did you ever wonder where your hard earned taxes go?

[silver_pilate]

If you're going to be considered the most powerful nation in the world, you gotta have the balls to back it up. The only way to assure the survival of our country and our troops is to make sure we've got the best toys.

Plus, we need that big military to keep those rowdy Canadians at bay.

...what they pay farmer's not to grow anything

As far as that goes, you've gotta keep the farmers alive. I was raised and still live in a predominantly agricultural area. I've seen many of my close friends sell their land and get out of farming because they can't feed their families. They work harder than 90% of the people in this country, and they compose a major vertebrae in the spine of this country. The reason they need aid in the first place is the fact that our own government would rather import dirt-cheap agricultural products from other countries in the name of foreign aide/relations than to allow its own farmers to make a living. There's no way U.S. farmers can compete with slave-labor cheap foreign grain and cotton, and the price for cotton and other products is the lowest it has ever been. It was actually more profitable for farmers to plow their fields under in the last several years than it was to make a crop, harvest it, and process it. At the same time prices are dropping, costs are increasing. Implement companies basically give away farm equipment worth hundreds of thousands of dollars in lesser developed countries while charging farmers their very livelihoods for that same equipment here.

We already depend heavily of foreign oil, and we've seen what kind of a barrel that can get us bent over. Why knee-cap ourselves in agricultural products when we can produce all we need here?

--nathan