I think the idea of offering a service to all, and then (in the case where the running of it is not free) collecting money from those who can pay, elsewhere, on the back end, is a good one for public services. Free schooling/health care/etc for all, but some people pay higher taxes (incidentally, how it works in much of the rest of the world!). Main point is, no one needs to know, up front, who is paying and who isn't. School lunch tokens work similarly - some people buy them, some get them free, but they all look the same when you're standing in the line.

As Sarah mentions, it gets rid of the stigma attached to the service, and it tends to higher quality when people are not constantly saying "what? A service for Those People? It can be crummy, because I will never use it."

Okay, "oil" might be a bit simplistic - perhaps "ensuring a lasting military presence in the oil producing region in order to (1) control the money emanating from the flow, and (2) be in a position to cut others off from the flow, thereby controlling the spigot to their economies, even if we don't need the oil ourselves" is closer to the mark.

Now we get to have our bases in the Middle East (those bases, incidentally, are where the majority of the reconstruction efforts are going, which is why the attendant "security concerns" are preventing the contractors from hiring local Iraqi labor) while largely abandoning the ones in Saudi, which helps lessen Bin Laden's pet peeve while not exactly admitting that that's what we're doing. Plus, with the new ones in all the "stans" coming out of the Afghan war, we're all set to encircle China when that becomes the Next Big Concern.

All that, PLUS we got to give a good ol' fashioned demonstration ass kicking, in order to ensure that everyone knows they could be next if they get too uppity. That part didn't quite work out as planned, natch, but hey, at least they tried.

So yeah, we pretty much had our bombs. Someone's gotta use 'em, after all, considering how many of 'em we make to keep the economy humming.

So a little free food outside the Pizza Hut, can't say no to that. Whatever tax dollars it receives are sure to be quite a bit less than a million or so a month. I'm all for a pot of soup, myself. Maybe for a few moments I can enjoy my meal in the company of friends on the sidewalk and forget about the travesties being perpetrated in my name, with my hard earned tax dollars.