stupid.

Whereas the stupid-right is just ignorant and doesn't really understand what science is beyond 'a bunch of eggheads saying things'. The stupid-right lives in a world where truth is handed down from high, and they reject competing truth, which is an entire understandable world-view.

This is why the stupid-right tend to treat science _as_ a 'set of beliefs', utterly baffling people who know that science is, at most, a single belief, a belief that is not really in dispute by anyone. (The belief that 'You can predict things by observing things and make theories to explain them.') 'Science', by itself, doesn't imply evolution or even a belief in gravity.

The stupid-left, OTOH, live in a world where, in theory, facts can be determined by objective evidence, and yet they refuse to apply their own rules to actually figure out the truth WRT whatever idiotic thing they believe.

Which is why the stupid-right doesn't want those competing truths taught to children, or at least their truth also taught, whereas the stupid-left delusionally thinks their 'truths' have been proven by their own super-duper science (as opposed to actual science, which has been duped, probably by big corporations) so don't mind.

'Different levels of abstraction' is a great way to talk about that, and I'm stealing that phrase from you.

Jenny McCarthy is a _Hollywood_Scientologist_. It's a category that 20 people total in the entire universe are in, so it's not really that representative of anything.

And anti-vax isn't anti-science in the sense I was using 'science'. Anti-vax is anti-_fact_. They actually accept science, which is why the anti-vaxers on the left have to keep changing their rational when science proves them incorrect. (The ones on the right, OTOH, just assert 'religion' or 'freedom' to have their kids die.)

I actually think what ppnl said is exactly right. The left, when it turns irrational, goes anti-technology, luddite. Anti-nuclear, anti-vaccine, anti-medicine, anti-automobile, etc. Usually with vast conspiracy theories to explain why everyone has it wrong.

The right, when it turns irrational, goes into into _denialism_. They just say 'You cannot tell me actual facts'.

To put it another way, if the left was doing climate change denying, they would be running around asserting that all the electric cars wouldn't work, and that the people producing them are evil con-men, and that the real problem is making the plastic for the car bodies, and stuff like that...it probably wouldn't even occur to the left to deny the _actual fact_ that the climate was changing.

The 'stupid left' doesn't argue with things that are obviously demonstrably true...they just invent nonsensical conclusions from those things. Whereas the 'stupid right' does argue with a lot of the actual facts, because it's those 'Godless scientists' and 'ivy tower elites' who came up with those facts.

New York City lost a huge amount from the pension fund due to the economy crash. Not the recession, the actual crash, as the money was invested in things that lost value.

http://www.nysun.com/new-york/city-pension-funds-lose-billions/80738/

So there's another reason pension costs are going up: Because investments crashed. And, actually, there's yet another reason...health care costs continue to skyrocket.

None of this really has anything to do with unions, expect that unions actually _demand_ health care and retirement, and at this point, _no one_ can afford paying for those things, at least, not without raising taxes, which they won't.

And, yes, taxes are a race to the bottom. That doesn't really change my point.

But, isn't 'All theories will be incomplete as long as there are people to create them' itself a theory, and hence, according to itself, not complete?

Where's Godel when you need him? ;)

And if he'd said 'anti-science' ideology I'd have no problem. Instead, for some reason, he said 'anti-education'.

Which is actually important, because the left has just anti-science people, whereas the right, in addition to having anti-science people, often has anti-education people too.

Actually, the left doesn't really have anti-science people. It has people who think that X is more important than stuff that normal people think it is not, which is sorta what I was trying to explain with 'object to what they do'. People objecting to animal research are not objecting to 'knowing how to cure cancer', they have just (irrationally) decided that not killing pigs is more important than curing cancer.

Same with the environmentalists, and to quote Craig Ferguson 'I wait your letters', anti-nuclear people, who think that not having easily manageable nuclear waste is more important than not spewing cancer-causing coal dust everywhere. Or the (mostly imaginary) hippies who think we should go back to pre-industrial times.

The fanatic left often veers into anti-science because of the results, real or imagined, of that science. Animals are more important than people! Trees are more important than people! No nuclear waste is more important than people! Radioactive testing might unleash Godzilla! The left and the right both can have this belief, in fact.

However, the right is often anti-science as an aspect of anti-education. A fair number of fanatics on the right seem to think that education _itself_ is bad, and this has actually managed to bubble up to the leaders ranting about 'elitism' (When the right says 'elite', they mean 'educated'. When the left says it, they mean 'rich'.) and 'liberal college professors' and 'ivy towers'.

