Money talks, bullsh!t walks. It has nothing to do with free speech. Telling someone else that they should spend their money on your favorite project is pretty nervy. It's bad enough when an American tells you that. At least he pays some of the taxes. But when a non-American tells you that, it's not only rude it's illogical. Unless you have skin in the game and have to spend money for something, how can you make a reasoned judgment? It was like me asking him how much he spends on his kids clothing and schooling? I don't earn his living and don't have to budget his money and don't know what his expenses are. Most of all I don't contribute to his household. Do you tell your neighbor how much they should give to charity?
You've lost me. You wrote a post about the one-sided biased society and I responded, and you accuse me of telling American how to spend its money. I do not follow.
We're having a wide-ranging discussion of policy options, which I guess ultimately involves spending money, and to that extent it's a discussion about how to spend money wisely. That much is true, but I don't see what that has to do with your tirade about PC.
But let's leave that aside. Since the discussion is about policy options, I and others will feel free to express our opinions. We don't need to be US taxpayers to do so, and we don't need your permission. In any case, I did not think that we were only discussing American policy expenditures. The issues we're discussing apply to pretty much everybody. However, I don't see what my personal earnings and expenditures have to do with anything. I don't want to know about yours and never asked.
But to address one of your asides, I believe that in most jurisdictions in Canada, we pay more (combined) tax that most jurisdictions in the USA, or that's what I was always led to believe. I did a comparison many years ago with a friend working in Connecticut, and that's what we concluded. Then we compared what additional services we get from government in Canada, especially wrt health, we concluded that we more or less spend the same amount of money to live our lives. That is, we pay more tax to pay for universal health care, but American have to purchase it themselves. Btw, I am referring to the Canadian health expense a tax, but it's really an insurance premium. (There were other minor differences. We pay for garbage collection through municipal governments, for example, but I believe he paid the contractor directly, but I may be remembering that incorrectly.) ) But, at that time anyway, the prices of consumer goods in the USA was much lower than in Canada, so the dollar went farther down there. But as I say, we did this comparison about 20 years ago, I have no idea what we would conclude now.
So, in conclusion, we pay different amounts in taxes and fees, but not wildly different.
This is off-topic in this climate thread, but does anyone know how current day taxes (personal, corporate, etc.) in the USA compares with the level of taxation in the late 1950s and 1960s. I ask because I seem to remember reading articles that said that the tax rates in those years was actually higher than it is now in the USA, and if that is the case, then the current fascination with lowering taxes seems odd to me. It's not as if people suffered from overtaxation back then. It was a period of high economic growth and upward mobility, and I don't remember rich people suffering either. As I say, this is really off-topic for this thread.