The government of Greece feels "obliged" to confiscate "idle cash reserves" of it's local govts.

Not impossible?!?

Try telling that to the billions of Chinese men + women who look at themselves in the mirror each morning with a slight tear in their eye, because "doing something" about their lack of freedom *IS* impossible, and always will be.
AKA: They are permanently, and irreversibly screwed.

-- TW

I don't know the answer to that one any more than you do. I get the impression that the Greeks wouldn't have a clue either.

"Gov't is not the solution to the problem. Gov't *IS* the problem."

True dat.

Well, the only problem with believing that is he himself didn't believe it. No true believer of that anti medicare scare rhetoric by Reagan in 1961 would ever really do what president Reagan did while he was in office. He not only signed improvements to medicare while president, but he also pushed and signed a major expansion of Medicare during his lame duck term. Why? Not to get votes obviously, but because it was the freaking right thing to do:

"Over the course of President Reagan's two terms, a number of changes were made to Medicare and Medicaid, primarily through annual budget reconciliation legislation. Highlights of these changes include expanding Medicaid waivers to allow states more flexibility in providing home and community-based services to beneficiaries who otherwise would have been institutionalized as well as waivers allowing included a new prospective payment system for inpatient hospital services, risk contracts for HMOs, and new Peer Review Organizations to improve the quality of health care. As a condition of participation in
Medicare, hospitals with emergency rooms were required to provide emergency screening and treatment to all patients in COBRA 1985.

The Clinical Laboratory Improvement Amendments (CLIA) of 1988 strengthened quality performance requirements for clinical laboratories in order to assure accurate and reliable laboratory tests and
procedures...

Secretary Bowen came to HHS in 1986 with the goal of extending Medicare to cover the costs of catastrophic illness. President Reagan called upon the Secretary in the State of the Union to develop such a plan. A Secretarial task force made recommendations and Congress subsequently passed the Medicar Catastrophic Coverage Act of 1988.

It made the most significant changes since enactment of the Medicare program; including improved hospital and skilled nursing facility benefits, an outpatient prescription drug benefit and a cap on
beneficiary cost-sharing liability. The benefits were financed by beneficiaries through new premiums and an income tax surcharge. Nursing home reform was enacted in OBRA 1987 after the Institute of
Medicine issued a report calling for new national standards to improve the quality of nursing home care."

https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&sour...OokwQt4hpi51eA

If Reagan really truly honestly believed in what he said in 61 he wouldn't have signed the bills he did whIle president. Yet, you think he was right. Lol

Well, when you repeatedly use words like "confiscate" and "steal" to describe taxes and when you repeatedly say something such as "..the right to the fruits of another person's labor wasn't one of them." it doesn't seem like you are just talking about lower taxes. At what point then, do taxes stop being theft and are just taxes? In other words, the over the top hyperbole you constantly use, or misquote from others, is not helpful just as Reagan's ridiculous 1961 speech.

By the way, I find it interesting that you describe social security and medicare as simply "getting something for nothing". Most people put a lifetime into paying into those systems. Again, over the top rhetoric with little meaning. Throw in a line about freedoms being lost and the constitution and there ya go! Lol

Hmm... I was taught that in my junior high history class, 7th or 8th grade, can't remember which.