you got it..and dont type on here..this is supposed to be OUR goverment. emai lthem and tell them:
http://www.webslingerz.com/jhoffman/congress-email.html

 

Someone needs to stop this government, sounds like it's being run by the morons at GM almost. Ironically they are both in the same situation, serious debt from years and years of mismanagement.

 

http://www.americansolutions.com/Gen...7-367da48a1430

http://www.fairtax.org/site/PageServer

 

It was all over the news that day seven and a half years ago. Rumsfield held a new conference and came out to say that there was $2.3 trillion dollars that the DoD couldn't account for. Unfortunately that day was the day before 9/11 and everyone had other things on their mind from then on. Also the Pentagon book keeping department where its records were was in the wing that was hit by the airliner so those specific records were probably "lost". Here is a link to CBS News from 1/29/02 talking about government waste and it talks for a little bit about the $2.3 trillion dollars.

 

You made it sound like they just misplaced 2.3 trillion 7 years ago (which is way more than the defense dept.'s budget for a year).

It sounds more like, looking back over the history of DOD's existence, you can add up all money they've ever spent, and 25% of that (or $2.3 trillion) has been spent but without records to clearly indicate what they spent it on.

Not good, for certain. But also not exactly the way you presented it in your earlier post.

 

The government pisses money away like water, and then bitches that it doesn't have enough. Solution? Reduce wasteful spending.

Problem solved. Why is this so hard to grasp?

 

Every country with elections gets just the government the electorate allowed to rule them.

 

You had me.. Up till that. Income for the top 5-10% of americans has risen. However, for the rest of us, income has remained relatively flat (verses cost of living) or even decreased since the 80s.



It's called economic warfare... Most people in the U.S. either are oblivious to it or refuse to acknowledge it (after all, who would want to hurt us charitable americans? )

 

listen very closely everyone...


our government is retarded and extremely greedy

all we have to do to solve our tax problem is to force the government to spend more responsibly
our government WASTES more money than is in the ENTIRE budget of most other countries around the world

if I can find the articles I'll post them, but just for example... the pentagon and other government buildings uses specific distributors to purchase all of it's products... it was found, once everything was broken down, that federal government building pay on average over $23,000 for each mini fridge purchased and over $150 each for ice cube trays through these distributors
and to have our congress vote on their own pay raises??? are you kidding me???

 

Nail on head.

What "encouragement" would anyone have of buying/driving fuel efficient vehicles if we paid a tax based on mileage instead of one based on fuel consumption?

The people who came up with this brilliant idea of a mileage tax need to be taken out to the woodshed.

 

How do they propose to know how much you "drove"?

By the odometer?
I've never seen one of those tampered with.

They gonna put a GPS in the car?
Hope nobody figures out where it's located.

How are you going to know if I drove the car, my buddy drove the car, my father drove the car, or a freaking crook stole it the day I left for China and drove it for 4 weeks before I got home and reported it stolen?!?! Bill me for miles that I didn't drive and see what that gets you...

How do you discern the difference between taxing in states that have more demanding road budgets? Illinois, Minnesota, Vermont, and Maine spend a little more $/mile of road than say Florida or Texas... you know... the whole pot-hole, freezing/bursting, scraping, salting, clearing thing.

What if I drive across state lines? Who gets the tax?
Again, you gonna look at some kind of GPS or trip log to see if NC gets 40% and TN gets 60% of my trip last week?

Color me jaded. I say the gas tax is the better way. It hits the user directly - doesn't matter if I let you drive my car... you fill it up, you pay the tax. If I have a gas guzzler, I buy more fuel to drive it, I pay more taxes for my choice of driving a guzzler. States that have more demanding budgets can set their tax appropriately and not penalize states that have better climates. It's anonymous (big thing for me). It's non-invasive. It's the best choice IMO.

Now to breech another topic about roads, their costs, and maintenance.
We seem eager to throw out the cost of building roads and bridges at any time, but you almost NEVER hear anything about maintaining them. Almost never is the cost of maintenance included in a project justification for the DOT. If it costs $1-million to build a road, the traffic is bad, and the State has the money..."POOF" there's a road. We all see that in newspapers and on TV... "built at a cost of $xx-million...blah blah blah". EVER hear anyone on the news say, ...and the annual cost to maintain this road/bridge is estimated at $x-million."

Wonder why a huge chunk of this stimulus bill is aimed at repairing bridges and roads?!?! Because their maintenance has never been properly funded from the beginning.
Even yesterday I read in my local paper how NC is planning to spend their chunk of money, and d@mn if there wasn't "new roads" all over the state being proposed. WTF?!?! We can't even keep up the ones we have, and they want to build more new ones?!?!

As an engineer, I can tell you 1st hand that maintenance and upkeep are almost ALWAYS more than the cost of creation or aquisition.
So let's just say it costs $1/mile to maintain a road... restripe it once in a while, put down new reflectors, replace signs and guardrails, salt it up north, scrape it in the mid-atlantic, reseal it every couple years, maybe a resurfacing once a decade, etc, etc. For every mile of roads that I add to my state, I have added a permanent fixed cost to the maintenance budget that will never go away or get smaller until the road or bridge is closed - and even then it may cost me money to have it demolished/removed.

I tire of seeing Private Developers install new roads into new developments and hand them over to the state to maintain. It's passing the buck in literal terms. When a contractor builds a sub-par road that cracks and falls apart as soon as a heavy truck (moving van, etc) drives over it, it falls to the state or local govt to rebuild the road correctly at taxpayer expense - which often costs more than doing it right the first time would have.

I won't belabor this topic too much, but as a former employee of the NC-DOT (Division 9 out of Winston-Salem), I can tell you that we as a Nation need to seriously revisit our current system and how we fund new roads and maintain them. Building it is not even half the battle.

I see us throwing good money after bad, and not even wanting to realize it.
Let's get responsible with the money we have FIRST, then I'll entertain giving you more of mine to spend.

 

This was shot down by the administration. LaHood was talking out of his ***, and someone quoted him...

 

Adding a milag tax is pointless, you could easily add the tax to the gas. There is NO difference. However, there is a giant monetary difference to implement. in order to charge per mile, they would have to put the devices in EVERY car in the US. How do they plan to do this in the current situation. People can not buy the GPS units. will they also have to pay a monthly service charge to use them? will the government cover it since it is thier mandate? seriously, the costs of doing something like that is incredible, vs just raising the gas tax. I figured it out. if it is 2/10 of a cent per mile. in order to get to 35 cents a mile it would only be 185 miles, which is a little more than half a tank of fuel. So basically they want to double the cost of the taxes. Minimum anyhow. and then add an additional cost for installation and all of the other costs associated with that GPS (since that is the only way to figure it out. the only problem is some tin foil around that thing would disable it or a steel building). there are more holes in a milage tax than any other thing i have heard yet. They can not seem to figure out that the things they do for the fuel milage are going to cut the taxes collected, so now they want to basically punish ya for having decent fuel economy.

 

Via an LS1 edit!

Seriously, such a law would encourage everybody to own a V8?

 

I couldn't agree more. Both seem to have too many chiefs and not enough indians too. I don't see one dime outta this going to fix Americas roads or bridges! This country is like the Titanic, headed for a big ****in' iceberg and certain death. It's getting too massive to even turn around. BTW I mentioned this in the lounge a while back.