Moving this video to NetRunner's personal queue. It failed to receive enough votes to get sifted up to the front page within 2 days.

*promote for awesome

would you rather have the epa? or 27 dollars in your pocket?

LMAO

Promoting this video and sending it back into the queue for one more try; last queued - promote requested by MINK.

I do not want the monolith. Not to say that i'd rather have $27, but more to say that the State of Georgia can handle its environmental problems more efficiently with my $27 dollars than the EPA ever could. This could be said of for most of the other mentioned organizations. For example, over 1/3 of taxes paid into entitlement programs such as Medicare and Social Security is lost to administrative costs of maintaining such a large organization. Anyone who has taken an economics course will understand this as diseconomies of scale. I see firsthand the results of the national EPA in my back yard, where lake lanier is suffering from silt runoff, extreme drought, and still draining into the Chattahoochee like there's no tomorrow.
I vote to expand my local and state government, where programs are customizable and flexible. Let my Federal Government do what they were supposed to do, per the U.S. Constitution.
Please explain the benefits of having one giant attempt at efficiency as opposed to 50 smaller tries.
upvote for debate purposes, not this misleading horse crap.

So the only two options for solving any problem are either the federal government or individuals? How about state and local governments, businesses, and non-profits?

As far as fixing the declining dollar, isn't a big part of the decline due to the federal government printing money in order to spend more than it takes in? Sure, they could cut spending instead, but that might lead to smaller government! *gasp*

Regulations for business are often helpful, but if you over-regulate and over-tax then you run the risk of businesses moving to other countries where the regulations aren't as restrictive, and that doesn't help anyone here.

I'm not a huge proponent of reducing government size, but I would like to cut out as much uselessness as possible to balance the budget. Do we really need to spend millions/billions a year to investigate, arrest, and prosecute non-violent drug users?

The video makes some good points, but it often seems to miss the point as well (yes, I know it was meant for entertainment primarily).

I certainly didn't expect this clip of all clips to spark meaningful debate, but okay, I'm game.

rgroom, citations for your health care numbers please. My quick research finds that even Cato and Heritage admit to a 2-3% overhead in Medicare administrative costs. Heritage gives a pretty reasonable explanation for why that number wouldn't hold up if everyone was covered under Medicare, but they only bump that estimate up to 6%. Cato claims the 2-3% comes from an institutional negligence towards fraud and abuse that government is covering up, which sounds less reasonable to me. Private insurance is more like 12% according to the last couple major studies done, and Heritage provides similar numbers (7-10% for PPO, 15% for HMO, which would probably average out to 12% overall).

That mouthful said, I don't think the only metric for what makes a good health care system is low administrative cots, and I'm pretty sure low administrative costs aren't the only thing we should be turning an eye to when talking about health care cost reduction.

As for the EPA, it's not saying a national EPA > state equivalents, just that it's worth the $27, despite the insane amount of griping about tax money going to it. I personally would argue that you're half right -- local, decentralized solutions to environmental issues are what we need, but we also need a national, if not global, set of standards we all are working to meet, otherwise polluters just migrate to the least environmentally strict areas. The catchphrase is "Think Globally, Act Locally" if you recall.


Psychologic, I mostly agree with what you said. My only two disagreements would be the idea that Democrats/progressives are "afraid" of shrinking government; we just think the conservatives' plan of "small government" shouldn't be treated as a goal in and of itself, because it didn't work out so well in the past.

Also, clearly, if you listened to Obama's speech, he wasn't calling for Federal government or nothing, he was saying Federal government should create a framework that encourages and empowers local governments, businesses, non-profits, and individuals to solve our problems. The progressive argument with regard to regulation is that there's an optimal level and shape for them that doesn't exist at the extreme ends of the scale. We'd love to have an opposition party that helped find a proper balance, rather than try to constantly tip the scale over.

The other side makes the argument that the optimal government is one that sticks to armies and courts and nothing more. This video is a response to those people who, like Grover Norquist, want to drown government in a bathtub.

Other, more moderate people, we welcome with open arms. And weed.

>> ^NetRunner:
Also, clearly, if you listened to Obama's speech, he wasn't calling for Federal government or nothing ...

I was referring to the video. It seemed to imply that if the federal government wasn't involved in fixing a problem then the only alternative would be for individuals to fix it themselves.

I know most Democrats don't think that way. =)

Dichotomy fail