Of all the odd places to find a discussion of U.S. aid to Israel, check out the Dilbert Blog.
As usual, one is hard-pressed to nail down where Scott Adams stands on the issue, but (also) as usual, he has a great way of approaching the question.
The post linked above is just one entry. Make sure to look up and down.
Why not go one step further…. Dismantle the 3000 military bases worldwide, cut the size of the army and military budget by 50% (equal to 250bn dollars), stop meddling in other countries and start spending that on education, healthcare, job creation, etc. Then the approval rating would be 99%, not 29%
Nearly $373 billion of revenues were raised to fund public education for grades prekindergarten through 12 in school year 1999–2000. We spend more of a percentage of our GDP than at any time in history, yet students are still graduating without the needed skills to enter the work force or are dropping out of school in record numbers.
In short, spending more money on education is obviously not the answer.
Job creation? Have you ever gone to a poor man to ask for a job? Allow companies to keep more of their money (which are only passed down to us end consumers) and they’ll be able to hire more people. Government doesn’t create jobs but it can create a business climate that encourages companies to hire. Our jobless rate is now at 4.7% — for you Bush-haters, that’s lower than the average unemployment rate for each of the last 4 decades.
The bottom line is that tax cuts work to expand the economy. They worked for Kennedy, they worked for Reagan, and they worked for Bush.
It’s also worth noting that 41% of American households pay no income taxes at all. Not only that, but the top 5% of American income earners pay 54.36% of the total tax revenue. In 1980, the share of income taxes paid by the top 1% of taxpayers was just 19.3 percent. Now the top 1 percent of taxpayers pay 34.27%! When someone makes the inane comment that Bush’s tax cuts helped the wealthy, point them to the facts.
Unfortunately, the mainstream media and the Democrats don’t like these facts because lower taxation means that they have less control over people. I happen to believe that I know how to spend my money better than the government does.
Keep the military as is. Despite the hand-wringing you here from the liberal media and the Democrats, we really are at war with a group of people who want to see us dead. Radical Islam is just as insidious as Nazism and Japan’s military rulers.
Unlike our last president, Bush doesn’t take polls to decide what to do. Whether you like some of his policies or not (and I don’t like everything he does) you can count on the fact that when he says something he means it.
Oh, and don’t believe everything you read in rags like the Washington Post and the New York Times. There’s a reason that newspaper readership and network new viewership is plunging. The mainstream media no longer has control over the flow of information and they now have a swarm of bloggers to hold their feet to the fire on their lies and lazy, biased reporting.
-Michael McCullough
Stingray: a blog for salty Christians