The Police In America Are Becoming Illegitimate

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The Police In America Are Becoming Illegitimate

Post by Amskeptic » Fri Dec 05, 2014 10:51 pm

The Police in America Are Becoming Illegitimate
The crooked math that's going to crash American law enforcement if policies aren't changed

BY MATT TAIBBI
Rolling Stone
December 5, 2014

Nobody's willing to say it yet. But after Ferguson, and especially after the Eric Garner case that exploded in New York yesterday after yet another non-indictment following a minority death-in-custody, the police suddenly have a legitimacy problem in this country.

Law-enforcement resources are now distributed so unevenly, and justice is being administered with such brazen inconsistency, that people everywhere are going to start questioning the basic political authority of law enforcement. And they're mostly going to be right to do it, and when they do, it's going to create problems that will make the post-Ferguson unrest seem minor.

The Garner case was a perfect symbol of everything that's wrong with the proactive police tactics that are now baseline policy in most inner cities. Police surrounded the 43-year-old Garner after he broke up a fight. The officers who responded to that call then decided to get in Garner's face for the preposterous crime of selling "loosies," i.e. single cigarettes from a pack.

When the police announced that they were taking him in to run him for the illegal tobacco sale, Garner balked and demanded to be left alone. A few minutes later he was in a choke hold, gasping "I can't breathe," and en route to fatal cardiac arrest.

On the tape you can actually hear the echo of Garner's years of experience with Broken Windows-style policing, a strategy based on a never-ending stream of small intrusive confrontations between police and residents in target neighborhoods.

The ostensible goal of Broken Windows is to quickly and efficiently weed out people with guns or outstanding warrants. You flood neighborhoods with police, you stop people for anything and everything and demand to see IDs, and before long you've both amassed mountains of intelligence about who hangs with whom, and made it genuinely difficult for fugitives and gunwielders to walk around unmolested.

You can make the argument that the policies work, as multiple studies have cited "hot spot" policing as a cause of urban crime-rate declines (other studies disagree, but let's stipulate).

But the psychic impact of these policies on the massive pool of everyone else in the target neighborhoods is a rising sense of being seriously pissed off. They're tired of being manhandled and searched once a week or more for riding bikes the wrong way down the sidewalk (about 25,000 summonses a year here in New York), smoking in the wrong spot, selling loosies, or just "obstructing pedestrian traffic," a.k.a. walking while black.

This is exactly what you hear Eric Garner complaining about in the last moments of his life. "Every time you see me, you want to mess with me," he says. "It stops today!"

This is the part white Middle American news audiences aren't hearing about these stories. News commentators like the New York Post's Bob McManus ("Blame Only the Man Who Tragically Decided to Resist"), predictably in full-on blame-the-victim mode, are telling readers that the mistake made by Eric Garner was resisting the police in a single moment of obstinacy over what admittedly was not a major offense, but a crime nonetheless. McManus writes:

He was on the street July 17, selling untaxed cigarettes one at a time — which, as inconsequential as it seems, happens to be a crime.

The press and the people who don't live in these places want you to focus only on the incidents in question. It was technically a crime! Annoying, but he should have complied! His fault for dying – and he was a fat guy with asthma besides!

But the real issue is almost always the hundreds of police interactions that take place before that single spotlight moment, the countless aggravations large and small that pump up the rage gland over time.

Over the last three years, while working on a book about the criminal justice gap that ended up being called The Divide, I spent a lot of time with people like Eric Garner. There's a shabby little courthouse at 346 Broadway in lower Manhattan that's set up as the place you go to be sentenced and fined for the kind of ticket Staten Island cops were probably planning on giving Garner.

I sat in that courtroom over and over again for weeks and listened to the stories. I met one guy, named Andre Finley, who kept showing up to court in an attempt to talk his way into jail as a way out of the $100 fine he'd got for riding a bike on a sidewalk in Bedford-Stuyvesant. He couldn't afford the hundred bucks. It took a year and multiple all-day court visits to clear up.

I met a woman who had to hire a sitter so she could spend all day in court waiting to be fined for drinking wine on her own front porch. And in the case of a Bed-Stuy bus driver named Andrew Brown, it was that old "obstructing traffic" saw: the same "offense" that first flagged Ferguson police to stop Michael Brown.

