It's not that I don't see the "money pool" thing, it's just that I see it as another wildly fantastickal portrayal of what Liberals actually believe. I get that you actually ascribe those motivations to us, but as I've said many times before, you really don't have the ability to read minds. You're arguing with your demons, not with me.

We agree that any regulation at all of an economy changes the outcome. But the effect is usually more subtle than the brutal forced redistribution of Communists that has you quaking in your boots.

Consider the way that the tax code makes some uses of money more attractive than others. The tax code embodies a judgment about the relative merits of, for example, investment versus wage income. Jiggering the tax code by doing things like eliminating or reducing capital gains, while not fixing the AMT, imposes a strong bias on the system that favors passive investment over employment. There are more rewards from membership in the "investing class" than from being a wage slave. The playing field is not level, and people have less of "the freedom to be creative and productive, the freedom to benefit from it, and the right to keep what they earn." when their choice of economic activity is constrained by arbitrary parameters of the system.

The fact is, there is no objective measure of the "goodness" of an economic system. The system we choose is a reflection of our values, and rewards those we want to reward and punishes those we want to punish. A democratic republic, especially one whose basic mission is to "promote the general welfare", is obligated to work toward an economic system that benefits the maximum number of people, not a small elite.

"Poor" in America often means only having one car.

Thank you for that insight, Ebenezer. Maybe in the context of a wealthy Silicon Valley suburb you look down on your "poor" neighbors who have only one car, but the reality is that poverty in America means living two or three families to a one-bedroom apartment, working two or three jobs, pissing hours of your life riding the second-class public transit system, and surviving on supplemental food allotments of beans and rice. It means never being able to build up even the slimmest of surpluses that would enable a person to get ahead. Who cares if community college is free when you're working 16 hours a day just to stay alive? "Get an education" is only slightly more arrogant and cynical than the Right's trademark "get a job".

BTW, we're paying more in entitlements because the number of old people is going up. Don't just make stuff up.

Employment's down? Uh....okay.

You must know you're just blowing smoke. You know full well that the unemployment rate is a deceptive measure of the true employment picture, and I won't bother to reiterate the reasons you already know. The metric that matters is the employment rate, and that's fallen steadily, by about 3% during the Bush Administration.

I thought I had put in a qualification about how a part of the increase is due to demographics of age, but now that I think about it, I said that in a different post somewhere else. But of course I'm accounting for the part of the increase due to demographics. But subtract that, and we still have an increase in spending due to an increase in recipients.