What sacrifice would you be willing to make?

It's the same thing with the war on drugs. Legalize pot and coke and what happens to all those prison guard paychecks? The law enforcement personnel? The prisons that won't be needed and won't be built? And, of course, the hundreds of thousands of non-violent offenders whose "job" has been to be a government-supported prisoner? You dump them right back into the work force?

This isn't to mention the economies of Central and South America, which'll go straight into the dump. Nor the value of the dollar, which partially dependent on being the black-market currency of choice.

Still, morally, the argument that something is just a WPA project with lots and lots of guns is pretty weak one...

 

Here's that recurring arts vs defense canard in starkest terms.

For 2009, the total of DoD cost overruns - not the entire budget, just what was over budget - was $296 BILLION. For one year.

www.galorath.com/wp/296-billion-dollars-in-dod-cost-overruns-2009-gao-weapons-systems-assessments.php

The annual NPR operating budget, according to FOX News, is $166 MILLION.

www.foxnews.com/politics/2010/10/22/republicans-add-npr-funding-cut-budget-slashing-contest/

The 2011 cost of the National Endowment for the Arts is $155 MILLION.

www.nea.gov/about/budget/AppropriationsHistory.html

You could fund both NPR and NEA for more than 1300 years with what the Department of Defense wasted on cost overruns last year alone.

 

Law enforcement personnel is already stretched thin dealing with important crimes, much less worrying about drugs and hookers. They just deal with those once in a while as a show of force.

As far as the prison guards go, they'll still have jobs. Just give violent offenders longer sentences. Keep Lindsay Lohan in jail for a while to teach her to obey the fucking law.

 

A 2009 study by the Department of Justice said that "of the 2.2 million Americans that are currently incarcerated, 21.2 percent of them are non-violent drug offenders." Throw in the violent ones and that's an awful lot of jobs being supported by them. Lawyers, judges, cops and the rest.

Once again, like with the war on terrorism, we've taken a problem and created a state-supported industry.

 

I'd be willing to sacrifice Craig DuBow.

 

We should cut a lot of foreign aid. Why do we borrow money from China, only to send it back to them as \"foreign aid?\" That kind of thing needs to go before funding for the arts.

 

You could fund the NEA for 6 years with the foreign aid we give to China for just one year! Somehow this is justification for spending the money on the NEA.

 

Damaged goods. Doesn't count.

 

Privatize fire departments and eliminate school buses or privatize them.

Make all school divsions run on a county system and not a town system.

I probably just cut local taxes by 15-20% just by making those changes.

 

That's only a sacrifice if your house is on fire and your kid rides a school bus.

 

Things that would or might affect me?

Severely cut subsidies on student loans, significantly reduce unemployment benefits after six months, gut the defense department.

Yes, yes, I know, without all those people employed to build planes and break windows, we'd be in even worse economic shape.

 

This is not my sacrifice now but would be eventually -- but we should raise the minimum age for Social Security and Medicare by at least five years. When those ages were established, they were based on a population that lived much shorter lives. It was never meant to give the average person 20 years of retirement.