Mooney44Cards;929605 wrote:Look, I'm not going to defend everything they're asking for because, again, nobody will ever agree on everything. But Washington does need more power, but the power to protect its people. As it is, Washington cannot protect the people because they are paid off by the big corporations in what is essentially a legal bribe to protect the best interests of Wall Street to the detriment of average joes.
Washington has all the power it needs to protect its people. Read the constitution. Now that said the real problem is too much power centralized in Washington. Power and the flow of money are ever increasing though Washington. Its now a one stop shop for the corrupt and those looking out for themselves and not the interests of the American people to collect federal cash. K street is booming. The parasite economy is thriving.
This article is from 2005. But really lays out the problem. There has been construction boom in Washington because of the corporate lobbyists heading to DC to feed at the trough.
Money spent in Washington is taken from the people who produced it all over America. Washington produces little real value on its own. National defense and courts are essential to our freedom and prosperity, but that's a small part of what the federal government does these days. Most federal activity involves taking money from some people, giving it to others and keeping a big chunk as a transaction fee.
Every business and interest group in society has an office in Washington devoted to getting some of the $2.5 trillion federal budget for itself: senior citizens, farmers, veterans, teachers, social workers, oil companies, labor unions — you name it.
Walk down K Street, the heart of Washington's lobbying industry, and look at the directory in any office building. They're full of lobbyists and associations that are in Washington, for one reason: because, as Willie Sutton said about why he robbed banks, "That's where the money is."
It's not just money that's being sucked into Washington. It's human talent, the most valuable productive asset of all. Too much of the talent at America's most dynamic companies is now diverted from productive activity to either getting corporate welfare from Congress or protecting the company from political predation.
Slow economic growth can be blamed in large measure on just this process — the expansion of the parasite economy into the productive economy. The number of corporations with Washington offices increased 10-fold between 1961 and 1982. The number of people lobbying in Washington doubled in the late 1970s — and it has doubled again just since 2000. The number of lawyers per million Americans stayed the same from 1870 to 1970, then more than doubled in just 20 years. The Federal Register, where new regulations are printed, now prints a record 75,000 pages a year.
As the parasite economy grows, taxing some people and doling out favors to others, everybody gets sucked in. Even if you don't want a government subsidy, you need a lobbyist to protect you from being taxed and regulated by the other groups and their lobbyists.
http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=5073
The real answer to this mess is to devolve power out of Washington. Let these lobbyists diperse and spread them across the 50 states and countless municipalities.
Mooney44Cards;929605 wrote:I still don't understand why people waste energy attacking these people. No they are not perfect white God-fearing well dressed citizens, no not all of their ideas are good, no there is no clear "end-game" here. But shouldn't you be mocking the real problem, not the people who want to solve it....even if they have no idea how?
Why do you use the word white? Most of these people are white. Seriously what does skin color have to do with any of this? I'd like to know. I do know one thing none of these protesters seek to devolve power out of Washington. Blindly they demand more power. More money and power for the parasite economy to feed on.
