It's ridiculous how much Kur sounds like the sensational right-winger radio guests in GTA 4. It's like literally word for word.
Hardly. I've heard that guy and nothing I am saying sounds like him. But I suppose to a hard left liberal, any amount of conservatism sounds 'sensational'.
Nothing I am saying is sensational. What I am saying is the principles and policies this country used for almost 200 years to become the super power it is today. What I am saying is the reason the US constitution is the oldest document of its kind still being followed. What I am saying is that policies like social security, public schools, national health care, welfare, food stamps, medicare, etc. all give the government more power and responsibility than the founding fathers ever wanted the government to have. With all these policies you are basically relying on the government to take care of you, educate you, and even feed you. That isn't freedom, it is how you treat a pet.
Freedom is great, but it comes with a price. You have to have personal accountability. If you want freedom, you have to be ready to make choices that will affect your life and you have to be ready to take responsibility if some of those choices are the wrong choices.
blazedaces said:
Source? Nope, of course you don't have one, because you're just a dishonest guy...
Inflating your tires and getting a tune up would reduce the amount of gasoline your car needs to use. Less would be wasted as you drive. This isn't all too complicated. He clearly didn't mean gas prices are going down. Stop sounding like a 4-year-old.
-blazed
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XzZNP4tTfV0
You seriously think I am just making this up?
He said it.
Of course I know that inflating your tires and getting a tune up will save you a few miles per gallon (assuming you always drive around with flat tires and your engine out of tune..)
And of course he did not say it would reduce the price of oil. So then what was the point? If it doesn't reduce the price of a gallon of gas, why even say it? Who cares if you inflate your tires and go from 20 mpg to 21 mpg? You will still be paying $4 a gallon for gas. There will still be a world wide shortage of oil and the US will still have to pay full price for a barrel of that oil. And because of that shortage, the price of oil will continue to climb higher and higher.
Now, if we drill for oil ourselves, we no longer rely on the world market to buy our oil. There is no longer an oil supply shortage as far as the US is concerned. There will be tens of thousands of new jobs created. The price of a gallon of gas will drop, you can still inflate your tires and get better fuel economy, and if we drill enough, we may even be able to sell some oil to other countries and bring some of their money to us, instead of sending ours to them. Not only that, but if the US increases supply, the world wide price of oil will fall, allowing poorer countries to more easily afford their energy costs.
Conservation is great, don't get me wrong. But conservation will never increase supply. Demand will always increase. China and India are using more and more oil every quarter, the western countries population will continue to grow and need oil for energy and fuel. Inflating your tires will do nothing to reduce the price of a gallon of gas.
And there is no way that keeping your tires inflated will save as much oil as we would be drilling. Most people keep their tires pretty well inflated anyway.
This is simply supply and demand. I don't understand why liberals can not understand it.
And please leave the personal attacks at the door. I have not lied or been dishonest once in any post I've made. Just because my views are different than yours, does not make me dishonest.
That doctors view on the economy strongly influences his reasons for wanting a single party universal health care system.
How can you say "People wouldn't need to cancel their coverage to save a few bucks"? What choice would they have? Of course, they could just not buy that gallon of milk to save a few bucks, or not take that vacation to save a few bucks, or not visit their parents across town to save a few bucks, and why? Because the government is forcing them to spend their money on a health care plan.
Everybody has the right to health care. But nobody is entitled to it. If you want it, go get it. If you can't afford it, you can't afford it.
And how could a free market health care system be "the worst thing that could happen"?
Think about what free market is. If AllState and Statefarm car insurance are competing for your business, what do they do? They certainly do not jack up prices and give sub par quality. No, they lower their prices or throw in free services in an effort to compete in the free market. Over all the consumer gets a better deal, better service, and it keeps the companies honest.
So if it works for car insurance, life insurance, grocery stores, wal-mart, target, auto repair shops, and all other forms of goods and service supply, why oh why, would it not work with health insurance?
Free market has a proven track record. It works. The reason the US' health care system isn't the best in the world is because it is over 50% funded and run by the government and is for some stupid reason, the responsibility of employers to provide to their employees, sometimes for free (nothing is ever free) and sometimes for a reduced rate. In both cases, would it not be better to let the person find their own health coverage and free up the employers money to, oh I don't know, pay the employee. In my own case, if my company did not have to pay health insurance costs, they would be able to pay me an extra $125 a month. With that $125 and the $100 I have to pay, I could by my own health insurance with better coverage and still have over $80 a month that I do not have now.
And please do not keep playing up the Canadian health care system as if it was flawless.
"A letter from the Moncton Hospital to a New Brunswick heart patient in need of an electrocardiogram said the appointment would be in three months. It added: "If the person named on this computer-generated letter is deceased, please accept our sincere apologies."
"Americans who flock to Canada for cheap flu shots often come away impressed at the free and first-class medical care available to Canadians, rich or poor. But tell that to hospital administrators constantly having to cut staff for lack of funds, or to the mother whose teenager was advised she would have to wait up to three years for surgery to repair a torn knee ligament. "
"... the average wait for surgical or specialist treatment is nearly 18 weeks, up from 9.3 weeks in 1993..."
"... a patient who was informed by Ontario officials that since Ontario couldn't help him, they would spend $35,000 to send him to the United States for surgery.
Day said his Vancouver clinic could have done it for $12,000 but the Ontario officials "do not philosophically support sending an individual to a nongovernment clinic in Canada."
