The Ultimate Question

IMHO & that of many others the US Government (Congress & the President, mostly) has fucked up most everything they have touched. One side or the other decries Big Tobacco, Big Pharmaceuticals, Big Oil, Big War, Big Weapons, Big Law...... Why not decry Big Government & BIG TAX & .... BIG BIG POLITICS!

(AT LEAST A BILLION $ PRICE TAG THIS YEAR!)

BIG Spending Bubble! <<==

It is my thesis that Government doesn't do anything well (except perhaps tax & spend & continue to try to get elected again). So why should we trust anything Big Government does to affect the current areas they would like to spend your & my tax dollars on:

Medicare & Health Care in General
Social Security
The financial crisis & securities (bailout etc.) ... Housing etc.
Energy
& ... the ultimate con game (or NOT) Global Climate Change
World Hunger & genocide
Abortion & Life

The difference between the parties has become blurred. Now they both seem to be moving toward bigger government. The ultimate big government is socialist which is likely to devolve into totalitarianism.

I defy each side to present something or some program that Big Government solved & which shows up today as still solved....& which couldn't have been solved better by private ingenuity & private/public investment.

12/20/2008 - & NOW, post-election, we see the government handling of the economy giving bailouts as far as the eye can see! Can anyone argue that the government does anything well? The president-elect is promising that there is no ceiling to spending to get out of the mess - the sky's the limit! And the US Congress votes itself a raise. This is the stuff of which revolutions are made. Now where did we hide that guillotine?

3/7/2009 - 150 days and still counting I wonder why nobody has yet found something that the US Government does well?

source: ... Obama has set a goal of signing a bill this year that would fix the U.S. health care system, which is the costliest in the world and leaves an estimated 48 million people uninsured, plus many others lacking adequate coverage.

"Our ideas and opinions about how to achieve this reform will vary, but our goal must be the same: quality, affordable health care for every American that no longer overwhelms the budgets of families, businesses and our government," Obama said.

...

So what has the government done which proves that it can fix healthcare in a sustainable way better than private enterprise unfettered by government meddling? What system shall we model it after that the government has produced? We're talking about a segment of the economy that was estimated during Hillarycare as ~17% of the economy.

9/26/2010 - now 718 days since I asked the question !!! - still no answer. And yet the economy & jobs situation continues to get worse & GM is back to making political contributions - (a bit incestuous don't you think?).

Comments

Mark de LA says

Mark de LA says

If you want more info on how bad the government does things you should have watched 20/20 last night with John Stossel. The only things getting done in New Orleans are by individuals completely independent of government handouts. There is much much more here. In particular the farm bill's rotten underbelly was exposed. Katrina, Campaign Finance, Regulation, & many other items were discussed in plain terms.

Good Job

Mark de LA says

A government that is just better than nothing! - a lot of hope & a lot of change (yours) and no difference for the good.

Mark de LA says

This needs to be quoted here one more time (at least!)

The America of my time line is a laboratory example of what can happen to democracies, what has eventually happened to all perfect democracies throughout all histories. A perfect democracy, a "warm body" democracy in which every adult may vote and all votes count equally, has no internal feedback for self-correction.... [O]nce a state extends the franchise to every warm body, be he producer or parasite, that day marks the beginning of the end of the state. For when the plebs discover that they can vote themselves bread and circuses without limit and that the productive members of the body politic cannot stop them, they will do so, until the state bleeds to death, or in its weakened condition the state succumbs to an invader " the barbarians enter Rome.
~~ Robert Heinlien - To Sail Beyond the Sunset

Mark de LA says

Well, I'm not going to stop the clock with this but I will provide an answer which is not in the abstract & has some tutorial value. Governments do well providing those things which have no intrinsic business value & thus need to have their costs distributed over a larger population than those who are immediately interested in the outcomes. The military is an example provided by the constitution. Others not explicit are:

Building roads & providing infrastructure
Regulating immigration - note however poorly it is currently done no private enterprise could do it without corruption
Intelligence gathering - however poorly you may think it is done now it would be worse provided by many different corportations with private agendas as well as public.
Initial high cost enterprises like NASA & the LHC & other physics experiments which are in part or whole financed on public funds.