In Andrew's case, police thought the sight of two black men standing in front of a project tower at 1 a.m. was suspicious and stopped them. In reality, Andrew was listening to music on headphones with a friend on his way home after a long shift driving a casino shuttle. When he balked at being stopped, just like Garner balked, cops wrote him up for "obstructing" a street completely empty of pedestrians, and the court demanded 50 bucks for his crime.

This policy of constantly badgering people for trifles generates bloodcurdling anger in "hot spot" neighborhoods with industrial efficiency. And then something like the Garner case happens and it all comes into relief. Six armed police officers tackling and killing a man for selling a 75-cent cigarette.

That was economic regulation turned lethal, a situation made all the more ridiculous by the fact that we no longer prosecute the countless serious economic crimes committed in this same city. A ferry ride away from Staten Island, on Wall Street, the pure unmolested freedom to fleece whoever you want is considered the sacred birthright of every rake with a briefcase.

If Lloyd Blankfein or Jamie Dimon had come up with the concept of selling loosies, they'd go to their graves defending it as free economic expression that "creates liquidity" and should never be regulated.

Taking it one step further, if Eric Garner had been selling naked credit default swaps instead of cigarettes – if in other words he'd set up a bookmaking operation in which passersby could bet on whether people made their home mortgage payments or companies paid off their bonds – the police by virtue of a federal law called the Commodity Futures Modernization Act would have been barred from even approaching him.

There were more cops surrounding Eric Garner on a Staten Island street this past July 17th then there were surrounding all of AIG during the period when the company was making the toxic bets that nearly destroyed the world economy years ago. Back then AIG's regulator, the OTS, had just one insurance expert on staff, policing a company with over 180,000 employees.

This is the crooked math that's going to crash American law enforcement if policies aren't changed. We flood poor minority neighborhoods with police and tell unwitting officers to aggressively pursue an interventionist strategy that sounds like good solid policing in a vacuum.

But the policy looks worse when a white yuppie like me can live in the same city as Garner for 15 years and never even be asked the time by someone in uniform. And at the very highest levels of society, where corruption has demonstrably been soaring in recent years, the police have almost been legislated out of existence.

The counter-argument to all this is that the police are sent where there's the most crime. But that argument doesn't hold up for long in a city that not only has recently become the unpunished economic corruption capital of the Western world – it's also a place where white professionals on the Upper East and West Sides can have their coke and weed safely home-delivered with their Chinese food, while minorities in Bed-Stuy and Harlem are catching real charges and jail time for the same thing.

City police have tough, brutal, dangerous jobs. Even in the "hot spots," residents know this and will cut officers a little slack for being paranoid and quick to escalate.

Still, being quick to draw in a dark alley in a gang chase is one thing. But if some overzealous patrolman chokes a guy all the way to death, on video, in a six-on-one broad daylight situation, for selling a cigarette, forget about a conviction – someone at least has to go to trial.

Because you can't send hundreds of thousands of people to court every year on broken-taillight-type misdemeanors and expect people to sit still while yet another coroner-declared homicide goes unindicted. It just won't hold. If the law isn't the same everywhere, it's not legitimate. And in these neighborhoods, what we have doesn't come close to looking like one single set of laws anymore.

When that perception sinks in, it's not just going to be one Eric Garner deciding that listening to police orders "ends today." It's going to be everyone. And man, what a mess that's going to be.
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Re: The Police In America Are Becoming Illegitimate

Post by JLT » Sat Dec 06, 2014 9:28 pm

I only hope that Eric Garner was right when he said "It ends today." Of course, it won't end today. It will take years of working with police and communities to restore perspective and trust. But maybe, just maybe, that process can start today.

It may be worth noting that the only person indicted for a crime in the Garner case happened to be the person recording it on his cell phone. He was charged with something else, of course, as the Broken Windows tactics probably identified him as being guilty of some crime, somewhere. The cops had a convenient stick to beat him with, and they used it.

And while police cams can help, they aren't the cure-all; witness that New Mexico police officer whose camera happened to "malfunction" just as his perp happened to die .... in this case, it was apparently the third time that this malfunction happened as he was doing something we really would have liked to see.

The only answer I can see is to make the police departments more directly answerable to the communities they serve. Good cops need to be rewarded and bad ones need to be fired. But the current mechanisms in the police departments themselves seem to be incapable of separating the wheat from the chaff. That needs to change.

