The guillotine I am building has a reset, does that count?

Also has a big red "Easy" button.

I think congress should be 2 terms and not be able to be a career with pensions.

Well, if they are unrelated organizations, why do their web sites look exactly the same?

http://www.americansforprosperityfoundation.com/foundation/about/directors

http://www.americansforprosperity.org/about/directors

You were dumbed down by Keynsian economics (if you even have a degree since you appear to have and have done everything).  As psychoak has tried to point out to you, every time that idiots theories are applied, disaster happens.  Recessions turn into depressions or just hang on.  Keynsians lack a critical ingredient that most people have - it is called common sense.   You cannot tax your way to prosperity as they would have you believe.  If indeed you did learn anything, it was a definite waste of time - perhaps not yours, but definitely of MITs.

I know I was deprived since I had only one Nobel Laureate among my professors when I got my econ degree.  But fortunately all were competent enough to make sure that I not only learned what had transpired before my time, but to make sure I could continue to learn.

Article I, Section 8- Powers of Congress

The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States; but all Duties, Imposts and Excises shall be uniform throughout the United States;

Those without compassion are not deserving of compassion.

I could have as easily said "May you reap what you sow" which would have had the exact same meaning. In that instance I just preferred to be a bit more explicit.

So may you too, reap what you sow.

Also from http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Americans_for_Prosperity_Foundation

Americans for Prosperity Foundation (AFP) is a section 501(c)(3) organization which operates as the counterpart of Americans for Prosperity, a section 501(c)(4) organization. On its website, Americans for Prosperity states that the two organisations are "committed to educating citizens about economic policy and a return of the federal government to its Constitutional limits."

Not sure what the difference between a c3 and c4 organization is, but the bottom line is that both organizations are funded directly or indirectly by Koch Industries as pointed out in the Sourcewatch article.

I have no dental, health, any insurance of any kind.  Why?  I am a lazy bastard.  I like to do as little work as I can get away with.  Compassion would be to give me a swift kick in the ass and tell me to go work harder and do something with myself so I can afford the finer things in life.  Providing a safety net for me to fall on is just encouraging me to do nothing.

Well meaning idiots are why there are a few hundred million starving people in Africa.  Aid has destroyed them as a people, they have no pride, no sense of purpose.  They sit around in camps waiting to be fed, wasting away for no reason other than we started feeding them instead of giving them a swift kick to get their shit together and pull themselves back up.  We've already lost most of ours.  Fifty years ago, picking up a welfare check would have been out of the question, the few with so little self respect as to do such a thing would have been societal pariahs with no sense of self worth.  It was a grave insult to have others think you needed help to survive.  Today, people are more likely to brag about milking the system instead, the true cost of a security net is our self reliance.

It is the duty of citizens to make an informed vote.  Key word being informed.  When people vote out of ignorance, we get monumental fuckups, like Carter, soon to be outdone by Obama as worst president in history.  Not that either of them deserve the title, FDR, Wilson and Johnson were all just as bad or worse.

I'd go for a full blown literacy and policy test, but the problem is who the fuck do you get to write it?  Once you give government power, it gets abused, so I'm left without a solution to all the fucking idiots on both sides of the aisle.  I also see nothing wrong with poll taxes, this nonsense about ID's is sheer absurdity.  If you don't have a valid ID, you're stupid.  There are numerous circumstances where not having one will cause you severe disruption.  If you're really that stupid, you have no business screwing up the country with your ill considered votes in the first place.  People that don't care enough to put effort into it should stay the hell out of it.

It pissed me off to no end when I see some dumb shit voting when they can't even do something so simple as pick out the vice president from a lineup.  Voting in complete ignorance isn't any better than voting with the batshit crazy, warped views people like Mumbles have about an entire party.  We've gotten so bad that elections come down to a choice between two nearly identical progressives, lefties will scream bloody murder over this, but it's true.  Bush and Gore are both progressives, McCain and Obama are both progressives.  They all seek to expand government control, and since not even 20% of the primary voting population has been bothering to educate themselves well enough to vote for any reason beyond name recognition, it's all we end up getting is a choice between two expansionist idiots that will increase the size of government in perpetuity.

