I should've edited my previous post for punctuation but ran out of time.

I think there are good points made all around but I do see a word like 'snowflake' and it is a fingerprint of talking points from the big agendists ('reciprocity', or 'reciprocal', is one you will hear from Trump and it's the mark of Pat Robertson and his virtual empire, not sure Trump actually knows what the word means, seems to think it's he gets back ten times what he gives). Not saying talking points aren't there from all sides but it makes me feel like 'this is a recording' and I don't know who is really talking. Watch what you buy into... a lot of it is going to be transient and reactionary. I'm sure I do it sometimes as well.

I agree about the need for restoring a more responsible scale on taxation aimed at the top who have essentially been getting (or paying for) lots of special concessions and self-policing. I remember being totally amazed back when Forbes supposed fair flat tax rate was floated and people responded positively. Maybe that's when I realized, geez, so many people have no grasp of their own self interest. That fair flat tax joke went even further than trickle down or the other obscenely self serving things that have been going on down there and yet there were still rubes in trailer parks eating t up in their perpetual outrage and blame for all things lefty or liberal. "You must hate the wealthy!" has been the moron level response for decades now. They must hate themselves, it's like the people with a poisoned well water supply covered up by their own local government who still fly old glory and actually live in real fear of asking the wrong questions. So much easier to blame some boogie man 'librul' for absolutely everything and not learning about offshore accounts and barbed wire on U.S. owned plants in commie China.

If I say anything in these messes I post it's a bonus. Thanks for trying anyway, trying is everything. Jumping to extremes and personalized conflict is what we all need less of. People are just at different places in their thinking and sheer jingoism or repetition doesn't usually have any lasting worth.

Balance, not entertainment or drama, just... balance, sustainability. That's the goal.

Oh, Captain, my captain...

Now you sound like a gun owner claiming that registering your automatic or semi-automatic rifle means that a ban on bump-stocks will mean that gummint agents (led, no doubt, by a coup-installed Obama and his army of Kenyan mercenaries) will be landing on your lawn in a black helicopter to confiscate your household arsenal. 

"Free" may not be the best way to describe tax-supported education, but I think people of good faith understand that Medicare isn't free, our K-12 public schools are not free, the interstate highway system is not free, and our military defense is not free.

"Confiscation and redistribution?" Really? Sorry, but we need taxes. Or do you want to rely on the honor system to apy the nation's bills?

And that word "snowflake." Lazy reductionism of a complex problem to an ad hominem attack. Not like you, I'd've thought. Plus, are there any more hyper-sensitive, threatened, entitled types than conservatives? 

Back to Senator Warren... Answering a question about the Confederate emblem's removal in Mississippi as directly as she did is refreshing, even if it was in a town hall full of left-leaning supporters and potential supporters. No hemming or hawing about respecting others' beliefs about heritage and tradition, no worries about alienating the ill-informed, just a simple, resounding one-word declaration. Would we'd hear more answers like that across the board.

As for Social Security, remember that it ain't just yours or my retirement account; it's also a way that people as lucky as you and I can do our part to support the many unfortunate fellow citizens. Bonus: we get our money back for investing in the commonweal. If you want to invest in a riskier, higher-yielding account, fine; no one's stopping you. Consider it a kind of service on the average person's part.

And service to others is the rent we pay for being alive. 

Not quite sure what you mean by your comparing me to a gun owner.  There's nothing in my comment even remotely along those lines.  

I stand by my use of the word "snowflake', and I don't feel it's lazy reductionism at all.  No one wants to be told that their child is average or below-average, because most everyone believes their child is special and talented and capable of anything.  The last two school districts I've lived in have either gotten rid of tracking or changed the names ("standard" became "academic" and "academic" became "accelerated") because they were afraid of the effect on the self-confidence of the students in the middle-of-the-road tracks.  We need to stop being so concerned about how these kids "feel" and more about getting the most out of their skills and intellectual abilities, but instead the school districts waste time and resources trying to get parents settled down when they're told their kid isn't going to be a rocket scientist or doctor and that maybe they should consider plumbing or electrician as a career (not that there is anything wrong with the trades; we're in desperate need of skilled tradespeople because of years of pushing the average kids to college).

I certainly understand those things aren't "free", but I blanch at the idea of more "free" things being added to the list, because someone has to pay for them.  If public college tuition is free, does that mean everyone who wants to go automatically gets in, and if so, doesn't that devalue the education at those schools then, because they have do dumb down the curriculum so that the lowest-performer can succeed?  If there is still some level of selectiveness, then sure, pay for the kids who might actually have a chance at graduating, but if it's just open doors for everyone, those degrees mean nothing more than a HS diploma today.