The thing about evolution is exactly that. Teaching evolution has no actual physical harmful effects. There's no mistaken priorities over harm, because there is no harm. Or, rather, the harm is literally _knowledge_. It is saying 'People should not know this thing.', which is quite a different direction than where the anti-science left is coming from.

Yeah, and if Einstein is correct Newton is wrong. But _physics_ is correct. The idea that there are actual laws that govern the movement of stuff is correct, and the idea that the FSM pulls things to earth with his noodly appendages is not something that should be taught, or even _mentioned_, in school. (I'm not even a fan of the 'teach ID in philosophy class' concept. ID is not a 'philosophy'. Christianity might be, but not the creation myth part of it.)

There are accepted general theories in science, and there are obscure corner case theories debating aspect of those, which don't matter in general education because no one gets anywhere close to them. No one cares about different sorts of evolutionary theories, just like no one care that the formula you're using to calculate motion stops working right at 9/10th the speed of light. No high schooler is going to deal with that. Heck, actual engineers don't deal with that 99.9999% of the time.

Public schools teach a simplification of everything, and don't need to figure to which evolutionary theory is correct, anymore than they need to figure out whether Einstein or Newton is right....they're nowhere at the level of that actually making a difference.

If you want to lump 'all people threatened because of what the threatener believes' into one group, almost all generalized threats fall under that. (I.e, threats not made for personal reasons.)

I was just pointing out that 'researchers' are not 'teachers', nor are they 'educators', and hence cannot possibly be the the targets of the majority of 'threats against educators'.

You're right, lucrative retirement payments aren't really bankrupting state and municipal governments. Lack of _tax revenue_ are doing that.

Which is about 33% the fault of the recession, and 33% the fault of the local right-wing tax-cut fanatics failing to have any buffers in revenue at all, and even having too little tax revenue before the recession, and 33% the lack of the Federal government failing to help out enough because of tax-cut fanatics there.

Threats against animal researches isn't even slightly related to threats against _teachers_. Those are two entirely different things.

Animal researchers are not being threatened because of what they 'teach', because they do not teach anything. They are being threatened because of what they do.

If all, or even any percentage of all, of environmentalists went around asserting that finishing constructing a house was going to kill someone, yes, they would be liars or cowards for not destroying construction equipment. As no one actually _does_ say that, though, it's a moot point.

The ELF is actually a pretty good proof of what I'm talking about WRT to how people behave to things they _actually think_ are killing people. A single SUV driver is not going to kill anyone, even statistically, with pollution. And yet there are people willing to light SUVs on fire.

On one hand, we have one 'side' where they believe the earth is being damaged, the majority claim being that it's being very slowly damaged and generally no one is standing around yelling at construction crews...

...and there _still are_ people willing to commit massive property damage. To quote the FBI: 'In 2005, the FBI announced that the ELF is America's greatest domestic terrorist threat, responsible for over 1,200 "criminal incidents" amounting to tens of millions of dollars in damage to property.'

OTOH, we have this other group, who is fighting, according to them, _murder_. Not trees being cut down, not oil being burned to slightly damage environment, but clear, direct, outright murder of people...

...and they're content with yelling at people and glueing locks.

Something's really really off there. Where is the ELF equivalent for anti-abortion people, who wander around firebombing abortion providers?

While no one knows how many people are in 'ELF' (Or even what that really means), for 1200 incidents (And probably only 200 non-trivial ones that went beyond slashing tires or spray paint or something.) I'll guess it's about 300 people in total, clustered in groups of maybe a dozen at a time. Which is basically the same as the number of abortion protesters outside clinics.

(I actually find it strange to have to point out how _little_ violence or even vandalism there is from an organization on the right of the political spectrum, because frankly most of the political violence and vandalism and actual terrorism _is_ from the right at this moment in time...but it's all anti-tax or white-power or crazy Beck-conspiracy nonsense. )

Parts of relativity are easier to grasp that others.

For example, almost everyone can imagine gravity and mass as a rubber sheet with stuff rolling around on it. We can imagine a ball rolling around a dent caused by another ball, we can see how something would curve, we can see that someone next a ball to has a very step 'slope' to climb, etc. That's analogy is actually more intuitive than what we have in our head by default, where we have to keep remapping 'down' to figure out how things 'fall'.

