First of all, you are simply asserting that taxes cause these problems without offering any proof. Secondly, there is no reason to believe that taxes are the cause of any of these problems. It is far more plausible that rising income inequality is the cause by denying the poor a large enough share of wealth to get out of their situation. A cause more easily solved by a more progressive tax system that actually addresses that problem rather than a no-tax system that helps no one with anything. You have also completely left out both an alternate way of getting police etc other than taxes nor can you point out a tax-less government, or a government of any kind, that does not have a poverty issue. In fact, governments with more progressive tax systems tend to have higher quality of living standards.

Yet, you have completely failed to demonstrate how anyone lied about anything. You just say "schools suck". The biggest relationship to school suckage is how much which tends to vary with the amount of wealth in the school district. Please point me to some statistics on how much more money schools are getting per capita in real dollars between now and 50 years ago. Not to mention that you have given no alternative whatsoever.

The ACT IS what is being punished. You do not go to jail for thinking or even talking about what would be a hate crime. Only when you actually commit a physical crime do you get jailed and punished. You don't seem to have any idea what thought crime is. By your logic we should not give harsher sentencing to premeditated murder than we do to a "crime of passion" since the only difference is the thought that goes into it.

I'm moving this here so I don't have to repeat myself.

You are just plain wrong. The '92 deficit (Bush) was $399B, the '93 deficit (Clinton/D congress) was $347B and the '94 deficit was $281B. This was the time when Democrats held congress and the deficit was shrinking rather then growing. On the other hand, Clinton's last two years (R's hold congress) the surplus was increasing reducing overall debt at an increasing rate. The first 2 years of Bush (R's hold congress) the surplus evaporated reducing debt at a decreasing rate until it went to debt.
While it is intuitive to say that congress is the leading factor of what budgets look like, the link between who holds congress is very weak compared to who holds the white house. Once you remember that doing things like dragging us into war constitutes a major spending increase that Congress pretty much HAS to fund, regardless of what party they are in, you can see how the president has a big influence on the budgetary process.
Not to mention you don't seem to know the difference between deficit and debt. This is probably part of your problem.

Clinton did not shut down the government. The Republicans did. They said they were going to do it. They came in and did it. Then they bragged about it afterwards.

Congress writes the budget but they are constrained by what the president will and won't sign, filibusters and the probability of congressional override. The presidential correlation between party and debt is very clear, the congressional correlation is not.

This is really where you show your ignorance. The increase in debt comes from reduced revenue due to economic conditions. Look more closely at the chart you linked, go from 2000-2010. It was going down from '06 to '07. The recession started in '07. It doesn't take off until 09 when the recession starting peaking. Just because you want the democrats to be the cause doesn't mean they are.

See what I said above. Presidents can have a huge impact on the deficit and the correlation from congressional control is very weak. Not to mention that you completely ignore from then end of WW2 till Reagan, when Democrats controlled congress almost all the way through, the debt was constantly decreasing as a % of GDP. http://www.businessinsider.com/federal-debt-as-a-percent-of-gdp-by-president-2010-5 It goes up under split congress under Regan. They go down and then up under Republicans from '96 to '06.

That may be what you want out of them but that is not why they are there and they do not have the ability to do what you want.

Gridlock is bad because government exists to do stuff. If we did not need government to do stuff then we would not have it. If you have gridlock then government can't do the things that the people need it to do.

I'm sorry, what? In what conceivable way are you kept in slavery? One of the dumbest things I have ever heard is the assertion that taxes are tantamount to slavery or tyranny. Taxes are the price you pay to live in a society. They pay for police, firefighters, roads a military an innumerable number of things that allow you to live the comfortable life you live. That government job you have, or you mother has or your brother has is paid for from those taxes. It most every time I hear about some anti-tax nut it turns out they make their living off a government job, military pension, or some part of the social safety net.

Again, you have no idea what your talking about and are just spitting up the tripe you've been spoon fed. How have they lied about improving education? There is a reason why TEACHERS generally support more liberal candidates. Because they actually do more than propose vouchers (more anti-tax stuff) and closing down the department of education.

<snip rant about people getting social insurance>

Your string of assertions without evidence is truly astounding. Please explain how the big bad Democrats have taken away your gun rights and then put that up against the people who kept showing up to town halls last year with automatic rifles hung on their shoulders. Explain to me how its the Democrats who want to force Christianity down our throats, remove the constitutionally mandated citizenship birthright and remove the constitutionally mandated right to elect your representatives. Oh, right. It is the constitution-loving Republicans that want to do that. These are things that have been proposed or publicly supported by Boener and/or McConell among others. Not just fringe groups.

"It is my personal belief that allowing gays and lesbians to serve openly would be the right thing to do". -Admiral Mullen Chairman of the joint chiefs of staff
Defense Sec. Robert Gates want's to get rid of DADT. Even Colon Powell wants to repeal it. And they are definitely Republicans.
Even if that were not the case, it is the military's responsibility to carry out policy, not create it.

So, I'm confused. You think it's ok to have racially based attacks on people? Or maybe its attacks on gay people that you are ok with?

There is a big difference. The nut-job evangelical minister's ramblings tend to become part of the Republican platform. Please point me to where policy has come from a black preacher. I'm going to ignore your race-tolling for now, not to mention the ironical reference to being uninformed and uneducated.

That so-called TARP crap was a small business loans program that had been something the Republicans has been ASKING for as much as a week before the vote. Politics first means that they killed it anyway to prevent Democrats from getting any credit for it. Nice job calling it TARP crap rather than laying out what it actually does so that people can actually understand what it was that was voted down.