As for Social Security, I'm concerned about not only its viability going forward, as I doubt I get out what I put into it due to mismanagement over the years, but also about the next logical step, which is going to be "means testing".  Make no mistake, that's on the mind of some progressive somewhere, to punish those folks who put money into 401(k)s by saying they have too much more than everyone else and because of that, they either get a much-reduced amount or nothing when they reach retirement, even though the agreement is that if they pay into it, they get out of it.

A good start for a real discussion is not calling everyone with differing views a lunatic (your words).

I don't want to seem as if a few of us are ganging up on you, Captain, but I also want to make myself clear. 

Your comments about what could, would or might happen if "free college" ever were to happen reminds me of the attacks of the vapors that afflict the gun-rights crowd whenever anything as benign as universal background checks and waiting periods are mentioned in polite company. 

Let's take a breath and listen to the ideas being floated. Does anyone really believe that major changes to the cultural fabric will just happen without debate, discussion, and tinkering? Hell, Obama couldn't get his health plan passed even when he had both houses of Congress on his team. Ditto Trump and the abolition of Obamacare two years ago. So let's not start extrapolating, sliding down slippery slopes or imagining worst-case scenarios before anyone has even had a chance to dig into the details. 

As for more free stuff, you know, I know, but maybe the American people don't know that an enormous percentage of free stuff goes to the well-off in the form of tax laws that benefit them. (And the Trump tax plan has made it even better for them.) Another huge portion of free stuff goes to folks who live in very red districts throughout the country. maybe we -- dare I say it? -- redistribute the free stuff we're already paying for so that we're benefiting more rather than fewer Americans.

A salient passage in Michael Lewis's highly recommended The Fifth Risk:

"The more rural the American, the more dependent he is for his way of life on the U.S. government. And the more rural the American, the more likely he was to have voted for Donald Trump.”

Naturally, one of the seven boxes removed from the USDA's organization chart soon after his administration took over?

“Rural Development,” a $220 billion bank that supplies low-interest rate loans and grants to small towns, the “poorest of the poor” in rural America, for such luxury items as firehouses and community centers.

Talk about socialism! 

I hear that, Prince Hal, but it's hard not to feel like The Top spinning around while Jay, Barry, and Wally are racing around me. It's what makes it difficult to post a conservative or even centrist view here, because there are so many folks ready to post counterpoints, and it's hard to keep up with everything that everyone else is saying. That's why, for me at least, I seem to get more tense and terse as the more people chime in, because it really does feel like everyone on the board is against me at those times and I'm constantly on the defensive. Being told that I'm wrong, for having an unpopular opinion, from multiple folks has a tendency to do that.


Again, I still don't know what you're talking about. If you're talking about how I described how folks are tracked in Germany, that's fact, not "vapors" or "tin foil hat territory"; that's how German schools work. Only 30% of German students get free public school education, and I was wondering how that would work in the US if a system like Germany's were instituted here, particularly because we have so much more diversity here in the US and so many focused interest groups that have specific constituencies that they support and how if kids in those constituencies were not tracked for university, how that would be taken. It's a question and a thought exercise, not some kind of paranoid nightmare or worst-case scenario.


But isn't part of the problem here that most of the current business in the US done in the same handful of cities? Manufacturing in rural areas closed years ago due to logistical reasons, and tech companies won't locate there now because they won't be able to attract the kind of talent they want to move there. Not everyone can live in urban areas, because when they try, you get situations like in the Bay Area or NYC where rents and real estate are through the roof and no one but the top earners can afford to live there.

It's great that the young and educated and hip want to live in Boston and New York and Austin and San Francisco and Southern California, because the major companies are there and there's lots to do and they're trendy, but there are people who live in rural America who either don't want to live in those kinds of areas or who don't have the skills to get those kinds of jobs at those kinds of companies. When those folks see and hear their states (you know "the fly-overs"), their religion, their lack of education, their way of life being denigrated and laughed at by, sorry to use the term, "the coastal elites", they get angry and bitter, because they don't understand why their decision to stay where they were raised is so looked down upon. I know it's hard to believe, but there are some people who are satisfied living in places like that, with a slower pace of life, where the streets roll up at 9:00, and you know your neighbors because they and you have lived there for years, rather than a transient society that hops from city to city chasing the next job or experience or thrill.

Hey everyone, please try to be cognizant of your language when responding to others here. We don't want this to be a place of personal attacks of any kind and that includes interpreting other posters' interpretations of policies and candidates.