There are a few others & some like the USPS have reverted to a semi-private enterprise. Notable failures are education, housing, taxation & legislative processes.

Mark de LA says

M 2008-11-03 07:51:21 10613

M 2008-11-03 07:48:48 10613

Adding to my thesis is that there are 435 members in the House for 2-year terms & 100 in the Senate for 6 year terms. With the staggering of terms up for election that means that 33 senators & all of the house are up for re-election. That means that those who appropriate your tax $$ (House) are spending money like crazy to get elected/re-elected to spend your money. 468 people in Congress have been doing little else but spend money to retain their cushy jobs mostly bribing the public with ideas, plans & government giveaways. The presidential part of the race is surely cost $Billion. Notice that McCain-Feingold did nothing to shrink this amount. Notice that an election every 2-years leaves these people with little time to do anything else (including reading the bills they sign-off on) except run for office. Notice that Congress has the lowest approval rates in history.

Throw the bums out!

That, my friends, is why you really do still have taxation without representation!

Also please read Heinlien's quote on 10760 for inspiration!

Mark de LA says

Mark de LA says

The countdown in the first comment moves on. It will pass 1000 hours & the entire current administration of the federal government by the day after July 4, 2011. Nobody has found the answer to the Untimate Question (political, eh?) - Happy celebration!!

Mark de LA says

C 2011-07-03 14:20:12 10613

When the Obama administration releases a report on the Friday before a long weekend, it’s clearly not trying to draw attention to the report’s contents. Sure enough, the “Seventh Quarterly Report” on the economic impact of the “stimulus,” released on Friday, July 1, provides further evidence that President Obama’s economic “stimulus” did very little, if anything, to stimulate the economy, and a whole lot to stimulate the debt.

The report was written by the White House’s Council of Economic Advisors, a group of three economists who were all handpicked by Obama, and it chronicles the alleged success of the “stimulus” in adding or saving jobs. The council reports that, using “mainstream estimates of economic multipliers for the effects of fiscal stimulus” (which it describes as a “natural way to estimate the effects of” the legislation), the “stimulus” has added or saved just under 2.4 million jobs ��" whether private or public ��" at a cost (to date) of $666 billion. That’s a cost to taxpayers of $278,000 per job.

http://www.weeklystandard.com/daily/daily.asp ... now if they just gave the money away without hiring bureaucrats to blow the money how many 6 figure "jobs" would be created?

Mark de LA says

Just for comic relief: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sdn3O6aaMNc&feature=share

Mark de LA says

More examples of what government does badly:

REPORT: Chevy Volt Costing Taxpayers Up to $250K Per Vehicle...

CAVUTO: Volt sales inflated with taxpayer fleet buys...

Mark de LA says

Should I stop the clock with the government is great at killing people & breaking things with our military & military hardware - perhaps the best in the World & spending our money to do it?

Seth says

MR 2012-01-21 07:29:38 10613

Should I stop the clock with the government is great at killing people & breaking things with our military & military hardware - perhaps the best in the World & spending our money to do it?

sounds like you are rooting for ron paul

Mark de LA says

seth 2012-01-21 10:01:08 10613

MR 2012-01-21 07:29:38 10613

Should I stop the clock with the government is great at killing people & breaking things with our military & military hardware - perhaps the best in the World & spending our money to do it?

sounds like you are rooting for ron paul

Yeah ... sometimes he sounds good & other times he sounds nutty! I want him to show me his cards - what is he going to do & how is he going to accomplish it in the expected environment he would find himself in January 2013 ? Sometimes it sounds like his OBGyn strayed into proctology!

The Ultimate Question

3/7/2009 - 150 days and still counting I wonder why nobody has yet found something that the US Government does well?

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