That's a half-truth at best. The biggest contributors to the national debt have been the Bush tax cuts and the Iraq/Afghanistan wars. Both policies that had little Democratic support. Even if that were the case, how does that absolve Bush. Bush and Reagan have been the biggest contributors to the national debt. The pattern for the last two Democratic presidents is that the previous Republican president jacks up the debt. Then, once the new guy is in the white house, the GOP starts having a fit about how there is too much debt and no new policies should be enacted, and by they way, lets privatize Social Security.

I don't think checks and balances means what you think it means. Checks and balances are not there to prevent a dominant ideology. They are there to prevent too much power by a branch of government. These days mixing the branches or otherwise distributing power does not get you a functioning government. Instead it gets you gridlock. The Republicans SHUT DOWN congress back in the Clinton years and they have been bragging about how they will do it again once they get control of Congress. Not because they think it will solve some problem, but because they think it will get them political advantage.

The whole "both parties are equally bad" mentality is a real problem. It fosters a disengaged electorate. The system has problems. Money problems. Money corrupts the system because you can't get elected without major corporate contributions. Which means that doing anything against those interests means you can kiss that money goodbye. Which means they are no longer looking out for the citizenry in ways which they otherwise could, because it means not being able to get re-elected.

If you want to fix that problem you can go to fixcongressfirst.org. It's non-partisan so you'll like that. But quit disseminating bad information, you do no one any favors.

Thats BS, most tax dollars go to finance debt (read bonds, payments go to mostly wealthy people who loaned the gov money), the military and social programs and both your average military personnel and the average social security recipient really need that money.*

Again, BS. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Ford Read the section on labor philosophy. He wanted both, to keep the best workers and for them to be able to buy his cars. Not to mention you are comparing apples to oranges. Ferrari are a luxury car company. The door bolt guy probably doesn't get paid enough to buy a Ferrari, but he does get paid enough to buy a Ford.

* Not necessarily in that order

You may want to look at these articles http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buddha_(disambiguation). The term buddha means "enlightened one". In Buddhism, the goal of any soul is to reach enlightenment and become a buddha. What generally happens is that a "saint" or god from a previous religion gets renamed a buddha when the culture converts. It actually gets complicated as you get into the particulars of each version of Buddhism since they all have different cultural variations on what a Buddha is, what their role is and how the ones they call buddhas became that way.

Now there is only one "The Buddha". By which people mean Siddhrtha Gautama. Also, the statues of "Buddha" are often not the buddha you are thinking of. Watch a lot of Chinese or Thai movies and it will become clear that they aren't talking about "The Buddha" when they refer to the statues or their buddhas.

HTH.

This is completely wrong. Buddhism is a religion but you could claim that it is not a theology. There is a difference. It is a religion because it involves things like souls and the afterlife/reincarnation. It is the combination of a philosophy and a fairy tale, a way of living your life and a fantastical reason why it should be that way. That is pretty much the definition of a religion. Now, in most Asian countries, the "Buddhas" are treated as gods. Why? Well because when they converted to Buddhism they took their old gods and made them enlightened ones (Buddhas). The same way that old African gods became saints in places where Christianity took over. The same story is repeated every place one religion comes to supplant another. In traditional (Indian) Buddhism, this is not the case, they accepted the old Hindu stories as useful parables but mostly moved on from their old beliefs.

The problem with this free market fantasy is that its not actually reflective of what reality nor does it come up with an ideal productivity.

Lets take the 100k/day guy. He makes 3.65 million a year. He's only going to buy 1 yacht with that because he only needs one at a time. Maybe that costs 1M, the rest goes in the bank or into derivatives trading or currency trading or into his bath tub so he can bathe in it. This is all financial masturbation, it doesn't really produce anything. So saying that making that much money ends up circulating it a fallacy because it only ends up circulating amongst the other financial types and not the economy as a whole.

"But he did end up paying for the boat" you say, "he employed all those people". OK, but lets compare that to what would happen otherwise. Making the yacht gives a few artisans a fairly decent amount of income once in a year. If you take that 3 million and give it to 10k poor or middle class people (in the form of salary for actual work done), they will spend *all* of it. Why? Because they are not flush with cash and have lots of things they could buy including things they have been needing but have been putting off buying because they didn't have the cash. So you have circulated a lot more money to a lot more people, and since the money is going into buying things that are useful to more people (as opposed to yachts) the business that flourish are the ones that actually mean something to society and the economy. And you get bonus points for actually making more stuff that has more value.

Those people making all the goods also end up buying things to make the goods, so there is a multiplier effect happening. Now you have can compare a smaller base ($1M vs $3.65M) and a smaller multiplier (yachts need wood, paint, canvas and a small number of other parts vs the wide variety of other things that people would buy with the money such as cars, TVs mobile phones, college text books, groceries etc which are lower margin items that require a lot more investment into their production ) and you end up contributing a LOT less to the GDP as Mr. $3.65M than you do if that money was more evenly distributed.

Not to mention the fact that there is no way that guy deserves to get 100 times the pay. He's not 100 X smarter nor is he 100 X more hard working. Given the recent financial troubles it is rather easy to argue for the reverse. So now you are rewarding the wrong person a disproportionate amount in a way that hurts the economy relative to doing it the right way.

Congrats.

People really ought to stop thinking that they are going to become rich one day. It skews their perception of whats happening in the real world and makes applaud the people who are taking advantage of them.