I wonder why the government fought this tooth and nail. Do they just really hate to lose, so they double down time and again? Or are they worried that losing once will open the floodgates to a torrent of litigation?
This meme about taxes needs to die.
That is expressly not the case. The government's money is not in any sort of fiduciary relationship with anyone else. The fact that you nor anyone else didn't even notice what I was talking about just shows how pervasive this meme is.
"Taxpayer's money" is useful rhetorical shorthand to remind people that creating government money requires either increasing taxes (taking money from taxpayers), printing more money ("taxing" holders of the currency through inflation), etcetera.
We have the notion of "for the people, by the people" - that the government should act in the interests of it's citizenry ("taxpayers", if sometimes quite indirectly), that the money should be spend wisely instead of wasted - both in the moral duty sense, and sometimes in the legal duty sense as well.
Can you give an example of a legal and moral use of government funds that doesn't benefit taxpayers or citizens? The closest I can come up with is foreign aid and other outwardly focused actions, which still aim to "benefit" the local citizenry through warm and fuzzy feelings, better international relationships, better access to oil and foreign markets, etc...
Maybe in the sense, like in Office Space, that "it becomes ours", but not in any real way. The government is the public entity; its things are everyone's things. The fact that it (with few exceptions) acts like a private entity, with entitlement to its plunder, doesn't change anything about this.
Literally not the case. I like how you said I misinterpreted the words of the original post but then repeated the very meme I said needs to die. It's fake news. The tax payer owes taxes to the government. The government spends its own money, not someone else's. The shallowest reflection on the matter would reveal this meme to be a sham of pure rhetoric.
And the increase in the deficits is the increase in spending on top of that.
The size of government does not inherently need to scale linearly with the size of the economy. The cost of some services may scale with population, but that's something else entirely. For example, general productivity improvements may grow the economy at the same population level, but they imply needing fewer resources to achieve the same level of government services because the same productivity improvements should make the provision of government services more efficient too.
And not all government services even need to scale with population. If we had twice as many citizens, would that really require us to double the military budget?
"Government programs expand to consume all available funding" explains why the government budget does expand with the economy, not why it should.
The frustration is that however much we dislike Tuesday government, these are the representatives that we collectively chose.
U.S. officials abuse their country's lack of transparency to evade scrutiny, and innocent people suffer because of it.
I'd put money on her visa being denied because the folks who screwed up and put her on the no-fly list resent her fighting so hard and so publicly to get off it.
As the government is limited by the law they use tricks to go around it, in this case by using a secret list with secret rules and contents. You’re not allowed to know the list exists so you can’t contest if you are on it by mistake. There can be no precedent that allows people to remove themselves from the list.
Yes you can, and should. That's the entire point of the idea that it is better to let 9 guilty people walk free than to unfairly punish one innocent person.
It has always been the case that a plane full of passengers could overcome half a dozen hijackers, but the historical assumption was that you shouldn't fight them because you could get hurt. If you're going to get hurt anyway, that's out the window, so you fight them, so does everybody else, and the passengers win.
You'll notice that there have been no further crashing of airplanes into buildings after 9/11, despite the fact that the TSA's security record is terrible.
Americans should have honored the heroes of flight 93, reminded each other that plane hijackers should now be fought directly, and the TSA never created with all of its waste and violations of civil liberties. Hopefully some near future government can find the strength to do this.
And there is of course a difference between harm reduction based on risk assessment (what's allowed in the carry on, where planes can fly, when they are escorted by fighter jets) and other active prevention (metal detectors, backscatter Xray, luggage Xray, passenger interviews, up to and including armed air marshalls).
And the profiling of somehow dangerous individuals is of course there as an option. But so far all the previously mentioned actions were uniform and prevented no one from flying. (Of course implanted medical devices are an interesting challenge for detectors. But it's much easier to acquire and smuggle a land to air homing missile and aim it at a plane taking off than implanting a bomb into someone and smuggling through security.) So they were just. To infringe on someone's right of free movement we would have to be very sure that there is no other - just - way to minimize the risk. And that's how a lot of regulations (should) work, but ... they don't. They are inefficient and injust in a lot of cases and government has no priority to address these injustices. (As the electorate is also biased, and regulations usually amplify these biases.)
Edit: My comment was meant to say that this was /is a loophole so the Gov stays "within the law." Killing you is obviously illegal, using their entire power to ruin you is not because they try 1000 arguments before the courts. May the truth win....er, if you have the time and tens of million$.
What? Who cares about that. We aren't talking about regular citizens, but about people on no fly lists. Only terrorists get there
Denying a US citizen the right to travel without telling them why and preventing them from having any recourse to challenge it almost certainly violates that provision.
Does the Constitution apply to those outside "the land"? Often not.
The Fifth Ammendment begins with “No person” not “No US citizen”
There is no option for our government.