pikeshot1600
Ad Honoris
- Jul 2009
- 10,002
I assume you are talking about the US in #397. In the States, nearly everyone gets a piece of the Federal pie, and in many cases of the individual state pie as well. The ignorance of that tends to be willful.Not least if you have a public culture that doesn't value that kind of civil administration, and generally tends to paint it and its employees as little better than sponges squandering tax payer money.
There are individual persons, and even professional associations, who speak nonsense about that. A civil engineer who designs bridges and roadways, and who bitches and moans about how the Federal government should "get off his back," is flirting with an insanity diagnosis. Public money is what pays for his life.
Well off retired people who have enough, or more than enough, income are not declining their Social Security benefits. They are not declining their Medicare after age 65.
Trucking companies and independent transportation workers who support the current Republican con game ignore the fact that the highways, and in many cases their customers on whom they depend, are in their turns dependent on Federal DOT funding, or on Federal subsidies for transportation of (often Federally subsidized) agricultural products or even automobiles (Tesla would have collapsed long since without Federal and state subsidies).
The Koch Brothers and Amazon are not complaining about the tax breaks they get, as in no taxes at all in many cases. Even there some Federal employees have to verify that their cheating is within the law.
My father passed away young and I got Social Security benefits until age 22 which paid in large part for my education. I probably could not have afforded it otherwise. I know others who also benefited in that way.
** Nor are corporations like Lockheed, and Ingalls Shipbuilding, and United Technologies, and Raytheon, and General Electric....and all the major universities that do multi-billions in Federal research contracts, blah, blah....turning down the business. Also their employees, stockholders - and all the military personnel, and their civilian employees and their families, and local economies that are supported by them.....A.S.O.
The flow of public funding requires those sponge-employees to facilitate the transfer payments to people who consume all that "squandered" tax payer money.
** EDIT: Incidentally, the seventh paragraph above in re defense contractors and research contracts definitely applies to this thread and to NATO.
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