From: bzs@ussr.std.com (Barry Shein)
Newsgroups: alt.politics.clinton,alt.politics.democrats.d,alt.politics.elections,ba.politics,co.politics,ne.politics,nj.politics,or.politics,ny.politics,talk.politics.misc
Subject: Re: VOTE, BABY, VOTE!
Date: 8 Nov 92 05:31:10 GMT
	<BZS.92Nov5202519@ussr.std.com>
	<1992Nov7.180325.10798@ucsu.Colorado.EDU>
Organization: The World


From: fcrary@ucsu.Colorado.EDU (Frank Crary)
>That isn't the issue here: The question is, which costs the government
>more, helping the rich or the poor?

Helping the rich.

Doesn't it occur to you that probably most of the fortune 100 (all
multi-billion dollar companies) could not survive one more minute
without their govt contracts?

I don't even know that companies over $10B or some number like that
could even exist if it wasn't for the govt concentrating wealth and
doling it out by the billions to them. With the cold war over we'll
see, it could be interesting, it could be the end of many of these
mega-corps (unless they can figure out some way to start the cycle
again.)

Such huge corporations hardly existed before WWII (and then usually
only because of some state monopoly they were granted, railroads etc.)

Don't you see what our govt'al system is (or has become)?

It's a method for the largest corporations to have the money they paid
out in salaries gathered back so they can get it from the govt again
and pay it out in salaries again. Round and round. In concentrated
hunks, billions (or at least hundreds of millions) at a shot. AT&T
gets a $1B contract for computers (they hardly even BUILD computers,
they went into the business mostly *after* they got the $1B contract
from the Air Force!), Chrysler builds some tanks or whatever, round
and round, and round and round...

Only each time the money passes through the cycle it builds more stuff
that the people building it don't own. Who owns and profits from it
(most)? The companies, their shareholders, their executives etc.
People who get to build *wealth*, not their wage slaves.

Just like Reagan and Bush claimed to be fiscal conservatives while
driving the federal budget and deficit to unimagined heights, they
were also state socialists* of the worst ilk. They increased govt and
(ultimately) taxes to give the benefits to the wealthiest and most
powerful. All the while moaning about the poor the poor oh the poor
are driving us broke oh no oh no.

What unadulterated crap. What's sad is to see how many people fell for
it.

(* "State Socialism" is an invective that was often used among
communists against the Soviet Union. It is a degenerate form of
socialism where wealth is taken in massive quantites from the average
person in order to enrich the insiders and powerful. Basically,
socialism on behalf of the state rather than its citizens.)

>>My proposal: Let's start getting rid of government waste from the top
>>down. I won't deny your favorite gripe. First let's cut programs we
>>can do without that are >$1B each. Then >$100M each, on down.
>
>That's a pretty nieve way to cut the deficit: All it would do is 
>_increase_ spending: Everyone would quickly split their favorite,
>$25 billion program into a dozen small programs (with overhead and
>administrative costs going through the roof.)

(if you're going to call me naive at least learn how to spell it)

Hey, do you perchance WORK for one of these mega-corps? They'd love
you!

>By the way, Food Stamps, "Human Development Services", subsidized
>housing projects and Medicare all cost over $5 billion each (Food
>Stamps and Medicare over $20 billion each). They
>would be a pretty high priority under your suggestion.

No, I was referring to the largest RECIPIENTS of boondoggles, not the
largest sources.

Besides, food stamps are run by the Dept of Agriculture as a subsidy
to farmers. Now, maybe when you hear the word "farmers" you think of
farmer green and his cute kids clearing the back 40 and running
barefoot in the grass. But it ain't like that any more. It's General
Mills, General Foods and the factory farms who get the do-re-mi
benefits of these subsidies, by and large.

Oh sure it might raise the price of watermelons on the local
truckstand, but that's just an accident, leakage, it came about with
the rise of the great food companies and their take-over of about 85%
of the nation's agriculture. When food came from sod-busters there was
no such thing.

C'mon, how many NATO theater weapons that will never be deployed are
still being and will be built thru the rest of the decade so we don't
send any shocks to the system of large defense corps?

And you worry about pathetic bottom-feeders. As if *they're* in
control of what goes on around you. Hah! What a silly delusion. Your
country is under the control of single welfare mothers, is that your
point? Isn't that what you profess? Doesn't it sound just a little bit
silly when you hear it repeated back at you?

>>I reckon in three or four hundred years when we get down to some
>>single mother getting an extra $12/month cuz she had a kid or whatever
>>it is that ticks you off we'll be about done, right?
>
>Is there, just out of curiosity, _any_ reason to give money to 
>a poor, single mother who continues to have _more_ children and
>thereby makes her situation worse?

Yes. I will give you several:

1. It is not her children's fault that they were born, yet they are
who will suffer under your proposal. Would you like to toss out
another generation?

2. Again, you have no sense of perspective. An extra $12/month to feed
a child unfortunate enough to be born into poverty you get all bent
out of shape over. General Dynamics recently being charged with about
a billion dollars in govt contract fraud is not worth mentioning.

Don't you understand, you have no ECONOMIC point to make, you are on a
MISSION FROM GOD. You are moralizing, that's all, cut every damn thing
you complain about and no one (other than those cut) would notice a
difference (other than maybe some more pathetic and dead on the
streets.)

Hell, most likely they wouldn't lower taxes, they'd distribute the
savings to their buddies in Webtech, General Dynamics, etc. and send
*your* butt back to work where it belongs: Building them *wealth*,
paying it back in taxes by the trillions to do it all over again. And
people wonder why they never get ahead...they worship gods who laugh
their asses off at them.

3. I don't live in a rat-scum third-world nation where you get to step
over the dead bodies on the way to the market every day. We're better
than that.

I realize you don't think so and believe we should emulate Somalia or
some such place as an ideal, but that's not the country I want to live
in. *I* can help the pathetic. If I think there is a problem with
abuse then let's work on their spirits and see how to work them into
the system. Not with whips and threats and torture as you suggest,
that's the sort of thing the Soviet Union fell apart trying to
motivate people with. Let's get them to stand on their own two feet if
they truly can, and if they truly can't then let's have mercy on them
and show them that Americans have a better way than the trash cans of
this world.

To be frank (no, you're frank, I'll be earnest) I find this entire
Reagan-esque demonizing of the poor, claiming the most pathetic
members of our society to be the source of the troubles in this
country as offensive and pathetic. I always have.

It's the rhetoric of losers who have given up and can't think of any
better way to better themselves than take bread off a poor person or a
child's plate, can't think of a better way to get a person moving
again than to threaten him with prison (c.f. A Christmas Carol.)

I'm not a loser. This is not a country of losers as the Reagans and
Bushes of this country would have you believe. Losers are people who
form bread lines, who fret over who got more than their share of
bread. WINNERS BAKE MORE BREAD.

Thank god thank god that with Clinton in office perhaps some of this
negativism and third-world "we can't do it, throw the women and
children overboard!" loser thinking may finally come to an end.
Personally it disgusts me.

--
        -Barry Shein

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