The descent into third world status continues apace. But people would rather suffer than admit that American rugged individualism is and always has been a farcical lie. It's like Easter Island. Change, no way! Just because we're starving and dying is no reason to question our belief system.

A key component of the conservative mindset is that such things "don't happen to me", because "I'm careful", or even that since such things have been free in the past "freeloaders" strive to take advantage of them. This is much the same thinking that keeps them hating other social safety-net programs.

As such, I think conservative voters see such "taxes" as wholly legitimate. If you don't want to lose your home to pay for police and fire responses, don't drive like an asshole. Or, at least, get better insurance.

Let's see..there is an accident. The victim decides to avoid paying the police, so departs. Charged with leaving the scene of an accident.

This could get very messy.

I'm surprised nobody up to this point has looked at the way the public sector has asked the citizenry to provide for its shortfalls as taxation in its own right, using barter methodology instead of currency.

Parents sending their children to a school that demands those kids bring with them soap/TP/whatever, for example, are paying a surcharge - in materiel - for their children's education. If those items were purchased by the schools, and likely purchased at far below retail thanks to the power of volume purchasing and the non-profit public-sector dollar, those parents would make a tremendous racket about "taxing" parents of school-age children. But bringing their own consumables - and paying full retail prices plus sales taxes for them - costs more than it would the school. This is not only the schools transferring an obligation to the citizens, it is actually a measurable increase in obligation, since the prices the parents are paying is almost certainly 20% or more higher than what the school would pay, and the parents are paying sales taxes on top of that.

There will be some who will answer this particular complaint with the suggestion that parents band together to make the kind of bulk purchases the schools could make, and realise the consequent benefits in pricing. The problem is that they've already done that, and those entities are called the school district, the county and the state; creating yet another group to handle the public's business will not solve the mismanagement steps of the existing ones.

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Gee who knew Nikita Cruschev was right. We did get buried , but by our own incompetence and stupidity. We now look like a 50's communist country in more ways than one. I remember a student visiting from he Ukraine who carried his own toilet paper , because it was never available in his country .

This leads us back to one of the only truly successful achievements of the Bush Administration and any Republican-run government: Deplete the government's reserves and finances with tax cuts and debt-financed spending so as to insist upon the elimination of government services, social security and medicare.

I wonder how long it will be till the government can once again pay for something without help from the Chinese. Breaks my heart just thinking about it.

Thanks a lot, George.

in all this brouhaha, the Right has overlooked an ever handy scapegoat: Trial Lawyers!

(Of course big city cops and firemen are union members, so let's take a whack at them, too.)

Whooo-hoo! Finally time to take on Somalia for the title to world's freest market!

I'm going to get all entrepreneurial and invest in a fast motorboat and a couple AK47s, myself. Maybe I can get me a container ship full of them fancy Chinese manufactured goods and start a cargo cult with the ransom money.

In Colorado Springs I have heard that 23 police officers were also cut to save money. Where are the "law and order" conservatives when these things happen?

Sounds like a double edge sword. I can imagine a 911 call going like this, "The estimated wait time to respond to your call is approximately 2 hours. While we have you on the phone, what card can we bill this call to? We accept Visa, MC, Discover. We will also apply a $4.00 convenience fee for using your credit card"
I remember a scene from Robocop 1 or 2 about private companies being the Police, Fire Dept, etc.

This is a wet dream for all of those 2nd Amendment types, "I can't wait for the cops so I am going shooting"

William Jennings Bryant (WJB), huckster that he was, was sufficiently a populist to recognize the evils of social Darwinism when he saw them. Applying Darwin's principle of survival-of- the-fittest was popular among the greedheads of his day, to justify their methods of rape, plunder and pillage. Bryant fought it.

Today's greedheads, the GOP, also believe they are entitled to have and own everything because they are smarter, more responsible, richer than the undeserving poor and rapidly growing underclasses. They are surviving so nicely because they are more fit, in this Darwinian interpretation. Of course so many of this same crowd rejects any evolutionary explanation, and chooses instead to insist that God has chosen them to be successful.

How this dynamic turns around, given our craven, credulous media, without civil unrest I don't know. There is no WJB, or FDR, to make the case for reason.