Other stuff, not so easy to understand. Think of the speed of light as 0 or as mass/0, and everything makes a lot more sense. Light has no actual mass (Although it does, strangely, have 'virtual mass'.), so light is 0/0, which is infinite, and light cannot actually go any other speed, but everything else has mass and can't be divided by zero, so cannot go the speed of light. (Yes, yes, the actual value of 0/0 is up for debate, but 'infinite' is a possible value, as is 'all values')

Note that this math is crazy, scientifically, but it gives a good analogy of the weirdness. Relativity is mentally easier to understand if you operate from the speed of light as the _baseline_, instead of trying to operate from 0 as the baseline.

Also, I didn't really 'suggest' that pregnant women have their medical care paid for, or certainly don't get the credit for it.

The pro-choice people have been saying that for decades. The left has been saying that for decades. That's part of that Planned Parenthood is _for_, although they obviously don't have the funding for it, although they do some cheap prenatal tests. It's really a blatantly obvious idea, once you lean that 50% of all abortions have 'cost of child' as one of the considerations, and '25% have it as the primary considerations. Remove that, and hey, obviously less abortions. Not rocket science, and I should not be credited in any way for the idea.

But the question you should be asking yourself is "But, wait, this seems like a non-controversial issue that the pro-life people should be behind, so if it's not a secret, and it's been around forever, why aren't they?"

To figure that out, you have to ask yourself what political purpose does the pro-life movement serve? Who does it get votes for? What group does it elect? What group is essentially in control of it? Does _that_ group want less abortions at the cost of higher taxes, or do they just want a bunch of people voting against the baby-killing Democrats? (Oops, gave it away.)

As I pointed out, there is, indeed, a finite amount of people who actually stand by the sidelines at abortion clinics and yell things. These people are _most_ vocal about it being murder, and yet refuse to do anything. They don't need to spend time on this, or travel anywhere. They're already there, spending entire days yelling at people, and not doing anything else.

And 'anything' doesn't require murder. Like I said, an alternative would be slam your car into the front door of the building hours before it opens. Or attempt to burn the empty building down. Apparently protesters do sometimes _glue_ the front locks of such buildings, but even _that_ absurdly trivially thing is not that common, probably because they have cameras and people get arrested for it.

Nice to know that apparently spending time in jail is not worth it to attempt to save someone's life. Or them blowing up their own car.

And the trolley problem doesn't apply to killing _murderers_. Most people agree with the third question there on that site, if the guy to push in front of the train was the reason the other people were going to die, they'd push. People generally agree murderers should be killed to keep them from killing other people. In fact, even the law is on board with that, except it doesn't count fetuses as people.

Saying 'All people do not want to go all the way' does not, in fact, explain why a few people don't go all the way, and others go pretty far, and the rest just resort to physically blocking the doors or something.

Instead, it's maybe one protester who decides to break the law by refusing to stand back. And that's it. Oh, except when someone actually _does_ shoot a doctor, like George Tiller, at which point the pro-life organizations are shocked, shocked I tell you, to know that someone killed someone they've been fingering as an unrepentant and unstoppable mass murderer. But that happens once a decade.

In fact, there's probably more _vigilant murder_ of gang members by members of their community who are feed up with their actions. Despite gang members being much harder to kill and the risk of getting killed in return.

Either the American people are a more okay with just letting murder happen 50 feet away from them than I suspect, or the pro-life movement is full of very very very stupid people who cannot figure out how to disable abortions from happening for a little bit, or the pro-life movement, even the protesters at abortion clinics, don't actually think that killing fetuses counts as killing people.

Well, it's an interesting question.

Like I said, the pro-life movement appears to regard almost any abortion as something that should be illegal, so if you want legalized abortion, you probably don't belong in that group. However, they know this is unlikely at this moment in time, so are moving the laws, so you might end up 'on their side'.

OTOH, it's sorta down to whether or not you want Roe V. Wade overturned, at least for 90% of the people. But not for all...I'm pro-choice, but I'm someone who actually does want it overturned, simply so the pro-life people will _lose_, once and for all.