You view a safety net as something that most people scheme and scam and are willing to essentially to become what they do for a living. While I agree that there certainly is some abuse I also believe that it's the kind of abuse that you're talking about is a very small percentage of cases and that in most cases it's a matter of people trying to make it on their own that for one reason or other usually having more to do with blind luck than any kind of character flaw on their part that they require some kind of assistence.

Your particular example happens to pick welfare as your example however realistically welfare is such a miniscule portion of the budget that it hardly warrants discussion.

If you take look at what the real problems are at least on the non-defense budget side of the ledger the two things that stand out (besides the Bush tax cuts which in reality make up a significant portion of our current shortfall) and those are Social Security and Medicare. So let's talk about those two things for a moment.

First Social Security which all the lies from the right notwithstanding is really in pretty good shape. It has it's own, and up til now independent, source of funding specifically payroll taxes (a highly regressive form of taxation I might add) which currently has a *surplus* of over $2.6T dollars and by every reckoning is fully funded until the 2040 timeframe. Even if nothing is done to "fix" Social Security then when the surplus is depleted in the 2040 timeframe the revenue will still be sufficient to support 79% of projected outlays. This is assuming no changes, in particular to the COLA as it currently stands. SO in the absolute worst case we're looking at a 21% shortfall 30 years into the future and while a sudden cut of 21% would indeed be drastic it could easily be fixed with some very small adjustments today certainly far smaller than those being bandied about.

So the bottom line is Social Security is not really a problem. However Medicare is indeed a problem and it's a problem that's far bigger than Medicare itself. The Medicare problem is merely one portion of the overall healthcare problem that we have in this country. Medical costs are simply rising so fast, way beyond the rate of inflation, that they are simply becoming a greater and greater portion of GDP. That's the real problem. The question is what to do about it?

Are we supposed to simply let seniors die? Deathpanels were certainly a point the Teabaggers jumped all over during the healthcare debate. However that's what is in reality being proposed. What kind of insurance could a 70 year old couple get? Other than Medicare or Medicare Advantage there's really no option. Today I pay $20K per year for family coverage what a 70 year old couple would pay would be well beyond that and then what would it be even just 10 years later when they were 80? If they could even get coverage, which today they couldn't, the price would be astronomical.

The bottom line is that I support Medicare for all which I maintain would be less costly overall between what we pay in taxes for our healthcare system plus what we pay in total to the insurance industry. Plus by doing so we would actually be doing the same thing that the rest of the civilized world manages to do.

But obviously we're not going to solve the US healthcare problem in this or any other thread, however since you used welfare as your example I want to tell you a little bit about corporate welfare specifically as it regards our defense spending.

I'll try to keep this long story short, after being unemployed for 15 months (during which time I dissipated about $75,000 of my life savings) in 2003 and the first three months of 2004 I got a job with Lockheed Martin who contracted me to a DoD research facility for $90,000 (which was a $30,000 pay cut from my previous job). So here's where the corporate welfare came in because the cost of my services to the government were billed out at $320,000 per year. The way it worked was I got $90K, Lockheed Martin took $110K and the DoD research facility took another $120,000 a year as overhead. And I was one of literally *thousands* of such contractors.

Welfare, Food Stamps, Aid to Dependent Children and any other welfare type program pales in comparison to all the corporate welfare that's paid for on the taxpayers dime.

As an aside after a few years I got lucky and it was determined that there was "occupational conflict of interest" in my working as a Lockheed Martin employee on projects on which Lockheed Martin bid and at that point I was directed to select another contract house and since I knew how much they paid for me I was able to negotiate my current $90 an hour rate and so now I make $180K a year, my contract house makes $20K a year but the research facility still makes $120K a year and I still cost the taxpayer $320K a year or almost 3 times what I'm worth in the commercial market.

That's *real* welfare and that's what should be cut, the problem is that just as any fiscal spending cuts get applied to things the middle class America needs like Social Security and Medicare, the defense cuts proposed are veterans pensions and healthcare, which is something I'm not in favor of either.

The bottom line is that you're looking at things that cost a penny looking to save dollars (i.e. Welfare) or you're looking at reducing things that really help people, that they need and that is not even available commercially assuming most seniors could afford it to begin with.

These things are what your policy choices would do and hence are what I wish on anyone and everyone that makes the choice to explicitly hurt people which is what the Republican and the Teabaggers wish to do.

