Um...thanks Jason. (For educating are readers.)

Jason,I think Ringo is talking about the tax on each gallon.

Yes Tax I did round up 2.6 Cents

 At the least we have one that can comprehend.  Here is a little education. Miss

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I see. I misread my link, which shows the AZ tax at $0.18 + the federal tax. So, what do we get? Well, when was the last time you drove on a road...?

The tax on gas makes more sense than many other taxes, It is more like a user fee, the more you drive and use the roads , the more you pay.

The government misuses our tax money because it knows no other way to operate.  For decades, it has lived beyond its means while tacitly encouraging us to do the same.  Can't afford the new flashy social program?  Buy now, pay later!  Can't afford to expand the already-bloated and overburdened Medicare program to include prescription drugs?  Buy now, pay later!  This wholesale mortgaging of the economic future of this nation has cost us...and we are only beginning to witness this cost now.

Interestingly enough, our present Congressional leadership has decided (on party lines) to raise taxes for the vast majority of us next year.  Do you make more than $30,000 per year?  Standby for a tax increase of at least 3 percent.  Evidently this is what our Democratic Party means when they insist they're only set to raise taxes on "the wealthy." 

What an incredibly unwise move during a time of stagflation.  Congress, and especially those within the Democratic Party, could use a refresher course in Macroeconomics.

You have to pay for a war somehow. GilaGuy how unpatriotic of you to not pay your dues for our troops. You obviously don't care about the troops do you.

 
Oh I pay my dues.  I assume that most of us here are members of the taxpaying class.  The issue here is that Congress authorized this war, and is now doing whatever they can to back out of that.  You know what should be happening?  Spending should be cut.  The Republicans failed miserably at this task (which is part of the reason they were rightly voted out of power), but the Democrats have done even worse...they have raised taxes on the vast majority of this country (read: the middle class) to fund an expanded social agenda.

You see, this isn't about the war at all, despite your attempts to make it so.  This is about the inability of our representatives, especially Democrats, to reign in their spending and quit feeding from the public trough.  The Democrats have proposed increased social spending and its incumbent increase in taxation during an economic period where we are all going to need every penny we can save.  Their actions prove that they just plain don't care. 

So the only way to pay for one area of government spending is to raise taxes? Have you considered cutting other government spending? Short term deficient spending isn’t necessarily evil, the problem we have is I think there has been a deficit almost every year for the last 30 years or so.

On Social Security all I can say is what world are you living in? The GOP has tried to push some kind of reform for years. Bush wanted to let us invest just a part of our own money for retirement, not even all of it, just a small part and of course he was viciously attacked with all kinds of scary rhetoric from the left. Obama equated letting people invest their own money for retirement as “social Darwinism”, that his the level of fear mongering we are dealing with here. Ultimately you are right the Republicans have failed in being able to explain the benefits of reducing or eliminating Social Security.

Government spending falls into one of three categories, 1. Purchases, 2. Transfers, and 3. Debt service. (I have sometimes seen also a #4 as "investments" which are really purchases for future use as opposed to current consumption). In 2005 Transfers amounted to $1.4 trillion dollars, this is not pocket change.

Thanks,

Higgs

Feisty! I like that.