Comments

1
10% of your income is what you're supposed to tithe to a church, is there some connection here? Also, in the "people who hate taxes suck at math dept", as I paid for parking in the lot at the hospital this a.m., a man asked me to help him with the automated machine. He then said, "My wife broke her wrist in Arizona, and did you know the parking at the hospital is free there!" So, God knows what it costs to have an x-ray, casting, meds, etc. for a broken bone in the states, but by golly you don't have to pay for parking! (which was $4 for the day.)
2
What a silly man. But I have the real solution: move to a hippie commune.
http://www.inpoortaste.tumblr.com/
4
Are you telling me the fact a person doesn't have the option of putting themselves through college isn't a sad occurrence. So you believe the average person coming out of a lower-middle class family should only have two options.. either go deeply into debt or go on the government dole(which in hand creates the problem of unaffordable education in the 1st place). I don't see the problem you would have with having the option to decide whether or not to participate in these centralized programs....????..
5
So...the state didn't subsidized Mr. Paul's education, giving him artificially low tuition that he could afford to pay on a student's salary? Does he have any idea what has happened to tuitions in the last 20 years? What an entitled fucktard.
6
They're not government "services." That makes it sound like some waitress coming around to fill your coffee every 15 minutes.

They're necessities.

Opt out of all but the "most basic?" stuff, eh?
Does that include use of public roads?
The post office?
The internet?
Anything grown on a farm in the U.S.?
Food and water that's deemed safe for consumption?

There are countless things we all take for granted today that only came about because the government saw fit to put funding into them when the private sector did not (because there was no short-term profit).

Do people like him think those things just sprang up out of nowhere?
7
This 'compromise' he's proposing is no more likely and actually less radical than his ultimate goals and beliefs. I don't think he's getting crazier. He's just emboldened by a movement in the conservative base, one he seems to think is far more popular than it really is. He'll probably be less jubilant in a year or two.

Mildly surprising to realize Ron Paul doesn't think his education might have been partially subsidized by the federal government. Elucidating to hear him deny that extra paperwork (and regulations) might require more workers.

@3, I don't think marginalizing language from the left (as unhelpful as it might be) is what's given rise to the Republican majorities in many states and the federal House of Representatives. It seems to me the economy had far more impact, followed by stronger and more organized messaging from the right, the polarization of politics (geographically and rhetorically), and the general historical trends of midterms having lower turnout (which favours Republicans) and push-back against the president's party.
8
This is brilliant! Lets take him up on it. Use their 10% but give them nothing. Nno access to courts. Get sued in Fed Court, you lose as you opted out of FREE judicial decisions.

Interstate highways would be off limits. Fewer traffic jams!

Even better, we can fund health-care but we don't need to pay for their EXPENSIVE disease. Universal health care would be assured, for those opting in.

I suspect they'd argue that they weren't opting out of those things.

9
He should stop wasting the tax money being paid to him and resign as unfit.
10
Everyone who buys into this gets deported without any embassy services. Because most tax money goes to pay for the Pentagon. All conservatives know if it wasn't for the DoD we would have been taken over by a foreign country.
11
@10 Too true, Schmucky...if it weren't for that nuclear arsenal, you guys'd be eating poutine and beaver tails in the school lunch rooms, and wearing touques and flannel shirts with your cargo shorts... :p
12
Just theorizing here, but my guess is that you would have a surprising number of people going "oh, never mind...I think I'll opt-in now" as soon as they get a chronic disease, want to go to college, etc. Also, just did my taxes - I have an effective tax rate of 12.24%, and I'm comfortably middle, perhaps nearing upper-middle, class. I'd have to be looney to give up the government benefits I receive for that extra 2.25%. Oh, wait.......
13
@12,

You beat me to it. My effective rate is around 8 percent, and I'm single, childless, and not a homeowner. If I had those deductions, my federal tax rate would be even lower. Ron Paul isn't necessarily crazy, but he's definitely a moron.
14
I don't see why this isn't the same reasoning behind much of the Tolling and Fee'ing of the WA State citizenry, put forth by the Governor and the staunch Stalinists over at Seattle Transit Blog.

I mean, wouldn't you love to "opt out" of the tunnel?

Pay as you go, Basic Health instead of Cadillac.

That's the 21st century.
15
Stossel's mustache should really have its own show.
16
@14: You write like you're drunk. I never have any idea what it is you're trying to say.
17
Ha ha. Ron Paul went to the Duke University School of Medicine, so his M.D. was paid for in large part by tobacco profits, tobacco subsidized by the United States government, both in cash paid to farmers, and through addiction perpetrated by hooking every soldier with free cigarettes in their rations.

What a shithead.
18
"I'm sorry, you chose not to opt into clean air."
19
All of the comments above are based on the lie that nothing gets done without a government service 'addressing' it. The reason tuition prices have gone through the roof is that government subsidies have truly socialized education. The only people who pay full price are the wealthy. For everyone else, they must slog through a process of nearly free money loans from the government.

Before you believe the hype on weaning our selves off the teat of public 'service,' look at what has happened in cases where the government got out of the way:

By the late 1980s, nonprofit organizations managed more than half of federal social service funds. The 1996 Welfare Reform Act took privatization a step further by allowing for-profit agencies to become vendors of social services. At that point, most progressives called for a huge upswing in poverty and hunger. They blamed Bill Clinton for ending the social safety net. Unfortunately, for the socialialists, nothing bad ever happened.

We deregulated airlines. No horrors resulted. We privatized most train lines, and the results were positive. Europe privatized most of their trains, increasing usage and reversing huge losses.

Please show me one example of privatization in the modern US, where the process failed and service declined.

Read more: The History of Privatization | eHow.com http://www.ehow.com/about_5434050_histor…

http://www.greens.org/s-r/12/12-15.html

20
@19: Healthcare in the US is failing.
21
Nice. Healthcare has been largely public in the US for decades. The federal government bribes the whole sector and our citizens to pretend/believe that costs do not matter. Please show any evidence that health care has become more privatized in the past twenty years. Look at the federal healthcare spending explosion over the past twenty years, expanded by both liberals and pseudo-conservatives like George W.
22
Ron Paul is older than John McCain. He was already nuts, now he is yelling at clouds.
23
@19
Enron.

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