TB - Don’t get me wrong. I agree with you on most points. The government is out of control in its spending but to brand either the Democrats or the Republicans and the party of ‘tax and spend’ is to miss the point – there both at fault as are we for letting it happen.

I can think of no better way to curb spending than to look at the earmarks on the budget and insist that our representatives stop this practice. They were sent to congress to enact laws not to fund pet projects for their home constituents. If there is something that needs to be done, like taking care of rebuilding New Orleans or putting a man on Mars, then that should and must be the consensuses of the congress not some midnight addition by a clerk in a senator’s office.

I spent my working life in the military / industrial complex so I know how badly that can perform and when I think of all the effort we put out to support our military rather than unleashing our economy on the really importing thinks in life it makes me sick. I worked for General Dynamics for a long time and one day I realized that we had over 300,000 people building a couple of weapons systems and they had been at it for 30 years. That’s on the scale of the pyramids in construction projects and I always thought that must have been a drain on the Egyptian economy. At one point in the ’80 about 1 in 3 engineers were working for the military in one way or another but then, thanks to the end of the cold war we were able to put that talent into something worthwhile and the technology revolution kicked in. With another breather we could do it again.

I don’t know how to achieve that second breather but I am sure that the war in Iraq is not the answer.

But when you say there is *nothing* worth doing by our government, and I include all levels of government as our government, you are off the mark by a mile. There are a great many projects that are best performed by our government and I have come to the conclusion that health care is one of them. Let’s add it to the list. It’s a positive act for the good of the country and should be our top priority right after getting the hell out of Iraq.