I did read the single PDF you linked to:

I also indicated that I had done so: "(If I'm reading that table correctly..."

There's no links to anything else on that page. The link that you've just now provided is for another single PDF, on a different server than the link from your original post. Maybe you intended to point to a page that had a number of links to budget documents, but you didn't, and you didn't supply any other information in your post.

You didn't present any useful evidence for your argument, and I pointed that out. Why should I do your research for you?

Lies, damned lies, and statistics. Gross expenditure, especially comparing unadjusted dollar amounts over a twenty-year period, is meaningless by itself. Per-capita would be a start, so what's the change in population over that period? The government may have taken in a lot more money over that time, so what's the change in revenues? Especially, what are the ratios of revenue to expenditure? How's the economy: what has the GDP done? How much does the state government have in its "savings account"? How much is that changing? (If I'm reading that table correctly, it looks like there was a reserve fund well in the black over most of the period you mention.)

Most of them, actually. There were quite a number of African-American soldiers fighting in the Civil War, and WWI, and WWII, and I therefore assume the wars between those. Women didn't serve openly (more than a few enlisted, pretending to be men, during the Civil War and perhaps other wars too) until the Women's Army Auxiliary Corps in 1941. They went to boot camp, but mostly, AFAIK, had non-combat positions.

Those rights aren't an inconvenient afterthought, they're the entire point of the country. It's critical that gays and lesbians are allowed to serve in the military, because it's defending the rights of everybody, including and especially those who are different, that makes the country worth fighting for in the first place. If we aren't doing that, then everything else becomes just a waste of time.

Hear, hear!

They're doing it, and other tech companies are considering it, only so that the FCC and Congress won't force them to. I don't say that's good or bad, just that's the reason this is even on their to-do list.

MasterCard is an American company. In America. . .

Julian Assange and WikiLeaks aren't. He may not have even ever been to the U.S.

In America, distributing classified documents is illegal.

No, it isn't.

Case closed.

. . .a criminal (in their jurisdiction) company.

There was no case. In America, there is a principle that says a person is innocent until proven guilty.

Income has been stagnant for the working and lower-middle classes for decades, but people feel entitled to a much higher standard of living.

Well, why do you think that is?

Working class people see the GDP increasing, see the country on average becoming more wealthy, but see the upper classes absorbing that extra wealth, getting a bigger piece of the pie than before.

Everyone around them has an increasing standard of living, why shouldn't they?

Why shouldn't the pie continue to be divided up roughly the same way, so that as the pie grows, everyone gets more wealthy?

Yes, France and Finland have per-capita GDP almost $5000 less than USA! How do such devastated, dirt-farming third-world countries, with such lazy workers producing no value, think they will compete in the Global Marketplace?!

Is domestic productivity the appropriate measure for the success of a free society?

How many people are really working with no paid time off in the US above the minimum wage/burger flipper levels?

Almost half of the U.S. makes less than $25K a year: Graph of Census data. Not everyone's white-collar like you.

But you don't work for a private company. You work for the state government. Your protestation is pointless, because, whether federal or state, the government as an employer has very different rules that it has to follow than a private company.

Finland GDP per capita, from the World Bank: 44K USD; vacation days: 30

USA GDP per capita: 46K USD; vacation days: 0

Luxemborg: 105K; 25
UK: 35K; 20
Phillipines: 1.7K; 5
Thailand: 3.8K; 6
France: 41K; 30
Canada: 39K; 10
Czech Republic: 18K; 20

More info on Google Public Data. I haven't done a full graph of GDP against days off, but there doesn't seem to be any correlation at a glance. Thanks for playing!

How on earth do you determine that a politician (or anyone for that matter) has "good character" or that you can trust that person to make decisions, without some oversight and ability to compare actions with claims?

So vote third party! If the outcome is "guaranteed" to be either R or D, think of it as giving you the luxury to check the box next to I, or G, or L, without "throwing the race".

+1 for reasonable, hopeful attitude! Well written!