> So is it more cost effective to spend on prevention or clean-up?
Prevention. However, spending money on prevention doesn't make things better (just prevents them from getting worse), so the results are not nearly as quantifiable as clean-up (in which case, things have already gotten worse, but you're spending considerably more money to get things back to where they were). Plus, since there's always a chance that the bad thing won't happen, well, there's a chance that spending money on prevention is just wasting it on something that wasn't going to be a problem anyway.
(Oh, and for a prime example of how the whole "conservative means wanting smaller government" thing is BS: conservatives in Virginia are proposing a bill which would force women who want abortions to submit to ultrasounds done transvaginally (i.e., from inside the womb) before an abortion would be allowed. Yes, on page 2 it does actually say that one delegate's reasoning that "women had already made the decision to be 'vaginally penetrated when they got pregnant
The whole idea of having a safety net is because it is better for society as a whole. People need things - food, shelter, some minimum of safety - and if they can get that when life happens, they are less likely to commit crimes.
And the people who say "let me decide where to put my money" never will give it away, you're right - and they NEVER think that they, themselves, will EVER be one asking for a handout - and often enough they *are* getting a handout. The mortgage deduction? That's middle-to-upper class welfare. Seriously. Poor people don't get it, they can't afford a house.
What the religious and tea party people have done to the republicans turns my stomach. I want to have a choice in who to vote for, because sometimes I don't like the democrat all that much - but when I look at the other side, I shudder in fear and go vote anyway.
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Prevention. However, spending money on prevention doesn't make things better (just prevents them from getting worse), so the results are not nearly as quantifiable as clean-up (in which case, things have already gotten worse, but you're spending considerably more money to get things back to where they were). Plus, since there's always a chance that the bad thing won't happen, well, there's a chance that spending money on prevention is just wasting it on something that wasn't going to be a problem anyway.
(Oh, and for a prime example of how the whole "conservative means wanting smaller government" thing is BS: conservatives in Virginia are proposing a bill which would force women who want abortions to submit to ultrasounds done transvaginally (i.e., from inside the womb) before an abortion would be allowed. Yes, on page 2 it does actually say that one delegate's reasoning that "women had already made the decision to be 'vaginally penetrated when they got pregnant
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And the people who say "let me decide where to put my money" never will give it away, you're right - and they NEVER think that they, themselves, will EVER be one asking for a handout - and often enough they *are* getting a handout. The mortgage deduction? That's middle-to-upper class welfare. Seriously. Poor people don't get it, they can't afford a house.
What the religious and tea party people have done to the republicans turns my stomach. I want to have a choice in who to vote for, because sometimes I don't like the democrat all that much - but when I look at the other side, I shudder in fear and go vote anyway.
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