As soon as you demonstrate that you apply reason to your own party's actions as well, someone might take you seriously. Until then, you're just as much into Koolaid politics as anyone else. All I see from your posting history is someone drinking the Republican koolaid.
Care to actually debate anything I said or are you just going to attack the messenger? I have LOTS of problems with the Republicans... only, if you haven't noticed, they weren't the ones in power for the last two years and, in fact, I didn't even vote for their candidate in 2008 (I also wasn't stupid enough to vote for Obama).
I don't consider myself a full blown libertarian (taken to its extreme conclusion, you end up in a very bad place), but I am a conservative (and an atheist lest someone want to accuse me of being a bible thumper telling you who you can have sex with) with a libertarian streak running through me.
I appreciate the distinction but every time I hear this it feels insulting. I'm sure most people who say the phrase "free healthcare" are aware it's not free.
As I've said elsewhere, I used to manage restaurants for a long time and we hire a lot of kids (teenagers through college). I find kids tend to belong to one of two groups: A) "I can't believe they take taxes out of my pay! I worked hard for that money!" and B) "It's just beer/party/gas money anyway... my rent, tuition, etc are already taken care of (parents, loan, scholarships, whatever)" The latter group really doesn't care how much gets taken as long as they've got some spending cash because, at this point in their lives, everything IS pretty much free to them. Along with the permanent welfare class (and yes, there is a large permanent welfare class), they do see such things as free because they aren't thinking about where the money comes from since it has little to no immediate effect on themselves.
I think the real point of the issue was that these people were claiming that universal healthcare is inherently bad because of socialism, all the while telling others not to touch their medicare or social security. That's where the ignorance and hypocrisy lies.
I'm not sure you were really listening... everyday people were complaining because it puts the government in charge of their healthcare, removing choices from themselves (yes, there are regulatory boards which will tell you whether or not you can have a procedure ala NICE in Britain), because it meant government controlling their most sensitive personal information, because it meant higher taxes, because it meant lower quality care for the majority of Americans that DO have decent insurance already, because it meant losing plans people already had (and despite the promises, people are already being told their plans will end because of it), because the problems could be solved in far less invasive ways, etc. You equate all of those things together, and yes, the problem is essentially socialism, but it wasn't the kneejerk "omg socialism" that lefties want to proclaim it was. People were informed and they didn't like what they saw and what we ended up with was probably the worst of all outcomes, with government interference benefiting crony capitalism.
As to your points about our shitty government and it's politicians, I won't argue. But that's an argument against this system and it's participants, not universal healthcare or social safety nets. There are nations in this world who have figured these things out to a degree that makes those systems functional.
And those nations that have figured it out have small, relatively homogenous populations with relatively high local population densities. The proper place for such activity, from a Constitutional perspective, from a quality perspective and from a responsible government perspective is to let the states implement their own policies if they want to. However, that isn't good enough for the statists since they want to bludgeon everyone with the same one size fits all club because it concentrates power into one place and allows them to abuse it. That's not to say your every day lefty who dreams of warm fuzzies expects the government to be abusive, it just means that they're naive about the ultimate outcome of what they advocate for.
I think his point is that instead of doing those terrible things, it could be doing these good things. How do we fix it? How do we move forward and make government do what we feel it should.
Let the people govern themselves... that's not to say let anarchy reign supreme, but construct a government where, at the highest levels, it protects your most fundamental rights while staying out of your life as much as possible, and at the lower levels allow more involvement in day to day life because the smaller the government, the more responsive it is to its citizens. You know, kinda like what the Constitution says America is. Imagine that, a government actually of, by and for the people since it is kept close to those it is actually of, by and for.
Nice Fox News talking points. As an employer, I can tell you that this particular Fox News talking point is absolute hogwash. It's so wrong, it's laughable. Employers don't decide to hire or not hire people based on taxes. Maybe huge, tax-dodging employers do (ie: Haliburton, Wal-Mart), but small and mid size employers hire people when they need them, regardless of what the tax rate is now or in the future. Do you honestly think that Joe Blow sandwich shop owner thinks, "I really need to hire another person to cover the morning shift, but I'd better hold off because my tax bill may go up by 3% next year"? C'mon. You don't have to be a business owner to understand this. You just have to be able to think. The whole "uncertainty" story that Fox News/Republicans have drummed up is just plain stupid. Nobody knows what the future holds.
Funny, as a former employer (I quit in part to take care of a disabled parent), I did have to consider the costs of hiring and retaining new employees. I managed restaurants for about 15 years and sales tax increases, minimum wage increases, changes in fuel and utility taxes, property tax rate increases, et al played into our hiring and expansion decisions. Expecting me to pay thousands of dollars extra to hire employee low skill/low wage workers causes at least one of two things to happen - an increase in prices (likely with a decrease in business) and/or less hiring (you make your existing staff work a little harder as you decide to let a little attrition occur to balance things out).
Now, it doesn't take a lot to understand this, you just have to be able to think. Is it worth hiring more staff to marginally expand your business (most businesses don't experience exponential growth) if the increased costs are going to cause unecessary risk? And how you do estimate that risk if you don't even know how much those new employees will ultimately cost you. So instead of building that ice cream take out window and hiring four people to man it, you forgo it, figuring those four people, with staff turnover rates and the potential increased expenses from having to pay for insurance for them, won't produce enough of a margin for you to bother investing in the first place. At best, you delay until you get more certainty, at worst, the plans are scrapped all together.
If you think uncertainty doesn't matter, go to your local bank and tell them you want to borrow money to start a business. You have no business plan, you don't have any clue of how much demand there is for your business, how much it'll cost to make your product to meet demand, what kind of profit margins you'll run or how long it'll take to pay back the loan, but hey, you're sure you'll be able to pay them back eventually so why wouldn't they invest in you?
Would you take out a loan if you didn't know what the interest rate was going to be?
To a business owner, someone who invests in their own business, uncertainty DOES matter. Only an idiot jumps in head first without checking to see just how deep the water is.
The Times article you cite mentions the mythical "fund" that won't be exhausted until 2037. The 1967 amendment to the Social Security Act made it so that, any time Social Security ran a surplus, the money would go to the general fund in exchange for an IOU to be paid back later by Congress when Social Security was in deficit.
Those IOUs are what they're counting on as a "fund" and that money is flat out non-existent. The general fund is already running trillion+ dollar deficits without having to pay back the Social Security Trust Fund, meaning the money will either have to come from borrowing (sell more debt to China or to ourselves through the Fed), inflation (print more money to cover the deficit), taxation (which is likely to cause a revolt amongst working age people, especially younger ones, and will give them less money to prepare for their own future or current needs) or a reduction in payments (either through age increases, directly decreased payments, etc, which will likely cause a revolt amongst retirees and near retirees).
The "Greatest Generation" and the 1910s/30s/60s progressives sold today and tomorrow's generations down the river. We can only continue to ignore the reality of it for so long because it's going to come crashing down soon.
There's no such thing as free healthcare. Someone has to pay somewhere along the line...
It's the insurance companies that pays for astroturfing that gives the appearance that we really don't want universal healthcare. What was really amazing was the number of medicare recipients protesting against universal healthcare.
Medicare... you mean the insurance that people were force to pay into for maybe 50 years prior to receiving it? I can't possibly see why people would want what they had already paid for, especially since, after paying those premiums, they couldn't have invested that money for their future needs, like health insurance, themselves. I'm young enough to know that I'll never get my Social Security or Medicare premiums back, so I'll gladly forgo my future entitlements if the government will let me opt out now.
Social Security is $14.7 trillion in debt (and already in the red despite the projections we wouldn't be for another 7 years), Medicare is $77.1 trillion in arrears and likewise Medicare D is $19.4 trillion in the hole. We don't have the money for the entitlements we already have (and the "lock box" is a box full of promissory notes that, one day, Congress will pay back the money from the general fund that they've been stealing since 1967 to hide the deficits created by the Great Society and Vietnam). The CBO scoring of Obamacare was deliberately skewed by the assumptions they had to abide by written into the law and it ignores that the Doctor Fix alone was enough to obliterate the fake "savings."
The other amazing thing is how people believe that if we give tax cuts to the wealthy then jobs will magically appear. Never mind that we are talking about making Bush-era tax cuts permanent and not introducing new tax cuts. If the tax cuts were a panacea then why haven't they created new jobs in the past 3 years?
They weren't tax cuts, they were pre-bates. You save a couple bucks every paycheck, but you're still liable for the same tax amounts come April. Further, the pre-bates were so miniscule, they never created any emotional sense of tax savings. Stability is what produces jobs more than anything, and the Democrats decided to make healthcare their "one true issue" over the last two years, all while wavering on direct economic issues. They still have yet to pass a budget for the fiscal year that started a month+ ago, much less decide what the tax rate is going to be in 50ish days. Further, people STILL don't know everything that is in the healthcare law and that is STILL creating future uncertainty. It's pointless to hire and train new people today if you don't know if you'll be able to afford them in 6 months or a year.
