Hi,

Thanks for entering the contest.  I’ve recently been visiting http://mises.org which explains “Austrian Economics”.  The basic idea is that the government messes things up.  For example, the funding you talk about is taken (ultimately by threat of property seizure) from people who earn it.  If the people that earned the money were the ones deciding how to spend it, the programs funded by private donations would be much healthier, and the amount of money wasted on beaurocrats would be far far less.  This is essentially the reason that I applaud the cutting of the funding.  If it “trickles down” then we’ll all have more money to support the programs that I think work the best.

My site is partially an effort to get people to work together voluntarily rather than using the thread of property seizure (taxes) to collect the funds required to pay them to work together.  The fact that you are disseminating info like this is a tiny tiny example that my plan works.

Dave.

I work with an organization that does not take any money from government agencies.  We support ourselves 100% through private donations…and it works much better than government programs.  We are able to take any money we have and immediately direct it to where it is needed and the programs the community wants.  In theory if we were to emilinate government spending on the epidemic money could go to where it was needed.  The government, however, would not reduce taxes if it reduced spending on HIV funding…so instead we would likely be left with the same amount of private money but government spending on it at all.  We need to boost private funding so we can begin to eliminate government funding…that way we don’t have any government strings attached to our fight against this epidemic.

Perhaps your organization can get together a petition of the following sort to be publicized and push the government to stop bilking us all:

The undersigned have all agreed that at least 5% of any tax credit offered to them by the federal, state, and local governments will be donated to one of the following private organizations that funds programs for communities without taking any government money.  These organizations have demonstrated that they are far more effective than government programs through the following accomplishments:
...

Signatures:
Dave Scotese.  (Of course, who wouldn’t agree to get back as much of their taxes as they could if it only cost them 5% by their choice instead of 100%?)

Just imagine how much better our country - the world even! - would be if only 5% of our tax revenue was given to NGO’s that avoid government money like the plague it is?

Dave.