I agree that some of our government departments are huge. The
inefficiencies of our government are well known. Also well known are the
large amount of social welfare cheats. I guess we need a lot of people to
catch thes cheats though. We could decrease that numbe though if the
penalties for those cheats were much harder. Hard time maybe! As far as what
our country spends of defense, I believe it is necessary. I do believe that
we should not be in every police action though. The European countries and
also Japan do not spend a large percentage on defense because they are
depending on the U.S. to pull their, "chestnuts out of the fire", if
anything comes up. The United Nations is a joke and should go the way of
the League of Nations. A paper Tiger, especially with Kofi Anan at the
helm.

Mike Lindo
KG6IOC


--
"You cannot invade the mainland United States. There would be a rifle
behind each blade of grass." --Japanese Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto

"Dwight Stewart" wrote in message
link.net...

"Mike Lindo" wrote:
So, if what you say is true, where does
the money come from to pay for all
of those benefits?


Several facters. First, they generally have smaller governments.
Government is huge today, involved in some way or another in almost every
aspect of our lives. One or two of our government departments (say Health
&
Human Services and State) are almost as large as their entire civilian
government. Second, they hit corporations a little harder then we do here,
not a lot but somewhat harder. For example, business can't write off as
much. Finally, and here is a big one, they spend far less on defense. Our
defense costs are huge (annual military budget, debt, interest on debt,
research, retirement, medical benefits for injured vets, and so on). There
are certainly other facters, but these are the most obvious.


Dwight Stewart (W5NET)

http://www.qsl.net/w5net/