Mainstream media creates perceptions. Perceptions don't always reflect reality.
Yes, like the notion that free health care can exist. Nothing the government does is for free, someone always is forced to pay one way or another.
Also the US government always seem to do what is good for corporations and hardly anything good for consumers. They try to make it appear it was good for consumers. Take the current "Health Care Reforms" that the Democrats passed last year. It doesn't come close to making health care free, in fact it forces us to purchase health insurance. So on the surface it looks like the consumers are finally getting affordable healthcare, in reality the insurance corporations are getting customers who are forced to purchase insurance.
Next thing you'll see is the government promising more jobs from exports by initiating free trade with a country whose growing economy is based on jobs being outsourced from the US. Oh wait it looks like Obama wants to announce something....
Wait, is this the same government that you expect to be your sugar daddy savior? They'll sell you out left and right, but you're going to trust them THIS time, right? Further
NY has more than half of its population on the dole or working for the state. It spends about twice per capita what California does and if you look outside the NYC/Albany/Hudson Valley area, you'll find PERMANENT unemployment in the 8-9% range. The papers upstate "brag" about how we avoided the latest recession by already being in a decades long recession. Yay us!
NYC didn't care until the recession hit Manhattan since they mentally block out the rest of the state as non-existent. We've got the highest property taxes, pretty high sales taxes (8%), income taxes, untold numbers of fees and whatnot... and with the exception of NYC (like Silicon Valley, it's a destination to go to since large numbers of workers with the target knowledge are available), the state is dead. Businesses routinely leave and unemployment would be higher if not for the fact that working class people eventually uproot their families and leave for another state to find a job. NY's population stays relatively flat because of the influx of immigrants, but its native families are forced to relocate, giving the southern states their population jumps.
In a multiparty system many different groupings are possible and so it is not smart politics to paint other politicians as evil baby eaters because tomorrow you might need to work with them - or at least it is not as smart politics as it otherwise is. There is more of a common interest and that creates at least the possibility of cooperation among parties.
You'll often find politicians crossing the aisle to vote with the other party much to the consternation of the party to which they belong. A lot of Democrats hate Joe Lieberman (to the point where they forced him out of the party) because he often sides with the Republicans on foreign affairs, though on most other isssues, he's a reliable vote for the Democrats. Likewise, despite his nomination in 2008 (which was an effect of early open primaries in large winner-take-all states), McCain is pretty well hated within the Republican Party for the same reason. Northeast Republicans, Blue Dog democrats, etc... really, there are a lot of people and subgroups that break away from their party quite frequently.
That said, the Republicans stayed pretty unified against the Democrats for the last two years precisely because they believed that the Democrats misunderstood the results of the 2006 and 2008 elections. By sticking with the party instead of crossing aisles (think Lindsay Graham abandoning his co-authored cap-and-trade bill), they strengthened their broader coalition going into this year. Graham almost certainly won't get cap-and-trade now, but he might be able to get something else he's in favor of for remaining loyal to the party. Of course, that's exactly how things get screwed up - you start making promises to bribe your more tepid members and pretty soon, you're abandoning your platform entirely (see Republicans and small government, Democrats and a single payer health care system, etc).
I've heard there was positive sentiment in polls when people were asked about the content of the actual plan without it being revealed where the plan came from, though I don't know the details of that.
The problem is, for every thing they agreed with, there was something else they disagreed with... and by the time you included all the goodies that made everyone happy with something in the bill, most people were unhappy by the sweeteners added to make others happy. The surest way to anger everyone is to try to please everyone.
At the end of the day, the health care reform did nothing of what it ws originally supposed to do (bring down costs by covering everyone) and ended up raising costs for everyone, ensuring lots of people will refuse to insure themselves (why pay $15k a year if I can pay a $1k or so penalty and then wait until I get sick to buy insurance?), creating dozens of new bureaucracies, taking away insurance plans from those who already have them (people on Medicare Advantage, incentives for employers to DROP their employees insurance, etc). Frankly, there were too many cooks in the kitchen and they ruined the broth.
The Democrats knew people would hate a lot of provisions, which is why they staggered how the bill would be imposed on society. Some of the "good" stuff like coverage for "kids" up to 26 kicked in just before this year's elections, some of the negative effects like the penalties for not buying insurance magically don't kick in until after the next Presidential election so that Obama won't have to be held responsible for them. The whole thing was a game of politics.
The democrats did try to engage the republicans - on that we seem to agree though you have a different perspective on what their motivations for doing so were.
Well, there's a difference between honestly soliciting the opinions of the other side so you can try to craft better legislation and then there's putting on a show, where you solicit their opinions but ignore them while simultaneously whining that they don't have any opinions to try to make them loo
In the end you didn't get anything like what the Democrats wanted, yet they have a majority.
The Democrats weren't united in what they wanted themselves. The Bernie Sanders/Dennis Kucinich wanted full blown European style health care while the "Blue Dogs" wanted to tweak things, but didn't necessarily want to go to the extent of government controlled health care. So, the far left Dems went about watering down their ideas to please the Blue Dogs since they didn't have enough votes to pass it without them. At no point did the far left really care about what the Republicans wanted, they only wanted enough votes to pass it, which, with their large majorities, they could have done on their own (including in the Senate where, prior to Scott Brown's election to the former Kennedy seat, the Democrats had the super-majority needed to invoke cloture to stop a Republican filibuster. They would have loved to peel off a couple of the more liberal Republicans in an effort to call the legislation bi-partisan, but they knew they didn't need to and, in the end, they failed to do so.
When you vote for something, then you are voting to force the issue against those voting against and vice versa. It is what politics is, and that is exactly why politics makes people so angry. The funny thing is that what Obama is getting in trouble for is precisely that he tried to go beyond that and inevitably failed.
At the time it passed, the Congressional Republicans were united against it and, more importantly, about 70% of Americans at large were against the legislation as well. Obama famously saw its failure as his Waterloo, however, and ordered Pelosi and Reid to pull out all measures to get it passed, insisting that once it was a done deal, people would appreciate it. They didn't and they still don't, with roughly half of the voters turning out yesterday saying they want the law fully repealed.
Republicans are not concerned with pleasing democrats, and I don't know why they would be. The strange thing is that democrats are concerned with pleasing republicans. It is as if they don't understand that in a two-party system they are playing a zero-sum game for power. They are acting as though they are in a many-party system where consensus is the way to make decisions.
The truth is, America really is a many-party system but it is pre-built into two eternal coalitions. The Democrats go out of their way to focus on identity politics, talking about how they're the party that represents this special interest group and that special interest group. What most lefties fail to realize, however, is that the Republicans have a lot of constituencies within their tent as well, ranging from the social conservatives (who generally don't care one iota about huge government) to fiscal conservatives (who often don't care much about who you're sleeping with) to people of an even more libertarian bent and then people who might as well just be Democrats but they can't seem to give up the Republican label they inherited from their family.
Anyway, the Democrats don't care about pleasing Republicans, they just wanted the APPEARANCE of trying to please Republicans "in an effort to be bipartisan." As I said, over much of the last two years, the Republicans were completely powerless to stop anything that the Democrats wanted to do - the problem was that the more moderate Democrats didn't want to go along with the big ideas of the far left side of the party. For Democrat PR sake, they tried to dump their internal stalemates on the Republicans... all while not realizing that the population at large was against what the Democrats were imposing, or at least trying to, upon us.
That's a little amusing - you have clearly drunk the koolaid you rail against in your sig and name. I'm not American and have no stake in US politics, I just follow it out of curiosity, so there is no "us" or "them" for me. What the republicans did isn't just filibustering, they pretended to negotiate with no intention of getting anywhere. When the democrats turned out to be so extremely flexible and bipartisan that the republicans were unable to pretend that their demands weren't being met, they made up demands to make the bill a mess that they could then turn around and point fingers at for being such a mess and for taking so long.
Funny, I watched the same thing and saw the Democrats acting disingenuously... they claimed to want to work with Republicans to craft a bill but in reality, they did their best to shut Republicans out, going so far as to repeatedly claim that Republicans had no ideas on how to fix the system. I seem to remember Obama holding a meeting where he wanted to discuss the issue with members of both houses of Congress, where he routinely ignored the concerns and questions of Republicans to give his pre-written replies. I seem to remember the Democrats in the Senate calling a vote late on Christmas Eve, after Max Baucus (he's a D) personally rewrote it and ladened it with goodies like the rest of the country paying North Dakota's costs and Mary Landrieu's Louisiana purchase, to try to catch the country and Republicans off guard. I seem to remember hysteria over town hall meetings and the Democrat leadership telling their members to stop holding them since it allowed the opposition to coalesce against the Democrats' ideas. I seem to remember Pelosi telling us we wouldn't know what was in the bill until it was passed, especially since they were furiously rewriting it behind closed doors to get those last few Democrat House members to sign on.
