[at-l] OT: Next Shuttle flight...

[ellen at clinic.net (Bob C.)]

>"...Like many things - tax cuts and Rail Trail funding, for example - it ain't
>as simple as it looks - or as you've been told.  Or as easy to fix." argues Jim
>and/or...

So, lets discuss it. Being a liberal -- well by my perhaps skewed definition
anyway -- I'm appalled at the inability of alleged "conservatives" to balance
our nation's budgets, from Nixon through today. And amazed at the ability of
even a pseudo liberal like Clinton to do so.

Sorry, for the interruption, that's quite beside the point for this particular
discussion.

But we do have abandoned rail lines. Abandoned rail lines almost everyone seems
to agree make great trails of one kind or another. Since 99 percent of the most
used American trails are on Government land of one kind or another, that
suggests to me that most people don't earn the income needed to build trails of
their own. Nor, I suspect, that even if we each of us could afford our own
personal Appalachian Trail, we still wouldn't have enough land even with a
"growing" American land base for everyone to own their own trails (and if the
land doesn't grow, as we have learned, the land will ultimately "stagnate and
decay."

 But that's a problem for the future. More importantly, for now, most of us
agree that if trails don't expand, they also will stagnate and decay, making it
wise for us to take this opportunity to acquire trails and thus avoid that
"ultimate stagnation and decay."

>From a Liberal perspective, well, my version of liberal perspective, trails are
more important than tax cuts for the most wealthiest of Americans, especially
since they got wealthy mostly from making wise investments and they, therefore,
may not invest their new tax cut wealth to produce American jobs -- or even
American trails -- but rather in countries where people are willing to work for
a dollar a day producing things that Americans think they need, therefore
maximizing their wealth--the investors wealth, not the dollar a day folks'
wealth, or even the wealth of us few ordinary Americans, who think trails are
important.

 Weary, who has never before written a sentence quite so long -- or as truthful.
 YMMV.