I was a health inspector in Baltimore City in the early seventies. They wanted me to wear a uniform (cop-like but green instead of blue) and a badge. My co-workers and I considered that a very bad idea, because we were working in the inner city and we did not to be identified in any way with the police. Some of my associates did elect to wear the uniform when they were in communities that traditionally respected cops, but we chose instead to wear what we wanted to, just as our community liaisons did. We usually got good treatment from the people in that area, and this was one reason why.

Another reason was that most of us were black. I was one of five whites in an 85-man office, and the only one under fifty. (Yes, I was the "token white," hired to work with poor white communities.) Since we reflected the ethnics of the areas we were working in, and indeed had been largely hired from those areas, we had a link with the people we were serving. That's another thing that has to change before this sort of police confrontation becomes a thing of the past.
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Re: The Police In America Are Becoming Illegitimate

Post by Lanval » Sun Dec 07, 2014 12:24 am

So long as the police and the DA work hand in hand, no one is watching the watchers. Until the police are accountable to someone other than the politicians who rely upon the police, and the legal system of which they are an integral part, nothing will change. Or, revolution, and everything will change.

I've said it before, but I'll repeat it: If history has taught us nothing else, it is that the wealthy and powerful will give nothing right up to the point that they must give everything by virtue of a sword point. I am always surprised how inflexible and ignorant they are, and the look of surprise and/or disbelief on their faces as they were led to the guillotine in Paris must have been rich sauce for the peasants.

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Sir Robert Peel’s Nine Principles of Policing

Post by denjohn » Sun Dec 07, 2014 1:53 am

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/16/nyreg ... .html?_r=1
There is some doubt among scholars that Sir Robert Peel actually enunciated any of his nine principles himself — some researchers say they were formulated in 1829 by the two first commissioners of London’s Metropolitan Police Department.

PRINCIPLE 1 “The basic mission for which the police exist is to prevent crime and disorder.”

PRINCIPLE 2 “The ability of the police to perform their duties is dependent upon public approval of police actions.”

PRINCIPLE 3 “Police must secure the willing cooperation of the public in voluntary observance of the law to be able to secure and maintain the respect of the public.”

PRINCIPLE 4 “The degree of cooperation of the public that can be secured diminishes proportionately to the necessity of the use of physical force.”

PRINCIPLE 5 “Police seek and preserve public favor not by catering to the public opinion but by constantly demonstrating absolute impartial service to the law.”

PRINCIPLE 6 “Police use physical force to the extent necessary to secure observance of the law or to restore order only when the exercise of persuasion, advice and warning is found to be insufficient.”

PRINCIPLE 7 “Police, at all times, should maintain a relationship with the public that gives reality to the historic tradition that the police are the public and the public are the police; the police being only members of the public who are paid to give full-time attention to duties which are incumbent on every citizen in the interests of community welfare and existence.”

PRINCIPLE 8 “Police should always direct their action strictly towards their functions and never appear to usurp the powers of the judiciary.”

PRINCIPLE 9 “The test of police efficiency is the absence of crime and disorder, not the visible evidence of police action in dealing with it.”
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Re: The Police In America Are Becoming Illegitimate

Post by Amskeptic » Tue Dec 09, 2014 8:09 am

Lanval wrote:So long as the police and the DA work hand in hand, no one is watching the watchers.

I've said it before, but I'll repeat it: If history has taught us nothing else, it is that the wealthy and powerful will give nothing right up to the point that they must give everything by virtue of a sword point.

Very true.

This economic recovery that has not trickled down to the masses is causing rage on both sides of the police line. The rich have begun to slip into later stage of addiction to greed. Koch and other wealthy rightwing corporate interests are fomenting racial discord to further their pillaging. The overwhelming disrespect shown towards Obama, the utterly insane media drumbeat of his "unpopularity" that began in July, all serve to let those bastards sack our futures out from under us in peace, the rich should be singing the praises of Obama's foresight. Of course, Obama himself is too decent a person to call out the nefariousness. He has championed increasing wages, financial protections, mortgage relief, infrastructure jobs, healthcare, energy production (we are enjoying lower fuel prices now, so who is blaming Obama for that? no, airlines just increase their fares AGAIN even as jet fuel prices have plummeted 30%).

