Over on LiveJournal, there are a number of progressive communities of which I am a member. One post in particular deserves rehashing over here at Kos. The main theme of the post can be summed up in this exerpt:
Good government is expensive, so it's best to have as little of it as possible. That way you can afford the best. And the best should benifit those who pay for it, so the expense should be borne broadly.
The entire post and its thread can be found here. Firewheelvortex makes some intriguing points about whether or not we are getting value for the amount of taxes we pay.
Since it seems likely that we beleagered middle class taxpayers are going to be paying the lion's share of taxes for the foreseeable future, maybe we should come to some consensus on what we want from our government. This exercise may help us in our attempts to reason with those Republicans who haven't drank the Kool-aid but who also haven't drank at the fount of knowledge yet.
A common theme swirls around the progressive side of the blogosphere and that is that Republicans don't seem to want to govern after being elected. SanJoseLady had a couple of excellent observations over in today's diary about Katrina. She said in this reply that "Democrats may tax and spend, but at the very least you get something for your money. With the GOP in charge your money is spent and spent and spent and there is nothing to show for it." She also had a good point about how the no-bid contracts were awarded to "friends" of the administration and how loathe the administration is to hold their friends accountable.
With the outsourcing problem growing and the number of people underemployed, our tax base is eroding. Already there have been deep cuts in the budget for programs that benefit average Americans and the poor. There are de facto cuts in proper spending that are made by appointing cronies and incompetents to positions in order to quash parts of previously functional departments with which the GOP disagrees. NASA, NOAA, FDA, CDC and others have suffered from taking marching orders based on policy to undermine their core effectiveness.
Not only are the Republicans NOT making the government and the cost of running it smaller, they have their jowls in the trough with a phenomenal increase in pork projects. They certainly don't mind spending our money on their pets, but they'll be damned if they'll throw any bones to the what they consider the feral population of Americans for whom they have nothing but disdain.
We need to bring these issues to the fore and somehow make them understandable to the Americans who have consistently gone to the polls for the past several decades and voted against good government.
This is my first diary entry here so slam away.