(if I were the) King of the Forest

I agree that the school system has probably failed them, but not by refusing to grant them a diploma; rather it has failed them by insisting that they are through with high-school merely because they have served their time and despite the fact that they can’t read and write English well enough to pass the MCAS exam. Justice would demand not an immediate – and meaningless – diploma but the opportunity for another year of intensive English instruction to overcome their deficiencies, followed by a well-earned and meaningful diploma which signified that they had, in fact, successfully completed the entirety of the high-school curriculum.

In an age when charity was the primary means for providing a social safety net and cultural enrichment charity was a matter of moral obligation. We would like to think that is still the case, but according to the CBO such endeavors now consume somewhere between 55% and 75% of the federal budget, and anyone in the top quintile of income distribution is already providing at least 15%-20% of their income as taxes to various governments in direct support of that. Perhaps direct giving to charity is only 2% of income, but if you add the 15% or more of indirect contribution to the same causes via the channel of government I’d say we’re doing pretty well.

They (and you) seem to imply that the several hundred billion dollars of deficit we now face is primarily the result of a less-than $35B cut in revenue due to the tax cuts — rather than the result of at least as much increased spending (about which you will never hear a bad word from the Democratic party). So isn’t that contention at least as cynical and misleading as that of the Republicans?

The fact that complexities were over-simplified is part of the format and a necessary evil. However, at the end one of the characters, as a closing remark on the Constitution, read from its preamble. Nice touch – except that they left part of it (many would say the most important part) out. What they read was:

“We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, …. , promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to us and our posterity, do ordain and establish this constitution of the United States of America“.

What was left out, of course, were two of the primary purposes of government, ones which provide the necessary specifics for fulfilling what the Declaration of Independence considered the very reason for government to exist – the protection of individual rights. The missing phrases were:

“… to ensure domestic tranquility, to provide for the common defense, …“.