We are the stupid herd following these morons and showing a complete absence of critical thinking.
"Hey, I can't wait to get to the mall and look for a deal on plastic trash that will fall apart in a week. Then I am going to watch millionaires destroy their health throwing a ball around so their owners can get richer still as they fleece the hopeless taxpayers for a shiny stadiums. While decomposing in my lazyboy, I will eat 'food' that is so horrible for my health that I should pay more attention to the advertising between quarters promising to fix the acid reflux that I am sure to experience (maycausebleedingulcersanddeathaskyourdoctor)."

Really, America?
Colin
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Re: The Police In America Are Becoming Illegitimate

Post by Jivermo » Tue Dec 09, 2014 12:52 pm

I'll drink (a chemically enhanced, rice adjunct Budweiser) to that!

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Re: The Police In America Are Becoming Illegitimate

Post by Jivermo » Tue Dec 09, 2014 2:32 pm

I find it quite ironic that the path towards death for both Mr. Brown and Mr. Garner began with tobacco products.

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Re: The Police In America Are Becoming Illegitimate

Post by Amskeptic » Wed Dec 10, 2014 9:15 pm

Jivermo wrote:I find it quite ironic that the path towards death for both Mr. Brown and Mr. Garner began with tobacco products.
Ironic? The path towards death upon which I take great strides is littered with garlands of tobacco products. In America, we are FREE to kill OURSELVES however we SEE FIT.
Colin :shaking:
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Chloe - 70 bus . . . 217,593 miles
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Re: The Police In America Are Becoming Illegitimate

Post by denjohn » Thu Dec 11, 2014 4:05 pm

Harmful actions beget sorrowful consequences.
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Re: The Police In America Are Becoming Illegitimate

Post by 72Hardtop » Sat Jan 31, 2015 2:36 am

Amskeptic wrote:
Lanval wrote:So long as the police and the DA work hand in hand, no one is watching the watchers.

I've said it before, but I'll repeat it: If history has taught us nothing else, it is that the wealthy and powerful will give nothing right up to the point that they must give everything by virtue of a sword point.

Very true.

This economic recovery that has not trickled down to the masses is causing rage on both sides of the police line. The rich have begun to slip into later stage of addiction to greed. Koch and other wealthy rightwing corporate interests are fomenting racial discord to further their pillaging. The overwhelming disrespect shown towards Obama, the utterly insane media drumbeat of his "unpopularity" that began in July, all serve to let those bastards sack our futures out from under us in peace, the rich should be singing the praises of Obama's foresight. Of course, Obama himself is too decent a person to call out the nefariousness. He has championed increasing wages, financial protections, mortgage relief, infrastructure jobs, healthcare, energy production (we are enjoying lower fuel prices now, so who is blaming Obama for that? no, airlines just increase their fares AGAIN even as jet fuel prices have plummeted 30%).

We are the stupid herd following these morons and showing a complete absence of critical thinking.
"Hey, I can't wait to get to the mall and look for a deal on plastic trash that will fall apart in a week. Then I am going to watch millionaires destroy their health throwing a ball around so their owners can get richer still as they fleece the hopeless taxpayers for a shiny stadiums. While decomposing in my lazyboy, I will eat 'food' that is so horrible for my health that I should pay more attention to the advertising between quarters promising to fix the acid reflux that I am sure to experience (maycausebleedingulcersanddeathaskyourdoctor)."

Really, America?
Colin

Championed healthcare that no one wants let alone any law maker. Financial protections? The banks are right back to the same old games that led this country to near turmoil. Current energy production...or oil? That would be Bush. Bush laid the ground work for all the oil fracking that has given or put this country in the lead in terms of production of oil.

In time the airlines will have to drop their fares or risk losing customers to driving. Why? Because they used the excuse for raising fares on oil price increases. Now that oil has come back down where it should be they can't justify keeping the current fuel surcharges in place. The clock is ticking....

In fact airlines should have NEVER been allowed by law to add the surcharges. Why? Because they depend heavily on American tax subsideies and IMO opinion a company/corporation should not be allowed to offset cost/s with surcharges if your already excepting tax subsidies. They need to go back to regualting the airlines IMO.

