Peter Hendra wrote in
:

In my travels to the US, I have always been impressed with how cheap
many things were. Larry, you may not be as well off as you once were,
but you still have it better than many other developed nations.



Like I said in my other thread, sort of backwards from this. American
prices look cheaper, on face value, but one must also know that this
price for those pants includes NO SERVICES from any government, something
Europeans, Australians and New Zealanders just take for granted. A week
in a hospital bed can cost you from $US10,000 to $100,000. We pay in two
ways.....Our employers use several hundred dollars a month of money they
could be paying their employees and buy "medical insurance" for the
employees. This is not free..no more free than socialized medicine
elsewhere. It is money hidden from our paychecks, which are smaller as a
result. It's done this way to transfer the tax benefits to the Employer
as it's made to look like an expense to the company.

Many things in America have changed, drastically, in just the past 10
years. Our highways are a good example. They WERE beautiful! The grass
was mowed, the trees were kept trimmed, the roads were kept paved, no
holes lasted over a week. America used the tax money collected to keep
them that way. That is no longer the case. America charges 16c/gallon
Federal plus a state tax that varies by state. In SC that's 14c/gallon.
This money USED to be used for road maintenance and improvements. Now,
in reality, the roads are just going back to the forest. The pavement is
left for 20-30 years between repaving, until there is hardly paving
left...unless, of course, it leads up to some politician's home or other
influential person. The trees hang over the road surface from the ground
to the overhead...dragging on the top and sides of my stepvan truck
nearly everywhere I go. Our roads are now in awful shape. That's just
an example of the lack of REAL services US governments at all levels
DELIVER to the people for that tax load. Every year the tax goes up, the
services go down.

We still have it "better" than, say, Haiti, for instance. But, alas, we
are converging at some point. America is bankrupt.
http://www.brillig.com/debt_clock/
Every dime of Federal Income Tax we pay, a terrible load on us, goes to
INTEREST to the Illuminati Bankers who created this debt to enrich
themselves.

Here's our current reality.....
http://youtube.com/watch?v=zsZO6G7df...elated&search=
Watch the whole movie. Notice it's NOT a conspiracy theory by a nut. Mr
Russo is a famous producer of movies like "The Rose"...a businessman who
loves his country. He presents FACTS, not fantasy.


Larry
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