Election Countdown

[southpaw]

Runner don't loose any sleep think up those "tricky questions"!

[Guest]

Southpaw, I don't believe I'm over-regulated. I seem to have all the freedom I want. I think the government does the things it does to make society better and safer. Taxes are the price we pay for those things.

I know the helmet law was a big point on how gov't over-regulates our society. I think it's a dumb idea to ride a motorcycle without a helmet. You can say it only affects those riding, but it affects all of us. If a helmet prevents a serious head injury that saves all of us money. The insurance companies will pay, but eventually they will pass the cost on to all of us. Same goes with seatbelts.

Sure, I would like less taxes. I don't like it when the gov't spends the money wastefully and I don't mind at all when the money is used for the benefit of society.

[CRLionDawg]

People tend to think we are overtaxed here in the US until they visit a Latin or South American Country or a 3rd world country and experience their lifestyle. Sure we would like to pay less taxes, but we also enjoy having clean water, safe highways, and contained sewage.

[southpaw]

Or we could be like the former Soviet Union and have no taxes because there was no money. The problem is with taxes is 1. half of our tax dollars are used to fund big brother and the millions of nit-wit, do nothing bureaucrats. 2. The entitlement programs, ie, "national edowment for the arts" and pork-barrell grant bills that are just a waste. 3. The tax system itself is a joke with loop-holes for those in the know.

One big reason to vote for Bush is when he's reelected the IRS and the way we pay taxes will be changed forever!

[CRLionDawg]

Southpaw I agree with you. But dont get your hopes up.

Sure there are a lot of things that tax money gets wasted on. This is hardly a Demo v. Repub. thing. They both imbibe.

There are also a lot of good things that happen, ie. being able to flush your toilet in Spring Hope and the junk ends up somewhere else instead of in your well.

[foghorn]

Lefty wrote:

"One big reason to vote for Bush is when he's reelected the IRS and the way we pay taxes will be changed forever!"

Yeah, that Democrat-controlled Congress has kept W. from implementing his new reforms.

Get real.

[southpaw]

foggy: vote for Bush and you'll have more money to spend. Reelect Bush and see what happens to the IRS. No more income tax but a national sales tax! Me Get real. The GOP is real and original not the broken record of "tax and spend" Kerry is spewing all over the country!

Ever hear of a filibuster? It means Democrats obstructing the gov't!

Dawg- the gov't does have good public programs we just need to get rid of those frivolous ones like the Nat'l Edwoment for the Arts!

[foghorn]

As Ive said before: "Never the 'twain shall meet."

Admit it, Southpaw. The current Republican Congress is just as big a tax and spend bunch as any Dems were. Filibuster my butt. THAT'S why W. is beating the bushes (pardon the pun) with some new ideas, some of which are old Dem-inspired notions.

Nothing the matter with the National Endowment for the Arts -- the money is so insignificant in the big picture -- if administered properly. (Yeah, I'll blame a lot but not all that on Dems.) We just don't need money for exhibits of portraits of Jesus in urine.

[LionPride]

People, if you think Kerry won't raise your taxes, then do the homework. For 20 years it was all about tax and spend. Why in the world would you think it would be different now?

For an interesting article on a website that I never visted before, please go to http://www.newt.org and click on What is at stake in 2004.

For some of you that are still undecided, this may help in your decision.

[foghorn]

(Le Carre, a Brit, is perhaps the world's greatest writer of espionage and spy fiction. He pretty well sums things up here. Sad to say, he makes a good point in his first sentence.)

If Le Carré Could Vote

by John le Carré

 
Maybe there's one good reason — just one — for reelecting George W. Bush, and that's to force him to live with the consequences of his appalling actions and answer for his own lies, rather than wish the job on a Democrat who would then get blamed for his predecessor's follies.

Probably no American president in history has been so universally hated abroad as Bush: for his bullying unilateralism, his dismissal of international treaties, his reckless indifference to the aspirations of other nations and cultures, his contempt for institutions of world government, and above all for misusing the cause of anti-terrorism in order to unleash an illegal war — and now anarchy — upon a country that like too many others around the world was suffering under a hideous dictatorship but had no hand in the events of 9/11, no weapons of mass destruction and no record of terrorism except as an ally of the United States in a dirty war against Iran.

Is your president a great war leader because he allowed himself to be manipulated by a handful of deluded ideologues? Is Tony Blair, my prime minister, a great war leader because he committed Britain's troops, foreign policy and domestic security to the same harebrained adventure?

You are voting in November. We will vote next year. Yet the outcome in both countries will in large part depend on the same question: How long can the lies last now that the truth has finally been told? The Iraq war was planned long before 9/11. Osama bin Laden provided the excuse. Iraq paid the price. American kids paid the price. British kids paid the price. Our politicians lied to us.

While Bush was waging his father's war at your expense, he was also ruining your country. He made your rich richer and your poor and unemployed more numerous. He robbed your war veterans of their due and reduced your children's access to education. And he deprived more Americans than ever before of healthcare.

Now he's busy cooking the books, burying deficits and calling in contingency funds to fight a war that his advisors promised him he could light and put out like a candle.

Meanwhile, your Patriot Act has swept aside constitutional and civil liberties that took brave Americans 200 years to secure and were once the envy of a world that now looks on in horror, not just at Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib but at what you are doing to yourselves.

But please don't feel isolated from the Europe you twice saved. Give us back the America we loved, and your friends will be waiting for you. Here in Britain, for as long as we have Tony Blair singing the same lies as George W. Bush, your nightmares will be ours.

© 2004 LA Times