Why are people saying the Government is a complete failure?

Because it's true. Where do I start.

Highways

Bridges collapse, the interstate high ways will jar your guts out, the money collected from taxes on fuels is more than the oil companies make in profit for drilling, producing, and distributing the fuels. The Fed's don't turn back the money to the states that collect the taxes instead transfer the funds to mass transit plans like Am-track which are going broke.

If you put a letter in the mail you need to have a stamp on it an the price of those stamps keep going up while the service keeps going down. They are going to close post offices and will reduce the deliveries to 5 days per week so the letter won't get there on saturday.

Seems like just a few months ago people were dying from tainted peanut butter from a government inspected plant. Then before that we had the Tomato scare that put a bunch of growers out of business. I don't know how much safer your food is because of the FDA and USDA but I can tell you that its a lot more expensive which means some have to do with less.

Medicine is pretty safe but how unsafe would it be without the FDA its difficult to say. One thing for sure is that unsafe drugs make it to the market all the time, it seems that every year there is one problem or another. Then who can measure the cost of good drugs that don't make it to the market or don't make in time to save someone's life because of FDA red tape.

We do have the best military in the world, but its the most expensive in the world. Because the funding for the miltiary isn't based on what the military needs but where the politicians want the money spent. That's why they are buying planes the military doesn't want and keeping bases open the miltitary says it doesn't need. The military gets stuck with equipment because some congressman has a manufacturer in his district and wants them to profit.

As for health care why doesn't the government provide some good faith by fixing the Medicare system and VA medical systems first. Then take over the rest after they've proven they can handle that. Fact is medicare is going broke. And the main reason that medical cost are rising at a rate several times the rate of inflation is directly due to the government run medicare program and the shifting of medicare cost to non-medicare (private insurance) patients. Just look at the cost of medical procedures that are not covered by medicare, plastic surgery and lasik eye surgery. Those cost are going down while the other cost are blowing through the roof. Could it be that those surgeries are actually controlled by a free market while the medicare covered treatments are not.

When it comes to doing anything but particularily providing social services the Federal government is far to blunt an instrument to do it effectively. Its like swating flies with a sledge hammer. It might get the job done but the collaterial damage may be worse than the flies.

-Highways? I don't know where you are but ours in Michigan suck.

-Mail? You still use this?

-Unsafe food? FDA?... peanut butter paste, lettuce, spinach, The government stepped in only after we began to see problems. The people did a far better job than the Gov.

-Best military in the world... That IS a job of government. They should be the best.

Im not saying our government is a failure. All I'm saying is there are aspects of human existence that government does not need to infiltrate. Health care is one.

First, all of the stuff you just named are not a product of the current administration, those things were established decades, years ago and most of the time remained unchanged.

Besides there is a difference between a government that supports basic social programs and allows its departments to do their jobs and a government that wants to modify everything just because the current administration feels like it.

besides who mails a letter today in 2009?

By "complete failure" do you mean "still the greatest superpower in the history of the world"? Because despite all the corruption in the government, we're still leagues ahead of most of the rest of the world.

The reason why so many government programs do not work well is that they have been deliberately underfunded by a generation of neocons who wanted them to fail, so they would have an excuse to eliminate them. Thank Ronald Reagan.

When Bush took office I said that he was planning to bankrupt the economy so that conservatives could argue that the social safety net was unaffordable and needed to be eliminated. I was right. ∠°)

The post office is facing a 7 billion dollar deficit for the next year. Social Security is all but bankrupt, considering it's a pay-as-you-go system, but wasn't designed as such. Medicare and Medicaid are growing in costs, we always hear about deficits, debt, interest, national debt, not to mention states like California, New York and New Jersey are billions of dollars in debt, yet they have the highest taxes of all the states. The government is just irresponsible with money, so thinking they are going to save us tax money with universal healthcare is a joke.

Highways are state controlled. Bet you have a government education.

the government isnt a failure. Obama is a failure. he is like a dictator he wants control over everyone. thats why he took over GM, thats y he is takin over health care and thats why he wants a government controlled economy

Government fails at everything. except taxing your income.