There was almost nothing transparent about this bill and the only compromising that went on, was the hard left trying to bribe the moderate left with enough pork and other provisions so that they'd finally agree to vote for the bill. They would have loved to get a couple Republicans to peel off so they could try to pretend it was bipartisan, but it never materialized.
Now, it's possible that I saw what I wanted to see... but it's also just as likely that you saw what you chose to see. Chances are, since you're not American, you were cheering for the Democrats to impose European style healthcare on the US, making the Republicans, as Obama called them, the enemy and thus less sympathetic to your view of them.
The current election is punishing the Democrats for misleading the 2006 and 2008 elections. America was sick of the Republicans and voted for "anyone else," which, in a two party system, tends to be the Democrats. They didn't endorse the Democrats' platform so much as rebuked the Republicans' bad behavior. Obama, and even more so, Pelosi and Reid, took it as a mandate to force their big government agenda onto the country... but that's exactly the actions of the Republicans that was being rebuked. The public opposed the Bush bailouts and Obama doubled down. We opposed the Bush deficits and Obama doubled down. This year's elections was the American electorate again reiterating that "we didn't sign on for this" and rebuked the Democrats, favoring the Republicans in the same way that happened for the Democrats in 2006 and 2008.
That said, the next 4 years mark the last chance for the Republicans... if they don't remain true to their campaign promises this time around, they will go the way of the Whig Party. It'd be nice to say that the Democrat Party would suffer the same fate for their own lies, but there's always someone looking for a bigger government so they can use it for their own benefit.
Democrat: Where would you like us to shoot you?
Republican: Uh, I prefer you didn't shoot me at all. I choose to filibuster your plan to shoot me.
Dem points gun at GOP: BLAM!
Democrat: I tried to be bipartisan, it's not my fault you decided to sabotage me.
Remember how a few years ago, the Democrats trying to filibuster the Republicans was a wonderful thing? Yeah, well, sometimes the other guy gets to filibuster you instead. You thought what they were doing was hare brained and they thought what you were doing was hare brained. In fact, that's precisely why we have the filibuster, to draw out debate to make sure we're really, really sure before we do something extreme. Of course, everyone still wants to cry foul like a 4 year old when they don't get their way.
Had the Democrats actually cared more about making sure health care reform was done right rather than getting something they always wanted forced through, no matter what the cost, things may have been different...
I think you'll find the 17th Amendment to be the key source of the change in the deliberative nature of the Senate. Instead of being wise STATESmen sent to Washington by the state legislatures, Senators became popularly elected and, thus, no more selectively wise than their counterparts in the House. In fact, they had to be even better bullshitters since they had to appeal to a majority of an entire state instead of just a gerrymandered district.
except that right now, the states have the power to regulate health insurance, which they generally exercise.
and who is the state to tell me that I must have coverage that carries something like fertility treatments if I don't want fertility treatment coverage for myself, especially as a single thirty something nerd with no prospects? That's the problem, is the state not only regulates, but mandates excessive coverage which causes the price to increase, which in turns causes people to forego insurance they would otherwise normally buy. Every year, my state adds new mandates which causes the costs of insuring people, and thus the premiums of the insured, to rise dramatically.
I WANT insurance, but my state won't let me buy it unless I buy a ton of stuff I don't want. Why shouldn't I be able to get it from another source?
Allowing purchase across state lines initiates a race to the bottom in what's permitted, for example, as far as truth in policy-writing goes.
Caveat emptor. Apparently, nobody is allowed to be responsible for themselves anymore, we have to trust big nanny government to take care of us in case we do something dumb. There's also something to be said for existing fraud laws.
The price of freedom is responsibility... if we are to take away our responsibility, we do so at the cost of our freedom.
Do you really think there's any chance that wouldn't result in the federal government picking up the slack, as it has in every other similar case, historically? E.g. credit card laws.
Fat lot of good those credit card changes last year did for me... just as I predicted, just before the rate freezes were to take effect, everyone I know had their interest rates doubled despite having very good (700+) credit ratings. My dad had his grace period shortened in an effort to get him to make a late payment so that they could charge fees and screw with his interest rates more. Likewise, I had my credit limit cut without notification, likely in an effort to get me to go over my limit so they could charge fees.
Maybe, just maybe, the government should stop trying to help us through regulation since everything they do makes our lives more difficult while the increasing regulatory burdens only benefit the already entrenched and powerful.
Buying insurance over state lines, incidentally, would be 100% guaranteed to increase the size of the federal government significantly if implemented. I'm just saying.
Not really... going from "thou shall not" to "thou may" has pretty much the same amount of regulatory burden. Where it gets heavy is "thou may IF AND BUT..." There's no reason to assume that merely allowing people to buy across state lines would have to mean that the government would say that only these groups of people may do it and only if they buy these types of policies.
Instead, what we got, was a deeper lock-in to the existing problems. Now, we not only have to continue to buy insurance only from our in-state approved providers and whatever mandates the state say they have to cover, but we're FORCED to buy insurance policies we don't want or else we suffer a monetary penalty on top of it.
Over the last few years, I've opted for no insurance and saved about $30,000 while spending only $115 on medical bills. I really want to buy catastrophic only coverage, but my state won't let me, demanding I either buy a cadillac plan that I don't need or become a ward of the state. In fact, that's why they don't want me to be able to buy from another state, because it forces me to either spend $10k+ a year or become dependent upon the state. Just as mega-corps love lock-in, so do bureaucrats and they can abuse you just as easily, if not moreso.
You mistake a New England Republican's ideas for the ideas of the broader party. That would be like saying all Democrats agree with Zell Miller.
The GOP wanted to allow people to buy insurance over state lines, tort reform, more options for people to self-insure, etc. None of that was in the final legislation, because it wasn't a compromise between the Democrats and Republicans, but between the socialist branch of the Democrat party and the more moderate branch of the Democrat party.
There was always some politics here... I can remember the late 90s with the DMCA, UCITA, Columbine (who could forget Jon Katz?), global warming (sorry, it's as much, if not more, politics as it is science) and whatnot.
That said, Slashdot expanded beyond nerd political issues when they created the dedicated politics section and hired kdawson.
All of which is complicated by yet another dimension on each of those axises under a system like the US...
Government funding for education vs not becomes
Federal funding for education vs not
State funding for education vs not
Local funding for education vs not
Privatized education vs not
Someone can support public funding of schools at the state and local level while rejecting it at the federal level as well as opposing private schooling all together. Someone else might support full federal funding and control of education with none of the others allowable. Yet another person might support privatized only.
And the same goes true for pretty much any aspect (or not) of government. Lots of people may oppose something being done at the federal level since it paints with too broad of a brush/is a one-size-fits-all solution that fits nobody well, while they would accept it at the state or local level and, likewise, they might feel that local laws are too abusive or disjointed so they want the federal government to overrule/unify them.
Yeah, those family farmers... they're loaded. I bet they just love having to sell the farm to BigFarmCorp or SprawlTractInc so they can pay the government the value of 50% of the farm's assets.
Starting in 2011, the federal government will begin taking 55% of the value of the estate exceeding $1 million. You can pretty much guarantee that will hit almost every commercial family farm out there (100 acres at $10k per acre is enough to hit the exemption, and that is just land, ignoring machinery, buildings, livestock, etc). Factor in other assets like stock and bond holdings, retirement accounts, cash assets, life insurance, vehicles, homes, jewelry, etc and it isn't too hard for the average person to hit $1 million in assets these days.
Two people working minimum wage will earn $1.2 million over 40 years. Factor in that almost nobody works minimum wage for their entire life, and it's even theoretically possible for them to hit the estate tax, to say nothing of the 45% of households making $50k a year or more.
The reason I don't see it is that your argument is, essentially, everything that happened which was viewed as positive over the last century was actually a huge negative in disguise.
I think the results of the Civil Rights Movement were almost entirely good things (I have issues with things like Affirmative Action whereby racism is encouraged and even forced). I think the creation of work safety laws were a good thing (though I will disagree with many other labor laws like the minimum wage).
On the other hand, I think the entire concepts of Social and Economic Justice were horrible for the notion of freedom. I think Woodrow Wilson (federal reserve, segregating the US government, luring us into WWI so he could try to force his ideas of global government on the world), Franklin Roosevelt (New Deal, Judiciary Reorganization Bill) and Lyndon Johnson (Great Society) were some of the most evil people to ever occupy the Oval Office since they were the primary advocates in the last century of a government which controls the people, rather than a government beholden to the people (and to make it far, I'll add Hoover, Nixon and GWB in there too, though I think the previous 3 were more evil than these 3). Their ideas were wrapped up in feel good emotions, but there were deeply nefarious motives behind all of them if you read the writings of their closest advisers, especially with Wilson and FDR.
