called Not Out of My Pocket. It's just as short sighted, selfish, and stupid. Colorado Springs is the penultimate example, no one wanted to pay anything and now they'll live with nothing. Sure, the police and fire unions are expensive, but not have money to pay for watering public parks (in a semi-arid climate like the front range) and public trash collection? Forget about it, good luck attracting tourist money to the Springs now.

Dumb, dumber, libertarian, and then teabagger (at least they don't claim to think, they just hate and thrash.)

but I don't mind paying taxes that go towards building and maintaining public infrastructure or toward assissting the disadvantaged of our society.

Having said that, our taxes are being used, disproportionately, to bail out wealthy theiving bastards, to maintain a military presence around the whold goddamned globe, and also to imprison our own citizens at unprecedented levels.

I recently read a report that said 65% of tax money collected last year either directly or indirectly went toward out "defense" budget.

We don't need more taxes. We need to spend the tax money we already collect where it should go.

I wrote fucking check to the IRS for 920 thousand dollars this year. I am good and goddamned angry where it's being spent.

So now Lance, and you, Sean Paul, have met the libertarian that doesn't mind paying his share (and that of a few more of you), of social programs.

I did inhale.

One of many take-a-way quotes:

"We stand on the cusp of one of the bleakest periods in human history when the bright lights of a civilization blink out and we will descend for decades, if not centuries, into barbarity. The elites have successfully convinced us that we no longer have the capacity to understand the revealed truths presented before us or to fight back against the chaos caused by economic and environmental catastrophe. As long as the mass of bewildered and frightened people, fed images that permit them to perpetually hallucinate, exist in this state of barbarism, they may periodically strike out with a blind fury against increased state repression, widespread poverty and food shortages. But they will lack the ability and self-confidence to challenge in big and small ways the structures of control. The fantasy of widespread popular revolts and mass movements breaking the hegemony of the corporate state is just that – a fantasy.

My analysis comes close to the analysis of many anarchists. But there is a crucial difference. The anarchists do not understand the nature of violence. They grasp the extent of the rot in our cultural and political institutions, they know they must sever the tentacles of consumerism, but they naïvely believe that it can be countered with physical forms of resistance and acts of violence. There are debates within the anarchist movement – such as those on the destruction of property – but once you start using plastic explosives, innocent people get killed. And when anarchic violence begins to disrupt the mechanisms of governance, the power elite will use these acts, however minor, as an excuse to employ disproportionate and ruthless amounts of force against real and suspected agitators, only fueling the rage of the dispossessed...."

Read it. It's long, and it's the best thing I've read recently. Plus I love Ad Busters.

https://www.adbusters.org/magazine/88/chris-hedges.html

Now, it’s true, the rich and the well-to-do do not pay their fair share in taxes and they are doing what they can to see that that they pay even less. And a minimal increase in their marginal rates would go a long way towards digging the country out of its financial hole. But the fact is that for the great majority of us the rich are other people and voting to raise their taxes while leaving ours alone is still voting to make other people pay for our services.

"...for the great majority of us the rich are other people..."

How does that observation counter the notion that it's a really, really good idea to raise taxes on the rich, the one class of people we all know can afford it? Lance Mannion seems to be forgetting that the rich have, by finding ways of cutting or eliminating their fair share of taxation, been getting something for nothing for quite some time. In fact, the money missing from state budgets is what happens when the rich and corporations stop paying their fair share.

So, let's raise the hell out of their taxes. They owe the system a lot more money than they've been paying.
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Cows get milked, rubes get bilked,
And fat cats dine on fools and cream.