[quote]Uncle Gabby wrote:
I’m not sure how the two tie together, other than you think the money that’s being spent in the desert is a waste. Fair enough. But I don’t think you can “cure” cancer. It’s caused by a myriad of environmental factors, some of which people are already educated about, like smoking, and yet continue to do anyway.
Another cause of cancer, in my opinion, is more people simply living longer than ever before and the more times tissues have to replicate themselves, the more likely there is to be a “malfunction”. Of cousre that doesn’t apply to cancers like lukemia that affect the young. That said, money spent on cancer treatments is never a waste.
But I don’t like your using cancer funding as the argument against spending elsewhere. It’s a cheap debate tactic. You can always say “I think we should end the war on drugs. The money spent on the war on drugs should be spent on cancer.” or “I think we should get rid of welfare. The money being given to lazy bums should be spent on cancer.”
You could even argue that some of the money being wasted on the standardized testing of No Child Left Behind would be better spent on cancer research.
In other words, argue against the war or the policy in question based on its own merits and faults, not because there could be better ways to spend the money. There could always be an issue that is more important, more deserving of public funds, but that doesn’t mean that the issue at hand doesn’t deserve some support as well. [/quote]
Some Support? Do you have any idea what the #1 budget item for the US Govt is? Look, I am not against the military, or defense from outside threats. But if the premise of doing so is to save american lives, we are screwing the fucking pooch. There is more deaths from preventable causes INSIDE this country than there will ever be from outside. And yet we spend the vast majority of our government money on the latter. When you have the flu, do you go to the doctors, take medicine, try to heal yourself? Or do you go buy a bullet proof vest, a combat helmet and some guns and ammo? Sure, those things could help protect you if the need arisies, like someone invades your home. But in the meantime, you just made your chances of dying from the flu you have 100X worse. We need to “as a country” stop chasing boogeymen and deal with our internal problems. We certainly have a lot of them. No one is going to invade the USA, no one is going to fuck with us. The very worst that an outside force could do to us outside of a nukefight where everyone dies, is for a handful of small terrorist attacks. WHICh btw I think would be highley unlikley if the rest of the world saw we were minding our own business and not playing police in thier back yards.
So I CAN say that our gratuetous spending on defense and our abbhorrent foreign policy and warmongering do directly effect our internal problems. Because a few things will happen, #1 it will take real money away from real problems. #2 if that happens, the Fed will simply Make new money to alleviate those shortages, and finally #3, all the money now does less because the government cannot be responsible with thier policies. So if the government just cut back on military spending, brought people home from overseas etc… the real problems would have more money allocated to them, and that money would be worth MUCH more than it currently is. So even more work could be done with the same amount of money, more problems would be solved. But I’m glad all our military spending prevented something like 9-11 from happening. Oh wait it didn’t. It surely has helped stop any future attacks though. I mean the government tells me it does, obviously they never lie and always make the right decisions. AND in the far out chance they discovered they had made a wrong decision, they would immediately reverse that decision because they are not interested in saving face, only american lives. Which is clear because of how they spend our money. (and they don’t have any friends who own oil refineries, or weapons manufacturers)
V