How much government shrinkage will be acceptable to dumbed down America? How much poverty and deprivation can coexist with untold wealth and conspicuous consumption? Is this an experiment we really have to do? Again? All those European immigrants of the 19th and 20th Century, as well as Latin American immigrants more recently, were fleeing precisely that disparity of wealth. But they had a place to go.

Where do we go now?

@boatboy_srq

Really excellent analysis. Thanks!

So let me see if I got this right.

My house catches fire.
I call the Fire Dept. - They bill me for services & I get to pay the bill out of pocket...
OR
I let the house burn down & collect Insurance on my underwater abode.

Can I be arrested for not paying for Fire Protection from the Fire Dept?

Seeing how far we've sunk, my question is, how close are we to being a Fourth World nation?

Please stop the whinning. Such pay as you go government is completely equitable. To paraphrase Anatole France:
'The government, in its majestic equality, allows the rich as well as the poor to obtain government services', so long as they pay for them.

Whenever our governments, especially states, cut their budgets, they always start to add on new 'fees' for everything. I notice that the Highway Patrols get much more aggressive, balancing the budget on the backs of those going a few miles over the limit. If you prefer that kind of world, where unexpected fees keep popping up and you get 'ticketed' for everything you do, then by all means put Republicans back in charge...

@rrk1: "William Jennings Bryant (WJB), huckster that he was, was sufficiently a populist to recognize the evils of social Darwinism..."

Let the record show that William Jennings Bryant opposed all forms of "Darwinism". Don't forget the Scopes "Monkey" Trials, wherein Bryant defended Kansas against the teaching of evolution - and won.

Zandru - You are, of course right about WJB opposing Darwinism and evolution, and he did win the Scopes fiasco in 1926. But the capitalists of his day preached strongly that the poor and the working class were where they belonged because they were inferior genetically to successful industrialists like themselves. Moreover, they believed the wealthy owed the poor nothing because the poor weren't meant to survive.

Bryant was a fundamentalist protestant representing the rural hinterlands, but he believed in the basic Christian message of compassion and some collective responsibility for the well being of fellow humans. Thus he saw particularly the attempted superposition of Darwin onto a socio-economic class framework as dangerous. The Nazis were more blatant and barbaric about it since they used Darwin as a justification for exterminating those they considered biologically inferior. The Soviets used Darwin to explain how the rise of the proletariat represented the triumphant survival of the fittest.

Capitalism, fascism, communism, all twisted Darwin to fit their ideologies with disastrous results. We're just going through a revival of social Darwinism, which is bad enough. Hopefully, we don't repeat the Nazi version.

For all you bleeding idiots who dunna want money from the federal govsrnment, please direct them to send it to Southern Arizona. Our streets are crumbling, our museums tiny, our schools rotting, our sewers ancient, and our electical lines frayed. 25% of our kids live in poverty. Our schools rank at the bottom of all 50 states, just barely above Missisdippi. Our Hospitals are ancient, and we have a ahortage of Drs.

If you want to see the world taxcuts bring, look no further than the south side of Tucson and Southern Az.

Meanwhile,

Boycott the Wall Street Journal. It's
dated and biased.
Meanwhile,

Say the show too-std Republican talking points,how sad.

I'm seeing same nonsense in McMahon's commercials here. Reality be damned,will it resonate with the voters.

Stimulus was also big tax break, but that's ignored (was brought up briefly in Chris Matthews show by on of the panelists). Instead, "we all know" it just "grew gov't". How did it grow gov't? Or in McMahon's commercial, it just went to "gov't agencies, and we know how good they are at cresating jobs". Basically distributing those funds that clearly helped the economy and overseeing their use so it's not wasted are evil big gov't things.

There is one very valid point, Obama did say that the stimulus would keep unemployment down -it wouldn't get over 8%. The plan didn't hit that target. I' sure it seemed a safe bet at the time, but the economy was much worse than it looks and the levels of deception on Wall Street unfathomable. But he did say no more than 8%.

