Family Forum / Marriage / Marriage / September 2007

Because it has not produced the hoped for results. Academic test
scores in the USA have been trending down for decades despite more
money per pupil.

Frankly, its entirely consistent with what I see when I go shopping.
Maybe more fat people shop, but that seems unlikely.

The other thing to remember, is that if you pay teachers and nurses
more, you havta figure out where that money comes from, which is the
tax base, which in turn relies on the private sector. Who will
naturally ramp up what they pay to keep women working in the offices
creating corporate profits. It is somewhat of a zero sum game. Remove
enuf women from the private sector to meet the social safety net
requirments, and you reduce the profits from which the taxes are used
to support the workers in the social safety net.

By all means doubt what I say. this is only usenet, not scripture.

It is interesting that Huckabee has not followed out his own logic. He
has been elected by economic conservatives who would rant if they ever
figured it out, how junkfood profits would be reduced to promote
better fitness.

You have a much more homogeneous gene pool with much more of its
traditional dietary habits intact. The US has minorities with
alarmingly high rates of diabetes as a result to exposure to junkfood
and the saturated fats in it. If they still ate the diets their
ancestors did, they would not have nearly the problem.

The diabetes cascades into heart disease, kidney failure, and liver
problems. So, while the death certificate lists one of the latter, if
you trace back, you see the diabetes set them up for it. The white
population has been in the livestock business for 10,000 years or
more, and it evolved eating a lot more beef & pork, whereas the
indigeneous cultures of South America and Africa hunted a much wider
variety of meat sources that didnt have nearly the fat on them.

"Tai <tainuitiDELETE@gmail.com.invalid>" wrote:

I don't actually like a church big enough to park a blimp in it.  After
you have more than 300 or so members, a church usually splits into
subgroups anyway and people don't know each other so well.  The pastor
becomes overworked trying to actually shepherd that many people.  Better
to build a couple smaller churches closer to where people live.

But my perspective on this changed some years ago, after an article in
the /Washington Post/ about the Washington National Cathedral.  They
described the construction, and had lots of pretty pictures, and so
on.  A few days later they got a letter to the editor written by
someone whose father had worked on the building.  The writer talked
about watching as the building was constructed, and seeing which parts
his father worked on, and the many other people who worked on it too.

I don't remember specifics, but his overall point is that the vast
majority of all expenditure on such a building is in the people who build
it.  In an economy, you don't just spend money and it's gone: it has to
GO somewhere.  For things such as the National Cathedral, lots of it
went to train people in marble cutting, and then employ them as marble
cutters, and then when they've been at it 20 years they go and work on
museums and maintaining/cleaning old courthouses and stuff.

The guy who wrote the letter was of the view that while the church could
have just given his father money, his father might not have taken it.
But to give his father a *job*, and teach him the skills to do it, and pay
him a fair wage for a day's work, that was worth far more than a handout.

And you do get to amortize a marble church for a long time.  Many of the
big cathedrals have been there nearly 1000 years -- and unlike the Great
Wall of China, or the pyramids, they are still in regular use for their
original purpose.  The "cost per day of use", over the lifetime of a
marble cathedral, is probably measured in fractions of a penny.

My own preferences run toward smaller structures and simpler design, but
it may well be that Chartres cost less over its lifetime than the plain
wood/brick churches that are cheaper to build.  You couldn't use such
considerations on your house, because you're likely not going to live to
be even 100.  But churches live far longer than people do.

Darren Provine ! kilroy@elvis.rowan.edu ! http://www.rowan.edu/~kilroy
"Heaven goes by favor; if it went by merit, you would stay out and
your dog would go in." -- Mark Twain