I don't buy your premise that the debt is fundamentally beyond payment nor that the only way to balance the economy is to confiscate massive amounts of money or disband the entire military.
I don't agree with eliminating the military, I was just throwing it out there as an example of the first strike many wealth redistributionists call for. Granted, I think we could probably lose $100 billion out of the defense budget without a negative impact by getting rid of the waste, but I support a strong military since it is one of the few actual purposes of the federal government.
That said, we need very deep cuts in federal spending and, frankly, the fattest area to cut are the entitlements. We spend 3x as much on entitlements as we do on the military. People will cry that it isn't fair because they're entitled to it, but we all need to make sacrifices and we have to stop forcing our unborn great grandkids to make sacrifices for our benefit.
Cuts need to be made, the entire economy is not a total loss.
I actually started writing a book about the impending collapse of America about a decade ago. We're balkanized on too many fronts to remain a unified country and we're at the point where most people can't even talk to each other anymore, they just shout passed each other. We're at a crossroads where we need to decide where we're going to go as a nation because both sides are generally incompatible with the other side (you can't have a small near powerless government and a large government which controls large things like the economy at the same time).
I always thought it was going to be Social Security that would collapse us (my book had it projected at 2043, but I've revised it up to sometime late this decade or early next given that we've already moved into the red). And again, it comes down to the government, because of its interference, having to pick a winner and a loser - either the retirees benefit at the expense of the youth, or the retirees will be forced to do with less than they were promised so the youth can have opportunities of their own. Neither side will agree.
See, the problem is, our parents and grandparents already tapped out our rainy day funds so they could enjoy the good life. Now that its raining, we don't have those funds to rely on, so eventually panic will set in unless we begin to massively correct things now and those corrections WILL hurt. Nobody is really willing to take the pain, so we're screwed. In fact, we're doing the exact opposite with the stimulus, bailouts,
The solution is to raise the age of first payment and convince the boomers they need to work longer because they are getting the benefits of advanced medical care.
Good luck with the me generation being forced to work for a couple more years and delay their benefits... they "worked their whole lives on the promise that they're entitled to it!" Look at the current riots in France over the idea of raising retirement from 60 to 62 after it was reduced from 65 a couple decades ago. People get so wrapped up in their entitlement mentality, that they won't except any change in the concept that they bought into decades ago.
Further, that advanced medical care presents a problem if the government is going to have boards to decide how much things cost and whether or not someone qualifies for them (yes, both policies are in the monstrosity that was passed earlier this year). The government has a conflict of interest since letting you die early also means they get to keep all that Social Security money that you paid in.
Cutting all social programs doesn't make any sense.
First, I don't support a cut off date where, at such and such time, all social programs stop. The first thing I'd do, is transition them from the federal level (which the federal government actually has no power to manage to begin with) to the state level, so states can determine what is beneficial for their citizens. Then I'd begin to pare out the graft that encourages able bodied people to continue to leech off the government (and yes, there is lots of it... $60 billion annually in just Medicare if you believe the current administration's numbers). I'd setup maximum lifetime benefit allowances for any people that aren't permanently disabled.
The closer we are to the government, the better we can keep an eye on it and the more efficient it is. You're one of about 685,000 other voices your US Rep "listens" to and one of maybe 34 million people your US Senator listens to. On the other hand, your state representation has far fewer voices per representative, even moreso for your county and greatly moreso for your city or town. Again, looking at the healthcare bill, the federal system either has to grant exceptions at the cost of all other states (Nebraska) or has to force states to accept programs they don't want (say, a national speed limit or else you don't get any of your highway funds returned to you).
It will just make the lower income earners suffer and inevitably lead to less growth because of the downward cycle of poverty (no money, no education, no opportunity).
The problem aren't the permanently disabled... I believe we need to help the people that are truly incapable of taking care of themselves (though I believe it should be done more through charity and true caring than tax money since going the government route causes us to lose our humanity... and yes, I've sacrificed my own BS in computer engineering as well as career to take care of my disabled father over the last decade+, so I do put my money where my mouth is... and despite qualifying, neither of us takes welfare, though he does collect his SSI and Medicare benefits, which he paid into for 30+ years prior to becoming disabled).
The problem are the people who are satisfied with living on the dole and pass that onto their children. I have an aunt who has 7 kids, who has never had to get a job in her life and never will. When she was 51, her youngest was about to turn 18, kicking her off the welfare gravy train, so she popped out kid #7, which will take her to the age of 69, at which point she'll collect anyway. Of her 7 kids, 1 is dead (killed for trying to sell drugs on gang territory), 3 are in jail in connection with a driveby murder, 1 (the only female) has joined the dole herself with her own set of kids, 1 is still only 11 and can't support himself and 1 actually made a bit of a life providing for himself.
Buffett also supports the death tax in his belief that the government deserves your money to redistribute as they see fit... The key word being YOUR money, since Buffett has already signed over his fortune to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, obviously, because he believes the BMGF will redistribute his money in better ways than the government.
So what is it, the government should forcefully redistribute the wealth of people or that the foundation created by one of the few people richer than Buffett himself should be able to redistribute HIS money since they know better than the government... Again, Buffett believes in one set of rules for himself but a different set of rules for everyone else. If Buffett gave up half of his fortune to the government to distribute (he's conveniently getting rid of it now, which not only prevents it being taken by the death tax, but gives him nice fat tax writeoffs every year too, which, surprise, also would help him pay less tax than his secretary), he might have room to talk... instead, he's a complete hypocrite and I laugh every time someone brings up his tax arguments since he's deliberately flouting the rules he's supposedly supports... you know, for everyone EXCEPT him .
You're missing the problem of the unfunded entitlements. Boomers have officially started retiring and over the next decade, the costs associated that will quickly escalate. Current 2015 estimates project costs exceeding $2 trillion annually just for Social Security and Medicare compared to a little over $1 trillion back in 2005.
On top of that, we continue to spend money we don't have. GWB's $450ish billion deficit was bad, Obama's is 3 times that. If the government spending money actually produced growth, it should spend like there's no tomorrow (of course, that is the economic version of perpetual motion and it is just as false)... but it doesn't produce growth and it doesn't spend money efficiently, it tries to force the market into doing things that don't make sense (or private investment would already be in that market), which always results in waste. And yes, we do overspend on roads (bridges to nowhere anyone?), police (why do we have state troopers, sheriff deputies, town cops and university police all in my neighboring small college town of about 9000 people (college kids included) when the big crimes are vandalism, underage drinking and minor domestic disputes?), etc.
Further, you haven't disputed my claim that we've never, EVER reduced the debt in more than a century, we just pay the interest, and frequently, we have to borrow to pay that. Existing debt to GDP isn't all that meaningful of a statistic since it ignores things like the unfunded entitlements that are coming due, inflation, etc.
We ARE in the same type of deep shit as the morons that bought the $1 million house despite an income of $28k a year... For the first 5 years, all we had to pay was $800 a month on our interest only loan, a mere fraction of our GDP, er, income, but now, our first balloon payment is coming due and our interest rates are about to reset higher. Just like the house buyer that didn't understand the terms of his mortgage, don't forget about the bigger picture of unfunded entitlements nor that fact that our debts are being sold around the world and sooner or later, someone is going to want to cash in...
The solution is to cut our losses and stop spending on things that aren't absolutely vital. Instead, Obama doubled down on Bush's mistakes just like FDR did with Hoover's, and we're being setup for at least a decade of misery... only this time, I don't see the military collapse of Europe or China on the horizon as a means to us jumpstarting our domestic economy again. In fact, thanks to the mistakes of nearly every President and Congress over the last century+, we may already be too sick to recover even if we were to somehow suddenly become the world's virtual sole manufacturer again.
The debt simply is not payable. You could confiscate 100% of the wealth of the Forbes 400 richest Americans and you'd still only get $1.27 trillion, or roughly enough to pay off just this year's deficit. And that means they have no assets for you to tax in the future... If we were to cut the entire military budget to $0, ignoring that we'd immediately be attacked, it would take decades just to pay off the principle of the existing debt, ignoring the rapidly oncoming entitlement spending owed to the boomers (which will grow from about $1 trillion to $2 trillion over the period of 2005-2015). Seriously, we're screwed... the only thing that might help is deep, deep cuts. But good luck getting any of that through with the political environment we have today where people, corporations and special interests demand "their" share of your money that the government took for them. Really, I don't understand how you can't see that we really are screwed, especially if you're as into statistics as your moniker would suggest.
Actual debt hasn't decreased in the lifetime of any American alive today, it has continually increased (and yes, that includes the Enron-style accounting that produced a "surplus" at the end of Clinton's term, but you'll notice national debt continued to increase, proving there wasn't really a surplus). Your claim that it decreased relative to GDP is true, however, the Keynesians never paid it down, they simply ignored it while the American economy took off due to the collapse of European manufacturing post-WWII.