Other meme, he focused on health care, not jobs. The only way to any sustained growth rrequires health care reform. You've done posts here about it, and its really worse than it appears. It used to be independent contractors and small business owners would have their spouse work at a big company for benefits. That's no longer allowed. And if you have children, you can't put them all on the good plan. Dealing with that now before it's a full blown crises was the only way to keep any recovery going in the longer term-meaning like next year.

Well, the ayatollahs charge a bullet fee for returning the body of a relative killed by the enforcers. Why shouldn't the US government do the same? We are daily becoming more and more like the thing we hate.

At the current pace, soon enough government in the US will be limited to the armed forces. Police, firefighters, schools, water, roads, etc.- all will be completely unfunded. It will be the very model of a night watchman state. But it's OK, b/c the ultra rich will be able to pay for their own private police force, clean water, private schools, etc.

Marx would be pleased,
-Z

We now look like a 50's communist country in more ways than one. -- John R, @11:33

Actually, the only two ways that I see where we're beginning to resemble communist countries is in the warrantless wire-tapping and (more recently) stopping people at whim and demanding documents.

Otherwise, not so much. Take that toilet paper bit. There was a scarcity of toilet paper but it was limited to private citizens. All the govt institutions (which meant almost everything, except restaurants) were supplied, just fine. It was only *after* the fall of communism ('89), that my friends in Poland had to find things like toilet paper, take shifts as cleaners, etc, to keep the schools going. Of course, at the same time, toilet paper became easily obtainable. At ten times the price, but there.

But things like "free" (supported by hidden taxes but available to everyone) healthcare? And free college education (conditionally free -- if you refused to go and teach or cure or whatever, for the 3 yrs, wherever the need was the greatest, *then* you were asked to pay back)? I'd happily trade and keep going around with a string, just as I used to (if you found tp in some store and they let you have as many as 10 rolls... you strung them on the string. tied a knot, slung the whole over your shoulder and marched, proudly, home, the envy of all who saw you), if I could go to any hospital and the only question asked would be my address. Or if my children and grandchildren could go to college and emerge with a diploma but without a life-crippling debt.

@rrk1 -- you're right on Bryant's populism vis-a-vis Darwin. But please don't drag Darwin down with the Nazis and Communism. There's a big difference between Darwinism the foundational theory of modern biology and Social Darwinism, the specious ideology that hijacked Darwin's name to justify racism and unregulated capitalism. Neither Hitler nor the Soviets paid much attention to Darwin because, strictly speaking, biological Darwinism refuted some of their core tenets. Nazism's racial ideology was cultural, not scientific, and owed more to white supremacists like Arthur Gobineau and Houston Stewart Chamberlain than Charles Darwin. Chamberlain in particular was as fierce a critic of Darwinism as he was an anti-Semite. While Marx embraced Darwin as vindicating his dialectic view of history, Stalin endorsed Lamarckian evolution over Darwin's model.

Seen those barriers suppurating lines of traffeic going different ways. I was in the middle of a big high speed wreck when a car crossed over into on coming traffic. Thinking about it I could remember barriers going up in the Carter years. But not in the Ronnie or Bush years. When our Bill came the started appearing. I wondered if the budget cuts stopped them for those years till our Bill came in. There were a lot of head ons in those years.

WJB's big thing was anti-war and he had talked to the leading intellectuals of the time when he was in Europe trying to stop WW-1 or at least keeping us out of it. War was looked on as a test of survival of the fittest.. They were going to have a war anyway why not say it was a good thing.. Teddy R. seems to have believed that at the start when he was pushing us into it. Social Darwinism was predated by Spencerism and it explained everything in terms of the fittest going to the top in war and peace. The rich really loved that and it was preached in their churches.

Seeing how far we've sunk, my question is, how close are we to being a Fourth World nation?

Posted by: c u n d gulag

just curious. have you ever traveled to a third world country? yeah we're in an economic mess right now but the vast majority of human beings on this planet would trade places with us in a second.

". . . Bryant defended Kansas against the teaching of evolution - and won."

The Scopes trial was in Tennessee.

Einstein once said "make things as simple as possible, but no simpler than that".

There are more simple ways to look at job creation but Washington is not interested in that simplicity.