Every day at my job I helped people just barely survive

No matter your stance on public vs private services, what good does it do to argue on the internet about how other people are running things. What happened to the government formed of the people and by the people, and the intrinsic responsibility in these types of matters that we all should bear? When will we all grow tired of commenting from the sidelines and begin to get in the game?

This group as a whole consists of some very smart, creative people, with a heavy lean towards entrepreneurialism. I would be willing to bet that if we all put our heads together we could come up with a solution that would not only put these libraries back in the black, but could generate extra revenue for our companies as well.

To kick things off I will throw out the first idea. Obviously, companies producing web applications have a vested interest in the universal access of technology. What if we could fund some of these training classes by offering these public libraries referral programs that would allow them to profit from teaching customers how to use our applications and services? Citizens learn new technology critical to their well being, we receive new signups for our services, libraries make a cut. Obviously this is very general and ripe with logistical complexities. It is meant to spark the minds of people much smarter than I am.

Not to sound too ridiculous here, but I for one still believe that we can fix this country if we ditch the someone else's problem attitude and start focusing on solutions.

I'm glad someone pointed this out, because I came here to do this. But that money has actually gone two places: war and welfare transfer payments, as Alex Tabarrok describes in Launching the Innovation Renaissance, where he says that "the big four of defense, Medicaid, Medicare and Social Security eat up $2.2 trillion, or nearly two-thirds of the U.S. federal budget."

We—collectively, as a society—have elected to spend steadily more money on war and transfer payments. A lot of library funding comes from the local and state level, but local taxing abilities are partially contingent on how much the federal government is taking, and what the federal government is spending that money on.

When I write a fervent wall of text I think is worthy of reading in full, I don't put on a TLDR, I just pity the fool who doesn't take the time to partake of dense knowledge.

So, TLDR, it is the author feeling the content is lacking in a dense section of text more than the reader having a limited attention span that leads to TLDR's. I think.

Libraries, in my opinion, are a model of what social services should look like: universally beneficial, only practical at the community level, little chance of moral hazard or conflict of interest by any party involved (don't return a book, you lose check out privileges - the only one hurt is the perp).

Next time you think of buying a book, seriously check out your local library system.

Where I work out of we have a lot of space for random drop ins, currently these people though are mostly highly technical. Government could provide funding for a place like this to hire someone to assist people getting started with technology.

While most of us working there are busy, we can usually take a small amount of time out of our day to meet someone new and give them a hand.