I did just pay $1.79 for gas. First time I've seen it that low in 10 years. I predicted awhile back that oil will go to 20-30 per barrel and stay there for a loooooooooooooong time.
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Re: The Police In America Are Becoming Illegitimate

Post by Amskeptic » Mon Feb 02, 2015 10:06 am

72Hardtop wrote: Championed healthcare that no one wants let alone any law maker.
Look at the hard numbers, health care costs are levelling off, the numbers of uninsured are dropping (we, you and I, pay for every uninsured person who goes to a hospital), and, not mentioned by enough people, the moral dereliction of allowing people to fall sick, go bankrupt, and lose their homes, is being mitigated.
72Hardtop wrote: Financial protections?
The banks are right back to the same old games that led this country to near turmoil.
You aren't going to mention that your, my, all of our credit card bills have changed for the better? That interest rate charges have been capped? That the Consumer Protection Bureau has already saved American consumers some 15 billion dollars in usurious charges in the past two years? That your, my, and our mortgages do have new protections? Come on, call out the problems, yes, but call out the successes too.

The Republicans in Congress that are trying mightily to roll back the Dodd Frank bill and de-fang the Wall Street regulations whose ink has barely dried. We have to call it out.
72Hardtop wrote:Current energy production...or oil?
That would be Bush.
Bush laid the ground work for all the oil fracking that has given or put this country in the lead in terms of production of oil.
No, not Bush. Bush saber-rattling and pre-emptive war-mongering roiled the markets and drove the costs of oil to well over a hundred dollars a barrel. Any legislation relating to the development of fracking had to be passed in Congress, Bush did not do an executive edict. Senator Obama voted for fracking back in 2005, but more importantly, he helped to stabilize the world stage (far more than he will ever be given credit for) that helped to prevent speculative oil trading spikes. Obama was at the forefront of domestic energy production *diversification* which has allowed us to be less dependent on the Middle East (especially the Bush family's pals, the Saudis) and *that* broke the psychological barrier to kow-towing to the Saudis.
Do you know that we are now the largest solar/wind power producers in the world?
72Hardtop wrote: In time the airlines will have to drop their fares or risk losing customers to driving. Why? Because they used the excuse for raising for on oil price increases. Now that oil has come back down where it should be they can't justify keeping the current fuel surcharges in place. The clock is ticking....
In fact airlines should have NEVER been allowed by law to add the surcharges. Why? Because they depend heavily on American tax subsideies and IMO opinion a company/corporation should not be allowed to offset cost/s with surcharges if your already excepting tax subsidies. They need to go back to regualting the airlines IMO.
I agree.
They are not playing by the correct and classic rules of capitalism. They are engaged in collusion, it's about the fees and more fees and diminished service, they will NOT reduce their prices when they are all on each others boards and reading the same trade publications, "How To Make Baggage A Profit Driver!" and "New Study Shows Humans Don't Need To Eat On A Trans-Pacific Flight!"
72Hardtop wrote: I did just pay $1.79 for gas. First time I've seen it that low in 10 years. I predicted awhile back that oil will go to 20-30 per barrel and stay there for a loooooooooooooong time.
I am embarrassed to be paying such a low price for gas. It screams "dysfunction" to me. It tells me that we are kicking the can down the road again. It tells me that political expediency wins AGAIN over the right thing to do, which is to raise the Federal tax so we can rebuild our disgraceful infrastructure (to also help prop the energy price floor and keep Americans from an orgy of piggy truck/SUV buying).
Ah well . . .
Colin
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Chloe - 70 bus . . . 217,593 miles
Naranja - 77 Westy . . . 142,970 miles
Pluck - 1973 Squareback . . . . . . 55,600 miles
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Re: The Police In America Are Becoming Illegitimate

Post by 72Hardtop » Mon Feb 02, 2015 6:39 pm

The ground work for all the current fracking was laid during the Bush years and most was pushed by backers of Halliburton. Most democrats were opposed to any fracking. Obama is ready to sign another executive order allowing drilling off the east coast though. Beyond that he hasn't had much of a hand in out current production rates. Current production rates took time from ground work laid years ago...long before he took office.

Credit card rates continue to go up not to mention the banks have also found other ways to tack fees and charges onto ones card or account/s. And now Obama wants to raise the spending limit which quite frankly doesn't need to be raised. He also wants to heavily increase....

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_ ... stems.html

http://www.wsj.com/articles/obama-seeks ... 1422895838

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/03/us/ob ... .html?_r=0

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/15/us/po ... -2015.html

http://obamacarefacts.com/obamacare-hea ... -premiums/

http://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/22 ... e-for-many

I don't mind paying an extra nickel or dime on gas as a tax but only under 1 condition....