"Another watershed lawsuit was filed last year against 12 Quebec hospitals on behalf of 10,000 breast-cancer patients in Quebec who had to wait more than eight weeks for radiation therapy during a period dating to October 1997.
One woman went to Turkey for treatment. Another, Johanne Lavoie, was among several sent to the United States. Diagnosed with invasive breast cancer in 1999, she traveled every week with her 5-year-old son to Vermont, a four-hour bus ride. "
"Rates vary from province to province, but Ontario, the most populous, spends roughly 40 percent of every tax dollar on health care, according to the Canadian Taxpayers Federation."
"It calculates that at present rates, Ontario will be spending 85 percent of its budget on health care by 2035."
All quoted from this article
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2005/03/20/health/main681801.shtml?cmp=EM8705
A good point to remember is that if there is no universal health care system, there can be no tax to pay for that system, leaving that money in the pockets of the people, enabling them to pay for health insurance if they so choose, or use that money to buy food if they can not afford health insurance. And if a person can not afford health insurance, how could they afford to be forced to pay taxes to pay for the health insurance of not only themselves, but also of the people in their state or country who do not pay taxes, but still utilize the benefits of that health insurance program?
Schools.
Fire teachers for doing a bad job... Ok. But they can't. Why? Because there is a shortage of teachers. You fire one teacher and spend months trying to replace them. And there is good reason for this, it is no secret that public school teachers make a pretty useless wage. And really, who wants to put up with 30+ little brats for 6 hours a day, for less than $35,000 a year?
Spend money on the needs of the student? They do. Or at least they say they do. Not really much accountability remember? You said so yourself.
Make someone accountable? How? If the school is doing poorly, fire the super? Fire the principal? Then what? A new principal comes in and the school continues to do poorly so you fire him to? It takes even more money to enforce this accountability. You need to pay for committees, investigations, and a whole bunch of other things to be able to properly blame somebody for something, and then you have to spend even more to figure out what to change to get it right. All this money is diverted from the funds you wanted spent on the needs of the students.
Yes do away with no child left behind. I could not agree more. It does basically nothing but soak up tax dollars.
And again, I take this back to the free market argument. If all schools were private schools, they would need lower tuition rates and higher results just to stay in business against other schools. Parents would be spending less (no education taxes after all) for a much better education for their children. Teachers would be making more money because they would be working for a company, a company whose agenda is to make profit. They make that profit by have good teachers who are happy working at that school and turn out a high quality product (educated rugrats)
Social security. It is nearly bankrupt. Barrack Obama wants to increase social security tax by something like 8% so it will last another 10 or 15 years. Whatever. It doesn't work and we can't just get rid of it because of the people who completely rely on it. Now, had social security never been implimented, I would have an extra $30 - $50 in my weekly check that I could use to buy food, gas, cable, or put into a retirement account THAT WORKS. Even if a person collects social security, it is not nearly enough to live on and you collect far less that you would had you put the same amount of money into a proper retirement plan. Not only that, you need a separate retirement to live on with social security anyway. Social security is just another failed liberal policy that relies on the government to (attempt to) ease our burdens and take care of us because we are all too stupid to do it ourselves. Just like public education and just like they want to do with national health care. Even your single player health care system can only work for a finite amount of time.
Corporate fraud.
You still haven't shown me how this is some huge problem. Of course there are a few bad apples, but on average I simply have not seen the wide spread corruption the liberals are always going on about.
And who ever said that you HAVE to work for minimum wage? Just because there is a minimum wage (only $6.90 here in Arizona) does not mean you are required to earn only minimum wage. It is entirely possible and likely that you will make more than minimum wage. Actually, I don't even know of a place that pays minimum wage. Even the fast food places out here pay at least $1.50 over minimum.
And don't tell me you can't live on minimum wage. Of course it is extremely difficult and nobody would ever want to, but it can be done. My brother supported 6 people on minimum wage for 4 months while he took the initiative to get training for a better paying job.
Minimum wage jobs are meant for part time employees, kids in high school, people new to the working life, or like my brother, as an emergency source of income while looking for a better job if you lose your job unexpectedly. If you are 45 years old and working for minimum wage then you did something really wrong with your life and you need to take a step back and find a way to change yourself. Even a high school drop out can find a way to make at least $10 an hour.
But I really fail to see why I should have to pay for a person making minimum (or for that matter, nothing) wage, to go to a doctor, or retire, or send their kids to some crappy public school.
I am not rich. I am not even close to middle class. I can't afford a cell phone or an HDTV, or even a car, but I am still forced to use my own money to pay for a retirement plan I don't want, and may never even collect, I am still forced to pay for somebody elses food (food stamps) I am still forced to pay for somebody elses health care (medicare, Acchess) I don't have any kids and I may never have any kids, yet I am forced to pay for everybody elses kids to go to school. I am still forced to pay for somebody elses HDTV, rent, mortgage, car, cell phone, and toilet paper, in the form of the ridiculous amounts of Welfare checks the government hand out on a daily basis. And why? Because nobody wants to take responsibility for their own lives. They want the government to hold their hand and take care of everything for them.
If these few thing were left up to me to handle on my own, I would have better health insurance, better retirement, and more money to spend in my daily life. But the liberals in the government don't trust me to make the right decisions regarding my own life.