Meanwhile, people jump on and off unemployment every six months while they work off the books, skip getting married just to work the tax code, and then get married so they can declare bankruptcy to dodge their credit card debt a second time.  Even the honest ones often spend two years sitting on their ass now because they can't get a job that pays higher than the unemployment checks they're collecting from their old one.

You're going nuts over your own personal experience, but the people you're railing against just might be honest enough about cutting spending to actually try solving that problem.  There have been a lot of people screaming about defense contracts for a long time, but the loony left just wants to shrink the size of the military, not fix it, so they never get anywhere.  The crooks are on both sides of the aisle, and they work together in private while they trash each other in public, it's where your precious compromises come from.

You say there's nothing wrong with Social Security, it's just fine till 2040.  Social Security is supposed to be funded in advance, which means it's already tits up.  If what I'm paying into it will be gone thirty years from now, wouldn't you say that's a problem for me, since 65 is only a few years after that?  Social Security will lay waste to society in 2040 if the problem isn't solved in advance, it's not some minor detail we can just work out later.  There are people expecting it to be there that will have already quit working, bumping it up five to ten years, which is a minimalist expectation by 2040, would be severe disruption.  It has to be fixed in advance, I see no reason not to start now, since it's already losing money.  I prefer to avoid drastic measures that will end up coming about when we do a stupid and wait for it to collapse first.  A 79% payout can be the difference between eating and not eating after your rent and utilities have been paid for, long term conditions get you long term planning to make up for them with no ill effect, an immediate change would be guaranteed disaster.

Medicaid and Medicare are the real time bomb though, Social Security is just going to end up being a broken promise, having robbed people of 15% of their lifelong income, which would have been enough to retire on just a few years later, only to go bankrupt.

Medicaid pays less than cost on pretty much everything.  Individual practitioners actually lose money on medicaid patients if they do their job well.  It's why so many practices have jam packed waiting rooms with doctors popping in for a two minute checkup on a patient they know nothing about.  Medicare isn't much better.  The real reason your insurance premiums are so high, is that Medicare and Medicaid comprise a majority of the cost, but a minority of the spending.  The government is robbing them blind to pretend we don't have a catastrophic problem, and they're making it up off the insured.  To have the health care we have, it has to be paid for, another 15% on the payroll tax would do it.  I don't know about you, but I don't like the idea of having 30% of my income go towards paying for me to be old and sickly for another twenty years when I could make my own damn decisions and just kick the bucket a whole lot sooner.  I'm a very practical individual, I'd rather have a computer now, than crippling arthritis for twenty more years when I'm an old fart tired of being here.

For those that do feel like paying lots of money to live a little longer, save the money you would have been taxed on, and you'll be able to afford that ungodly expensive insurance in your old age.

Then of course, there's just government in general.  A built in 8% increase in budgets, from which they loath taking imaginary cuts.  GDP doesn't increase that fast.  It's insane, to put it mildly.  Even in a boom, you can't expect it to double in ten years with any reliability, and the bust that follows such a boom wipes out a few years of it and typically leaves you with stagnant growth over the next decade.  Government merrily continues growing regardless.

I am way too lazy to write that up again, damn the forum for eating my post.

Short version, yes it will, no it doesn't, living longer means retiring later, and if you'd like fries with that what the fuck are you doing paying for college, kids and a mortgage at 55?  You've been an irresponsible git and lived beyond your means while popping out kids at an unhealthy age, depending on the future to just turn out all rosy to accommodate your actions.  If you want to waste money sending your ten year late kids to an ivy league college on your own dime, save in advance.  Skip the stupid thirty year mortgage regardless, buy a smaller house.

I just watched the DOW and TSX take the biggest nose dive since 2008 and can't wait for the Asian market to open at 8pm est to watch this mellow drama unfold. The US dollar is very close to losing its world reserve currency status then watch the inflation explode.

I also volunteer at the local food bank and the requests are going up & up & up and the people donating are going down, down, down. We now have to prioritize families with children only. What happens when inflation kicks in and prices rise to the point where even the moderately well off stop donating?

I agree with SivCorp about the civility. I am interested in both sides of the argument but without the school yard antics.

EDIT: 

Dow Sinks 500, Worst Day Since Dec. 2008