If gas or oil goes back up the tax/es have to be removed. These idiots here in Washington state want to raise the state gas tax...this is in addition to the $20 they just added to everyone's registration fees last year. There is also talk of charging 1.5 cents per mile driven on your car. I'm not supportive of continually putting money in uncle sams hand. Government needs to have limits on spending and learn how to cut spending and costs overtime.

When you look at what it's going to cost to keep the Obamacare going (Trillions) it's very easy to see that for a fraction of the cost the government could have...

Given every person who needs health care $1-2 million in an account for health care costs only and that would be far cheaper than the current offering. That $1-2 million can only be used on health care and it would be enough for you and your family for life. How many in the US population? Easy to see it would be a lot cheaper.
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Re: The Police In America Are Becoming Illegitimate

Post by Amskeptic » Wed Feb 04, 2015 12:41 pm

72Hardtop wrote: Government needs to have limits on spending and learn how to cut spending and costs overtime.
Overall, federal spending as a percentage of the total economic output of this country has been steady since 1962, right around 22-24% of GDP. So why are we always hearing about "runaway federal spending"?
Obama has been *more frugal* than his predecessor.
72Hardtop wrote: When you look at what it's going to cost to keep the Obamacare going (Trillions) it's very easy to see that for a fraction of the cost the government could have...

Given every person who needs health care $1-2 million in an account for health care costs only and that would be far cheaper than the current offering. That $1-2 million can only be used on health care and it would be enough for you and your family for life. How many in the US population? Easy to see it would be a lot cheaper.
I like the idea. Now revive your republican congressman who just fainted.

Unfortunately, there are people like me who have cost the healthcare system $0.00, and there are others who cost millions. I don't want that money. It has to be disbursed according to need.
Colin
BobD - 78 Bus . . . 112,730 miles
Chloe - 70 bus . . . 217,593 miles
Naranja - 77 Westy . . . 142,970 miles
Pluck - 1973 Squareback . . . . . . 55,600 miles
Alexus - 91 Lexus LS400 . . . 96,675 miles

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Re: The Police In America Are Becoming Illegitimate

Post by 72Hardtop » Wed Feb 04, 2015 2:34 pm

Amskeptic wrote:
72Hardtop wrote: Government needs to have limits on spending and learn how to cut spending and costs overtime.
Overall, federal spending as a percentage of the total economic output of this country has been steady since 1962, right around 22-24% of GDP. So why are we always hearing about "runaway federal spending"?
Obama has been *more frugal* than his predecessor.
72Hardtop wrote: When you look at what it's going to cost to keep the Obamacare going (Trillions) it's very easy to see that for a fraction of the cost the government could have...

Given every person who needs health care $1-2 million in an account for health care costs only and that would be far cheaper than the current offering. That $1-2 million can only be used on health care and it would be enough for you and your family for life. How many in the US population? Easy to see it would be a lot cheaper.
I like the idea. Now revive your republican congressman who just fainted.

Unfortunately, there are people like me who have cost the healthcare system $0.00, and there are others who cost millions. I don't want that money. It has to be disbursed according to need.
Colin

Wanting to raise the debt limit and/or spending caps is not helping or going to help. That is exactly what Obama wants to do. We need government who looks constantly at new ways to cut and keep prices from going up across the board. As for the health care account/s I propose any money left over from ones fund at the time of death gets rolled over into the healthcare's main funding account to offset any overruns from any who may have gone over. That is highly unlikely given $1-2 million would likely be more than enough for ones needs may they arise. In the end it's still faaaaar cheaper than what anyone has going right now...including the private system.
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JLT
Old School!
Location: Sacramento CA
Status: Offline

Re: The Police In America Are Becoming Illegitimate

Post by JLT » Wed Feb 04, 2015 3:47 pm

72Hardtop wrote:We need government who looks constantly at new ways to cut and keep prices from going up across the board.
Yes, we do. I sincerely hope that you don't think that the Republicans are going to be that government. Their track record certainly doesn't support that.

But my question now is: how did this discussion about police excesses somehow morph into a debate on health care? And when are we going to bring gun control or abortion or illegal immigration into the discussion? When threads aren't kept on track, that's what's likely to happen.
-- JLT
Sacramento CA

Present bus: '71 Dormobile Westie "George"
(sometimes towing a '65 Allstate single-wheel trailer)
Former buses: '61 17-window Deluxe "Pink Bus"
'70 Frankenwestie "Blunder Bus"
'71 Frankenwestie "Thunder Bus"

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