Further, in 1967, the Democrats made a modification to the Social Security Act which allowed them to take the surpluses generated by Social Security to pay off the increasing debts that proved we already couldn't afford from the 4 year old welfare state as well as the increased spending from the escalation in Vietnam. Now we're left with a massive national debt as well as a further $111 trillion in unfunded social program liabilities ($15 trillion SSI, $19 trillion Medicare D, $77 trillion Medicare) that are already starting to come due. Social Security is already in the red this year and the only place to make up that money is through the general fund, which doesn't have the money to pay back what it started taking 43 years ago. So, take the $14 trillion, add in a further $111 trillion and we're suddenly in the neighborhood of debt+liabilities exceeding GDP by almost tenfold. Interest alone on already accrued debt will gain parity with defense spending before the decade is out.
In short, we're screwed... most people just don't realize it yet because the numbers are mindbogglingly huge, people think that "it can't happen to us" and the feds (almost all of them regardless of party) have done their best to hide the reality of the situation because it keeps them in office. Spoil the people today at the expense of the people tomorrow and by the time it has to be dealt with, you'll likely at least be out of office, if not already six feet under.
O'Reilly has dialed back his aggressive style... it first became obvious during the 2008 campaign, especially with his sit down interview with Obama, where he refused to ask the really hard questions. Sure, he threw a couple hard pitches just for his cred, but he did nothing to hold his feet to the fire like he used to do with guests a decade ago, when guests used to storm off set on occasion. He's gone from railing on Jesse Jackson and questions of tax evasion to sitting next to Jackson at dinner parties (about 2:50 in).
O'Reilly has become a part of the establishment. He's had the #1 rated cable news program for, what, 9 or so years now? He's also getting older and has become more focused on his family than on the "no spin" tough guy that he still likes to portray himself as. He's living on past glory with a long, fat contract, secure with the knowledge that Fox isn't going to let him leave for a competitor, especially as long as he stays at #1. People at the top almost always lost the edge that got them there.
As for the rest of Fox News, as a conservative/libertarian/tea party type, I've become increasingly disgusted with it over the years and at this point, I really only tune in for Cavuto, Red Eye, John Stossel and Andrew Napolitano. Fox and Friends has been horrendous since they canned ED Hill and replaced her with Gretchen Carlson - I would have preferred Kiran Chetry. The day time has gone from hard news to soft news and sensationalism and, in particular, I don't like the choice of Jenna Lee replacing Jane Skinner. I've had a grudge against Shepard Smith since the JFK Jr search when he told a viewer off because the viewer said 24/7 coverage, which ignored all of the other news for a guy of, really, little importance, was ridiculous. Beck is quickly turning into the 700 Club, Special Report isn't the same without Brit Hume, Hannity was always pretty meh but without anyone to challenge him he's completely lame, and Greta, well, she's not bad, but I'm generally not interested in her frequently Lifetime feeling show. With the exception of Smith, who is clearly the token liberal meant to prove that Fox doesn't completely lean right, it's clear that the channel has moved on from reporting to pandering for audience.
The sad part, is that MSNBC has followed them over an even bigger cliff on the opposite side (back in the late 90s, they were my news channel of choice, but today they are virtually unwatchable, much for the same reason that Air America was unlistenable - they're all attack with little substance. It's both boring and tiring unless you're a cheerleader and even then, it's inane (see Hannity for those on the right)). CNN is just outright lost. Seriously, Client Number Nine gets his own show and to balance him out, he gets a token conservative woman, with whom he has no chemistry, that no conservative believes is any further to the right than he is, and that's the show that was going to bail CNN out from its morass? Thankfully, I can find a pretty wide variety of news on the internet these days, since all three big cable stations are failing in that respect (informing the populace matters way less than generating eyeballs to bring in revenue).
A homeless shelter where they can work for their food, what a novel idea. Most people seem to think that's "slave labor" or "forced labor" something though, as if "forced" labor is necessarily bad (the average American is "forced" to labor, too... otherwise, they lose their job, money, house, food, etc).
The average American is forced to labor to provide for those unwilling or unable to provide for themselves as well. Obviously, those unable to provide for themselves need help, but a non-trivial amount of money goes to support those who have routinely made poor choices and either refuse to help themselves (like my drunk uncle that can't hold a job since it interferes with his whiskey) or find themselves in a situation where they simply can't work (like my aunt with 7 kids that has been on welfare her entire life "can't" work because she has to raise (read neglect) her children).
At the federal level, we're spending roughly $275 billion on Medicaid, $68 billion on housing, $72 bilion on SNAP, and $188 billion on various public assistance programs. That's $603 billion on various social welfare programs (not counting SCHIP, WIC, etc since children fall into the "unable to take care of themselves" category nor unemployment, education, etc since those are supposed to be going to otherwise productive people). That's about $2000 in extra tax for every adult and child in the country and that's just the federal spending, states spend a ton more and some states spend obscenely more. Your average family of 4 could have a significantly better life with an extra $4-8k (hard to pinpoint a number off the top of my head given the progressive income tax system) to invest in their homes, education, medical care, etc.
A lot of people used to like to quote Ben Franklin around here when the last President was in office (they seem to mysteriously have forgotten the quote today)... but Franklin had opinions on a lot of things. He was certainly a charitable man, founding the first public library and hospital in the US, not to mention helping to found a college... but he also wrote:
"I am for doing good to the poor, but I differ in opinion of the means. I think the best way of doing good to the poor, is not making them easy in poverty, but leading or driving them out of it. In my youth I traveled much, and I observed in different countries, that the more public provisions were made for the poor, the less they provided for themselves, and of course became poorer. And, on the contrary, the less was done for them, the more they did for themselves, and became richer."
Indeed, many of the poor in America have become complacent and they have no qualms about existing solely at the expense of the rest of society... stated another way, enslaving society to provide for them, extorting them with threats of theft and violence if society refuses their economic conscription.
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As soon as you demonstrate that you apply reason to your own party's actions as well, someone might take you seriously. Until then, you're just as much into Koolaid politics as anyone else. All I see from your posting history is someone drinking the Republican koolaid.
Care to actually debate anything I said or are you just going to attack the messenger? I have LOTS of problems with the Republicans... only, if you haven't noticed, they weren't the ones in power for the last two years and, in fact, I didn't even vote for their candidate in 2008 (I also wasn't stupid enough to vote for Obama).
I don't consider myself a full blown libertarian (taken to its extreme conclusion, you end up in a very bad place), but I am a conservative (and an atheist lest someone want to accuse me of being a bible thumper telling you who you can have sex with) with a libertarian streak running through me.
I appreciate the distinction but every time I hear this it feels insulting. I'm sure most people who say the phrase "free healthcare" are aware it's not free.
As I've said elsewhere, I used to manage restaurants for a long time and we hire a lot of kids (teenagers through college). I find kids tend to belong to one of two groups: A) "I can't believe they take taxes out of my pay! I worked hard for that money!" and B) "It's just beer/party/gas money anyway... my rent, tuition, etc are already taken care of (parents, loan, scholarships, whatever)" The latter group really doesn't care how much gets taken as long as they've got some spending cash because, at this point in their lives, everything IS pretty much free to them. Along with the permanent welfare class (and yes, there is a large permanent welfare class), they do see such things as free because they aren't thinking about where the money comes from since it has little to no immediate effect on themselves.
I think the real point of the issue was that these people were claiming that universal healthcare is inherently bad because of socialism, all the while telling others not to touch their medicare or social security. That's where the ignorance and hypocrisy lies.
I'm not sure you were really listening... everyday people were complaining because it puts the government in charge of their healthcare, removing choices from themselves (yes, there are regulatory boards which will tell you whether or not you can have a procedure ala NICE in Britain), because it meant government controlling their most sensitive personal information, because it meant higher taxes, because it meant lower quality care for the majority of Americans that DO have decent insurance already, because it meant losing plans people already had (and despite the promises, people are already being told their plans will end because of it), because the problems could be solved in far less invasive ways, etc. You equate all of those things together, and yes, the problem is essentially socialism, but it wasn't the kneejerk "omg socialism" that lefties want to proclaim it was. People were informed and they didn't like what they saw and what we ended up with was probably the worst of all outcomes, with government interference benefiting crony capitalism.
As to your points about our shitty government and it's politicians, I won't argue. But that's an argument against this system and it's participants, not universal healthcare or social safety nets. There are nations in this world who have figured these things out to a degree that makes those systems functional.