Like I said somewhere here, there isn't a majority even in South Dakota to actually ban abortion. Yes, it might win ballot measures, but weird things win ballot measures. Until it's overturned, the pro-life people will play martyr and use misleading polls and misidentify themselves and claim support for laws they simply have no actual support for. If you actually showed women being put in prison for having an abortion, it simply could not stay illegal. So I want Roe v. Wade overturned, but that's just me.

Bu, back on topic...in general, I would say that 'pro-life want it mostly illegal', and 'pro-choice want it mostly legal', and there probably is some overlap....but the overlap is way way to the pro-life side compared to now.

Yeah, I know. I go around calling myself pro-gun-control and everyone assumes I'm in favor of passing laws to control guns. Just because I think guns are bad and dangerous doesn't mean I'm in of laws banning then. I have no idea why people, when I call myself 'pro-gun-control', leap to that conclusion. (Note, I am not actually pro-gun-control, or even anti-gun)

More seriously, 'pro-life' is a political position with the stated political goal of making abortion less legal. In fact, making it utterly illegal, but if someone wants to dispute that, I have no problem say 'less legal'.

If you thin abortion is immoral but should be legal, you are, in fact, 'pro-choice'. That is the _political_ position you hold. Pro-life and pro-choice are political positions. They are entirely concerned with what sort of laws you want.

If you want to come up with some moral position meaning 'abortion should be legal but is immoral', then you probably want to pick a name that isn't already used, and picking one that is a political position that is opposite your political position is extremely silly.

Perhaps 'anti-abortion' would work? The slogan 'safe, legal, and rare' is what politicians tend to use, although that's not really a name.

Yes, but 'killing' is not the only option. Most of them appear to be perfectly willing to hang beyond police lines around and shout at the murderer. Killing the murderer isn't the only option...they could drive their car up and wedge it against the door, they form human chains and require the police to physically haul them out of the way, etc, etc.

They're clearly not uninterested bystanders, as they went to all the trouble to be there...but, um, that's it.

If someone was operating what functionally a death camp and I was going there to protest, I like to think that I wouldn't stand neatly behind police lines and chat slogans, especially when I saw victims going in. Especially if otherwise the rule of law was intact, and I knew I'd end up in the justice system and not beaten to death by the police.

Like I said, either they're the most cowardly people who ever lived...or they don't believe their rhetoric.

Indeed, and this is why I say, in all political discussion I have, that taxes are _not a political issue_. Taxes must match spending. Period. There is no such thing as 'tax policy'.(1)

You can have no more 'tax policy' than you can have 'gasoline purchasing policy'. You buy enough gas to actually move the car where you want to. You can buy it at different places, you can hoard it when it's cheaper, you can run on a gallon at a time, whatever. But you cannot assert 'We are spending too much on gas', and then, have, as a policy, that we will...purchase less gas, but continue to drive basically the same.

That's literally insane thinking. I can't even _explain_ how insane that is, it's so far a violation of actual behavioral norms. 'Paying for gas' is not some external thing that can be altered by itself.

If you want us to drive less, fine, propose that. Do not strand us on the side of the road where we have to take out expensive loans to cover the gas.

But one entire political party, and half of another, have delusionally decided that 'taxes' are some political thing, and that we should make spending match them, despite the fact this is clearly insanely backwards, and additionally,as the last three decades have shown, that we are _unable_ to make spending match them, outside of the economic boom in the 90s.

Much hay has been made of the facts the Republicans only met $32 billion of the $100 billion budget cut this year, and almost everyone has ignored the fact that $100 billion would literally do nothing, considering that we just passed a tax cut for $700 billion, a tax cut the Republicans demanded.

We should spend the money we need to spend. We should collect in taxes approximately that much.

We can argue what amount we 'need' to spend, like normal human beings. What we cannot do, what we must not do, is cut revenue as if it's some abstract thing.

And we must _remove from political debate_ people who demand we act like that, as if we can somehow buy less gas than the gas we use. Because those people have racked up _astronomical_ loans. Those people should not be taken seriously by anyone whosoever.

Of course, all this is a moot point, as, at the moment, the recession is more important than worrying about this. But it doesn't change the fact that 'spending' is a reasonable policy question, but 'taxes' are not.

1) Yes, yes, there's reasonable policy on who and what and where and when you tax, and you can even tax more during a boom and less during a surplus, and all sorts of things, so there is actually a tax policy. But there is no 'how much' policy on average. 'How much taxes we collect' is answered by 'how much spending we do', and cannot be _decided_ in any manner.