Your Tax Dollars at Work

From Album4

Minimal Photoshopping here, just a little enhancing, because it's Monday, I'm a little under the weather, and besides, what a spectacular photo.

This is something government can do -- enhance our understanding of the universe, with the help of highly trained, highly educated, and adequately paid civil servants. Also, with a $15 trillion dollar economy, there's more than enough room for this, for English teachers...and even Art Historians, some of whom have helped conserve things like the painting of Washington crossing the Delaware, the flag that inspired Francis Scott Key, or the original copies of the Declaration of Independence and Constitution housed in the National Archives, etc.

And...we still have enough left over to provide for a modest safety net...a net we all might need one day (Social Security and/or Medicare), a net we might need, god forbid, (unemployment insurance, food stamps)...and one that benefits us even if we don't need it (communities and property values aren't exactly enhanced by poverty or rampant disease).

Otherwise...once again, my heart goes out to victims of a senseless tragedy. So sad...