And those nations that have figured it out have small, relatively homogenous populations with relatively high local population densities. The proper place for such activity, from a Constitutional perspective, from a quality perspective and from a responsible government perspective is to let the states implement their own policies if they want to. However, that isn't good enough for the statists since they want to bludgeon everyone with the same one size fits all club because it concentrates power into one place and allows them to abuse it. That's not to say your every day lefty who dreams of warm fuzzies expects the government to be abusive, it just means that they're naive about the ultimate outcome of what they advocate for.
I think his point is that instead of doing those terrible things, it could be doing these good things. How do we fix it? How do we move forward and make government do what we feel it should.
Let the people govern themselves... that's not to say let anarchy reign supreme, but construct a government where, at the highest levels, it protects your most fundamental rights while staying out of your life as much as possible, and at the lower levels allow more involvement in day to day life because the smaller the government, the more responsive it is to its citizens. You know, kinda like what the Constitution says America is. Imagine that, a government actually of, by and for the people since it is kept close to those it is actually of, by and for.
Nice Fox News talking points. As an employer, I can tell you that this particular Fox News talking point is absolute hogwash. It's so wrong, it's laughable. Employers don't decide to hire or not hire people based on taxes. Maybe huge, tax-dodging employers do (ie: Haliburton, Wal-Mart), but small and mid size employers hire people when they need them, regardless of what the tax rate is now or in the future. Do you honestly think that Joe Blow sandwich shop owner thinks, "I really need to hire another person to cover the morning shift, but I'd better hold off because my tax bill may go up by 3% next year"? C'mon. You don't have to be a business owner to understand this. You just have to be able to think. The whole "uncertainty" story that Fox News/Republicans have drummed up is just plain stupid. Nobody knows what the future holds.
Funny, as a former employer (I quit in part to take care of a disabled parent), I did have to consider the costs of hiring and retaining new employees. I managed restaurants for about 15 years and sales tax increases, minimum wage increases, changes in fuel and utility taxes, property tax rate increases, et al played into our hiring and expansion decisions. Expecting me to pay thousands of dollars extra to hire employee low skill/low wage workers causes at least one of two things to happen - an increase in prices (likely with a decrease in business) and/or less hiring (you make your existing staff work a little harder as you decide to let a little attrition occur to balance things out).
Now, it doesn't take a lot to understand this, you just have to be able to think. Is it worth hiring more staff to marginally expand your business (most businesses don't experience exponential growth) if the increased costs are going to cause unecessary risk? And how you do estimate that risk if you don't even know how much those new employees will ultimately cost you. So instead of building that ice cream take out window and hiring four people to man it, you forgo it, figuring those four people, with staff turnover rates and the potential increased expenses from having to pay for insurance for them, won't produce enough of a margin for you to bother investing in the first place. At best, you delay until you get more certainty, at worst, the plans are scrapped all together.
If you think uncertainty doesn't matter, go to your local bank and tell them you want to borrow money to start a business. You have no business plan, you don't have any clue of how much demand there is for your business, how much it'll cost to make your product to meet demand, what kind of profit margins you'll run or how long it'll take to pay back the loan, but hey, you're sure you'll be able to pay them back eventually so why wouldn't they invest in you?
Would you take out a loan if you didn't know what the interest rate was going to be?
To a business owner, someone who invests in their own business, uncertainty DOES matter. Only an idiot jumps in head first without checking to see just how deep the water is.
My numbers came from usdebtclock.org
The Times article you cite mentions the mythical "fund" that won't be exhausted until 2037. The 1967 amendment to the Social Security Act made it so that, any time Social Security ran a surplus, the money would go to the general fund in exchange for an IOU to be paid back later by Congress when Social Security was in deficit.
Those IOUs are what they're counting on as a "fund" and that money is flat out non-existent. The general fund is already running trillion+ dollar deficits without having to pay back the Social Security Trust Fund, meaning the money will either have to come from borrowing (sell more debt to China or to ourselves through the Fed), inflation (print more money to cover the deficit), taxation (which is likely to cause a revolt amongst working age people, especially younger ones, and will give them less money to prepare for their own future or current needs) or a reduction in payments (either through age increases, directly decreased payments, etc, which will likely cause a revolt amongst retirees and near retirees).
The "Greatest Generation" and the 1910s/30s/60s progressives sold today and tomorrow's generations down the river. We can only continue to ignore the reality of it for so long because it's going to come crashing down soon.
We want free healthcare.
There's no such thing as free healthcare. Someone has to pay somewhere along the line...
It's the insurance companies that pays for astroturfing that gives the appearance that we really don't want universal healthcare. What was really amazing was the number of medicare recipients protesting against universal healthcare.
Medicare... you mean the insurance that people were force to pay into for maybe 50 years prior to receiving it? I can't possibly see why people would want what they had already paid for, especially since, after paying those premiums, they couldn't have invested that money for their future needs, like health insurance, themselves. I'm young enough to know that I'll never get my Social Security or Medicare premiums back, so I'll gladly forgo my future entitlements if the government will let me opt out now.
Social Security is $14.7 trillion in debt (and already in the red despite the projections we wouldn't be for another 7 years), Medicare is $77.1 trillion in arrears and likewise Medicare D is $19.4 trillion in the hole. We don't have the money for the entitlements we already have (and the "lock box" is a box full of promissory notes that, one day, Congress will pay back the money from the general fund that they've been stealing since 1967 to hide the deficits created by the Great Society and Vietnam). The CBO scoring of Obamacare was deliberately skewed by the assumptions they had to abide by written into the law and it ignores that the Doctor Fix alone was enough to obliterate the fake "savings."
The other amazing thing is how people believe that if we give tax cuts to the wealthy then jobs will magically appear. Never mind that we are talking about making Bush-era tax cuts permanent and not introducing new tax cuts. If the tax cuts were a panacea then why haven't they created new jobs in the past 3 years?
They weren't tax cuts, they were pre-bates. You save a couple bucks every paycheck, but you're still liable for the same tax amounts come April. Further, the pre-bates were so miniscule, they never created any emotional sense of tax savings. Stability is what produces jobs more than anything, and the Democrats decided to make healthcare their "one true issue" over the last two years, all while wavering on direct economic issues. They still have yet to pass a budget for the fiscal year that started a month+ ago, much less decide what the tax rate is going to be in 50ish days. Further, people STILL don't know everything that is in the healthcare law and that is STILL creating future uncertainty. It's pointless to hire and train new people today if you don't know if you'll be able to afford them in 6 months or a year.
Mainstream media creates perceptions. Perceptions don't always reflect reality.
Yes, like the notion that free health care can exist. Nothing the government does is for free, someone always is forced to pay one way or another.
Also the US government always seem to do what is good for corporations and hardly anything good for consumers. They try to make it appear it was good for consumers. Take the current "Health Care Reforms" that the Democrats passed last year. It doesn't come close to making health care free, in fact it forces us to purchase health insurance. So on the surface it looks like the consumers are finally getting affordable healthcare, in reality the insurance corporations are getting customers who are forced to purchase insurance.
Next thing you'll see is the government promising more jobs from exports by initiating free trade with a country whose growing economy is based on jobs being outsourced from the US. Oh wait it looks like Obama wants to announce something....
Wait, is this the same government that you expect to be your sugar daddy savior? They'll sell you out left and right, but you're going to trust them THIS time, right? Further
NY has more than half of its population on the dole or working for the state. It spends about twice per capita what California does and if you look outside the NYC/Albany/Hudson Valley area, you'll find PERMANENT unemployment in the 8-9% range. The papers upstate "brag" about how we avoided the latest recession by already being in a decades long recession. Yay us!
NYC didn't care until the recession hit Manhattan since they mentally block out the rest of the state as non-existent. We've got the highest property taxes, pretty high sales taxes (8%), income taxes, untold numbers of fees and whatnot... and with the exception of NYC (like Silicon Valley, it's a destination to go to since large numbers of workers with the target knowledge are available), the state is dead. Businesses routinely leave and unemployment would be higher if not for the fact that working class people eventually uproot their families and leave for another state to find a job. NY's population stays relatively flat because of the influx of immigrants, but its native families are forced to relocate, giving the southern states their population jumps.
In a multiparty system many different groupings are possible and so it is not smart politics to paint other politicians as evil baby eaters because tomorrow you might need to work with them - or at least it is not as smart politics as it otherwise is. There is more of a common interest and that creates at least the possibility of cooperation among parties.
You'll often find politicians crossing the aisle to vote with the other party much to the consternation of the party to which they belong. A lot of Democrats hate Joe Lieberman (to the point where they forced him out of the party) because he often sides with the Republicans on foreign affairs, though on most other isssues, he's a reliable vote for the Democrats. Likewise, despite his nomination in 2008 (which was an effect of early open primaries in large winner-take-all states), McCain is pretty well hated within the Republican Party for the same reason. Northeast Republicans, Blue Dog democrats, etc... really, there are a lot of people and subgroups that break away from their party quite frequently.
