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Message: <blockquote data-quote="APewty" data-source="post: 4492431" data-attributes="member: 71816">It was basically laying out what the calculator does by showing the cutoff ranges for income levels and the resulting cut/increase. Same subject, different presentation. I've meant to say that I identify a lot with much of what Libertarians work for. Not everything, but as Grimhelm says, the system has become a two party boondogle. Not enough people have voted for a third party since the Whigs (I think it was the Whigs, wasn't it?). <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whig_Party_(United_States" target="_blank">Whig Party (United States - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia</a>)  I'm not an economist nor do I care to become one. However, I think more along libertarian lines. The purpose of a federal government should not be to solve everyone's problems. Only to do as the constitution intended. Of course, the scope of the constitution is broad so it can cover many things. Still, our governments do not have to stick their hands in everything nor create programs for everything. Just because time passes do all things need fixing. You can say that I hang on to the old ways like it's a bad thing. But, consider what you all probably have experienced at work. Time and resources are spent brainstorming and learning how to do the same old things in new ways. It's mostly spin. In the work place, if the workers and managers worked at improvement all the time then most situtations would not require the infrastructure of processes such as <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six_Sigma" target="_blank">Six Sigma - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia</a> and the drain on resources that this represents. Problems and solutions come up in daily life, and are ignored many times. But, if a "problem solving team" studies things for a few weeks, then the solution for said problem is celebrated as a triumph. The bureaucracy of government is similar in many ways. In theory, you can take a dollar or an hour of your time, or both, and achieve something like feeding the hungry or cleaning the street. But using the bureaucracy inherent in government will take more than a dollar and more than hour to achieve the same. This inherent inefficiency is what I abhor so much. To know that it will always grow until the spending smothers us all is what bothers me so much about taxes and tax increases. It is rare for a government, be it local, state or federal, to collect "revenue", have a surplus and diligently return it to those it came from. Instead, that money is spent as soon as possible or held until it can be spent. I work with a physician that told me he used to work at a VA hospital. I guess I assumed from the stories you hear about substandard care that it was rough working there and I asked him as much. He responded that it was very good. He said that what happens is that there is a budget and if you don't spend all the money, then the next budget is reduced. But, if you spend it all, the next budget is increased. Therefore they never held back on spending. This is what I suspect and fear about the government model of providing services, health care, etc versus the free market model. It's also more of a core principal of conservatism. Speaking of intelligence, it seems intelligent to me not to hand your money to strangers and expect them to spend it wisely. It seems intelligent to oppose this kind of spending. Oversight is also just another kind of bureaucracy and is inefficient, not to mention the political difficulties that our party system entails when oversight fails.</blockquote>

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