That said, the Republicans stayed pretty unified against the Democrats for the last two years precisely because they believed that the Democrats misunderstood the results of the 2006 and 2008 elections. By sticking with the party instead of crossing aisles (think Lindsay Graham abandoning his co-authored cap-and-trade bill), they strengthened their broader coalition going into this year. Graham almost certainly won't get cap-and-trade now, but he might be able to get something else he's in favor of for remaining loyal to the party. Of course, that's exactly how things get screwed up - you start making promises to bribe your more tepid members and pretty soon, you're abandoning your platform entirely (see Republicans and small government, Democrats and a single payer health care system, etc).
I've heard there was positive sentiment in polls when people were asked about the content of the actual plan without it being revealed where the plan came from, though I don't know the details of that.
The problem is, for every thing they agreed with, there was something else they disagreed with... and by the time you included all the goodies that made everyone happy with something in the bill, most people were unhappy by the sweeteners added to make others happy. The surest way to anger everyone is to try to please everyone.
At the end of the day, the health care reform did nothing of what it ws originally supposed to do (bring down costs by covering everyone) and ended up raising costs for everyone, ensuring lots of people will refuse to insure themselves (why pay $15k a year if I can pay a $1k or so penalty and then wait until I get sick to buy insurance?), creating dozens of new bureaucracies, taking away insurance plans from those who already have them (people on Medicare Advantage, incentives for employers to DROP their employees insurance, etc). Frankly, there were too many cooks in the kitchen and they ruined the broth.
The Democrats knew people would hate a lot of provisions, which is why they staggered how the bill would be imposed on society. Some of the "good" stuff like coverage for "kids" up to 26 kicked in just before this year's elections, some of the negative effects like the penalties for not buying insurance magically don't kick in until after the next Presidential election so that Obama won't have to be held responsible for them. The whole thing was a game of politics.
The democrats did try to engage the republicans - on that we seem to agree though you have a different perspective on what their motivations for doing so were.
Well, there's a difference between honestly soliciting the opinions of the other side so you can try to craft better legislation and then there's putting on a show, where you solicit their opinions but ignore them while simultaneously whining that they don't have any opinions to try to make them loo
In the end you didn't get anything like what the Democrats wanted, yet they have a majority.
The Democrats weren't united in what they wanted themselves. The Bernie Sanders/Dennis Kucinich wanted full blown European style health care while the "Blue Dogs" wanted to tweak things, but didn't necessarily want to go to the extent of government controlled health care. So, the far left Dems went about watering down their ideas to please the Blue Dogs since they didn't have enough votes to pass it without them. At no point did the far left really care about what the Republicans wanted, they only wanted enough votes to pass it, which, with their large majorities, they could have done on their own (including in the Senate where, prior to Scott Brown's election to the former Kennedy seat, the Democrats had the super-majority needed to invoke cloture to stop a Republican filibuster. They would have loved to peel off a couple of the more liberal Republicans in an effort to call the legislation bi-partisan, but they knew they didn't need to and, in the end, they failed to do so.
When you vote for something, then you are voting to force the issue against those voting against and vice versa. It is what politics is, and that is exactly why politics makes people so angry. The funny thing is that what Obama is getting in trouble for is precisely that he tried to go beyond that and inevitably failed.
At the time it passed, the Congressional Republicans were united against it and, more importantly, about 70% of Americans at large were against the legislation as well. Obama famously saw its failure as his Waterloo, however, and ordered Pelosi and Reid to pull out all measures to get it passed, insisting that once it was a done deal, people would appreciate it. They didn't and they still don't, with roughly half of the voters turning out yesterday saying they want the law fully repealed.
Republicans are not concerned with pleasing democrats, and I don't know why they would be. The strange thing is that democrats are concerned with pleasing republicans. It is as if they don't understand that in a two-party system they are playing a zero-sum game for power. They are acting as though they are in a many-party system where consensus is the way to make decisions.
The truth is, America really is a many-party system but it is pre-built into two eternal coalitions. The Democrats go out of their way to focus on identity politics, talking about how they're the party that represents this special interest group and that special interest group. What most lefties fail to realize, however, is that the Republicans have a lot of constituencies within their tent as well, ranging from the social conservatives (who generally don't care one iota about huge government) to fiscal conservatives (who often don't care much about who you're sleeping with) to people of an even more libertarian bent and then people who might as well just be Democrats but they can't seem to give up the Republican label they inherited from their family.
Anyway, the Democrats don't care about pleasing Republicans, they just wanted the APPEARANCE of trying to please Republicans "in an effort to be bipartisan." As I said, over much of the last two years, the Republicans were completely powerless to stop anything that the Democrats wanted to do - the problem was that the more moderate Democrats didn't want to go along with the big ideas of the far left side of the party. For Democrat PR sake, they tried to dump their internal stalemates on the Republicans... all while not realizing that the population at large was against what the Democrats were imposing, or at least trying to, upon us.
That's a little amusing - you have clearly drunk the koolaid you rail against in your sig and name. I'm not American and have no stake in US politics, I just follow it out of curiosity, so there is no "us" or "them" for me. What the republicans did isn't just filibustering, they pretended to negotiate with no intention of getting anywhere. When the democrats turned out to be so extremely flexible and bipartisan that the republicans were unable to pretend that their demands weren't being met, they made up demands to make the bill a mess that they could then turn around and point fingers at for being such a mess and for taking so long.
Funny, I watched the same thing and saw the Democrats acting disingenuously... they claimed to want to work with Republicans to craft a bill but in reality, they did their best to shut Republicans out, going so far as to repeatedly claim that Republicans had no ideas on how to fix the system. I seem to remember Obama holding a meeting where he wanted to discuss the issue with members of both houses of Congress, where he routinely ignored the concerns and questions of Republicans to give his pre-written replies. I seem to remember the Democrats in the Senate calling a vote late on Christmas Eve, after Max Baucus (he's a D) personally rewrote it and ladened it with goodies like the rest of the country paying North Dakota's costs and Mary Landrieu's Louisiana purchase, to try to catch the country and Republicans off guard. I seem to remember hysteria over town hall meetings and the Democrat leadership telling their members to stop holding them since it allowed the opposition to coalesce against the Democrats' ideas. I seem to remember Pelosi telling us we wouldn't know what was in the bill until it was passed, especially since they were furiously rewriting it behind closed doors to get those last few Democrat House members to sign on.
There was almost nothing transparent about this bill and the only compromising that went on, was the hard left trying to bribe the moderate left with enough pork and other provisions so that they'd finally agree to vote for the bill. They would have loved to get a couple Republicans to peel off so they could try to pretend it was bipartisan, but it never materialized.
Now, it's possible that I saw what I wanted to see... but it's also just as likely that you saw what you chose to see. Chances are, since you're not American, you were cheering for the Democrats to impose European style healthcare on the US, making the Republicans, as Obama called them, the enemy and thus less sympathetic to your view of them.
The current election is punishing the Democrats for misleading the 2006 and 2008 elections. America was sick of the Republicans and voted for "anyone else," which, in a two party system, tends to be the Democrats. They didn't endorse the Democrats' platform so much as rebuked the Republicans' bad behavior. Obama, and even more so, Pelosi and Reid, took it as a mandate to force their big government agenda onto the country... but that's exactly the actions of the Republicans that was being rebuked. The public opposed the Bush bailouts and Obama doubled down. We opposed the Bush deficits and Obama doubled down. This year's elections was the American electorate again reiterating that "we didn't sign on for this" and rebuked the Democrats, favoring the Republicans in the same way that happened for the Democrats in 2006 and 2008.
That said, the next 4 years mark the last chance for the Republicans... if they don't remain true to their campaign promises this time around, they will go the way of the Whig Party. It'd be nice to say that the Democrat Party would suffer the same fate for their own lies, but there's always someone looking for a bigger government so they can use it for their own benefit.
Democrat: Where would you like us to shoot you?
Republican: Uh, I prefer you didn't shoot me at all. I choose to filibuster your plan to shoot me.
Dem points gun at GOP: BLAM!
Democrat: I tried to be bipartisan, it's not my fault you decided to sabotage me.
Remember how a few years ago, the Democrats trying to filibuster the Republicans was a wonderful thing? Yeah, well, sometimes the other guy gets to filibuster you instead. You thought what they were doing was hare brained and they thought what you were doing was hare brained. In fact, that's precisely why we have the filibuster, to draw out debate to make sure we're really, really sure before we do something extreme. Of course, everyone still wants to cry foul like a 4 year old when they don't get their way.
Had the Democrats actually cared more about making sure health care reform was done right rather than getting something they always wanted forced through, no matter what the cost, things may have been different...
I think you'll find the 17th Amendment to be the key source of the change in the deliberative nature of the Senate. Instead of being wise STATESmen sent to Washington by the state legislatures, Senators became popularly elected and, thus, no more selectively wise than their counterparts in the House. In fact, they had to be even better bullshitters since they had to appeal to a majority of an entire state instead of just a gerrymandered district.
except that right now, the states have the power to regulate health insurance, which they generally exercise.
and who is the state to tell me that I must have coverage that carries something like fertility treatments if I don't want fertility treatment coverage for myself, especially as a single thirty something nerd with no prospects? That's the problem, is the state not only regulates, but mandates excessive coverage which causes the price to increase, which in turns causes people to forego insurance they would otherwise normally buy. Every year, my state adds new mandates which causes the costs of insuring people, and thus the premiums of the insured, to rise dramatically.
I WANT insurance, but my state won't let me buy it unless I buy a ton of stuff I don't want. Why shouldn't I be able to get it from another source?
Allowing purchase across state lines initiates a race to the bottom in what's permitted, for example, as far as truth in policy-writing goes.
Caveat emptor. Apparently, nobody is allowed to be responsible for themselves anymore, we have to trust big nanny government to take care of us in case we do something dumb. There's also something to be said for existing fraud laws.
The price of freedom is responsibility... if we are to take away our responsibility, we do so at the cost of our freedom.
Do you really think there's any chance that wouldn't result in the federal government picking up the slack, as it has in every other similar case, historically? E.g. credit card laws.
Fat lot of good those credit card changes last year did for me... just as I predicted, just before the rate freezes were to take effect, everyone I know had their interest rates doubled despite having very good (700+) credit ratings. My dad had his grace period shortened in an effort to get him to make a late payment so that they could charge fees and screw with his interest rates more. Likewise, I had my credit limit cut without notification, likely in an effort to get me to go over my limit so they could charge fees.
Maybe, just maybe, the government should stop trying to help us through regulation since everything they do makes our lives more difficult while the increasing regulatory burdens only benefit the already entrenched and powerful.
Buying insurance over state lines, incidentally, would be 100% guaranteed to increase the size of the federal government significantly if implemented. I'm just saying.
Not really... going from "thou shall not" to "thou may" has pretty much the same amount of regulatory burden. Where it gets heavy is "thou may IF AND BUT..." There's no reason to assume that merely allowing people to buy across state lines would have to mean that the government would say that only these groups of people may do it and only if they buy these types of policies.
Instead, what we got, was a deeper lock-in to the existing problems. Now, we not only have to continue to buy insurance only from our in-state approved providers and whatever mandates the state say they have to cover, but we're FORCED to buy insurance policies we don't want or else we suffer a monetary penalty on top of it.
Over the last few years, I've opted for no insurance and saved about $30,000 while spending only $115 on medical bills. I really want to buy catastrophic only coverage, but my state won't let me, demanding I either buy a cadillac plan that I don't need or become a ward of the state. In fact, that's why they don't want me to be able to buy from another state, because it forces me to either spend $10k+ a year or become dependent upon the state. Just as mega-corps love lock-in, so do bureaucrats and they can abuse you just as easily, if not moreso.
You mistake a New England Republican's ideas for the ideas of the broader party. That would be like saying all Democrats agree with Zell Miller.
The GOP wanted to allow people to buy insurance over state lines, tort reform, more options for people to self-insure, etc. None of that was in the final legislation, because it wasn't a compromise between the Democrats and Republicans, but between the socialist branch of the Democrat party and the more moderate branch of the Democrat party.
There was always some politics here... I can remember the late 90s with the DMCA, UCITA, Columbine (who could forget Jon Katz?), global warming (sorry, it's as much, if not more, politics as it is science) and whatnot.
That said, Slashdot expanded beyond nerd political issues when they created the dedicated politics section and hired kdawson.
All of which is complicated by yet another dimension on each of those axises under a system like the US...
Government funding for education vs not becomes
Federal funding for education vs not
State funding for education vs not
Local funding for education vs not
Privatized education vs not
Someone can support public funding of schools at the state and local level while rejecting it at the federal level as well as opposing private schooling all together. Someone else might support full federal funding and control of education with none of the others allowable. Yet another person might support privatized only.
And the same goes true for pretty much any aspect (or not) of government. Lots of people may oppose something being done at the federal level since it paints with too broad of a brush/is a one-size-fits-all solution that fits nobody well, while they would accept it at the state or local level and, likewise, they might feel that local laws are too abusive or disjointed so they want the federal government to overrule/unify them.
Yeah, those family farmers... they're loaded. I bet they just love having to sell the farm to BigFarmCorp or SprawlTractInc so they can pay the government the value of 50% of the farm's assets.
Starting in 2011, the federal government will begin taking 55% of the value of the estate exceeding $1 million. You can pretty much guarantee that will hit almost every commercial family farm out there (100 acres at $10k per acre is enough to hit the exemption, and that is just land, ignoring machinery, buildings, livestock, etc). Factor in other assets like stock and bond holdings, retirement accounts, cash assets, life insurance, vehicles, homes, jewelry, etc and it isn't too hard for the average person to hit $1 million in assets these days.
Two people working minimum wage will earn $1.2 million over 40 years. Factor in that almost nobody works minimum wage for their entire life, and it's even theoretically possible for them to hit the estate tax, to say nothing of the 45% of households making $50k a year or more.
The reason I don't see it is that your argument is, essentially, everything that happened which was viewed as positive over the last century was actually a huge negative in disguise.
I think the results of the Civil Rights Movement were almost entirely good things (I have issues with things like Affirmative Action whereby racism is encouraged and even forced). I think the creation of work safety laws were a good thing (though I will disagree with many other labor laws like the minimum wage).
On the other hand, I think the entire concepts of Social and Economic Justice were horrible for the notion of freedom. I think Woodrow Wilson (federal reserve, segregating the US government, luring us into WWI so he could try to force his ideas of global government on the world), Franklin Roosevelt (New Deal, Judiciary Reorganization Bill) and Lyndon Johnson (Great Society) were some of the most evil people to ever occupy the Oval Office since they were the primary advocates in the last century of a government which controls the people, rather than a government beholden to the people (and to make it far, I'll add Hoover, Nixon and GWB in there too, though I think the previous 3 were more evil than these 3). Their ideas were wrapped up in feel good emotions, but there were deeply nefarious motives behind all of them if you read the writings of their closest advisers, especially with Wilson and FDR.
I don't buy your premise that the debt is fundamentally beyond payment nor that the only way to balance the economy is to confiscate massive amounts of money or disband the entire military.
I don't agree with eliminating the military, I was just throwing it out there as an example of the first strike many wealth redistributionists call for. Granted, I think we could probably lose $100 billion out of the defense budget without a negative impact by getting rid of the waste, but I support a strong military since it is one of the few actual purposes of the federal government.
That said, we need very deep cuts in federal spending and, frankly, the fattest area to cut are the entitlements. We spend 3x as much on entitlements as we do on the military. People will cry that it isn't fair because they're entitled to it, but we all need to make sacrifices and we have to stop forcing our unborn great grandkids to make sacrifices for our benefit.
Cuts need to be made, the entire economy is not a total loss.
I actually started writing a book about the impending collapse of America about a decade ago. We're balkanized on too many fronts to remain a unified country and we're at the point where most people can't even talk to each other anymore, they just shout passed each other. We're at a crossroads where we need to decide where we're going to go as a nation because both sides are generally incompatible with the other side (you can't have a small near powerless government and a large government which controls large things like the economy at the same time).
I always thought it was going to be Social Security that would collapse us (my book had it projected at 2043, but I've revised it up to sometime late this decade or early next given that we've already moved into the red). And again, it comes down to the government, because of its interference, having to pick a winner and a loser - either the retirees benefit at the expense of the youth, or the retirees will be forced to do with less than they were promised so the youth can have opportunities of their own. Neither side will agree.
See, the problem is, our parents and grandparents already tapped out our rainy day funds so they could enjoy the good life. Now that its raining, we don't have those funds to rely on, so eventually panic will set in unless we begin to massively correct things now and those corrections WILL hurt. Nobody is really willing to take the pain, so we're screwed. In fact, we're doing the exact opposite with the stimulus, bailouts,
The solution is to raise the age of first payment and convince the boomers they need to work longer because they are getting the benefits of advanced medical care.
Good luck with the me generation being forced to work for a couple more years and delay their benefits... they "worked their whole lives on the promise that they're entitled to it!" Look at the current riots in France over the idea of raising retirement from 60 to 62 after it was reduced from 65 a couple decades ago. People get so wrapped up in their entitlement mentality, that they won't except any change in the concept that they bought into decades ago.
Further, that advanced medical care presents a problem if the government is going to have boards to decide how much things cost and whether or not someone qualifies for them (yes, both policies are in the monstrosity that was passed earlier this year). The government has a conflict of interest since letting you die early also means they get to keep all that Social Security money that you paid in.
Cutting all social programs doesn't make any sense.
First, I don't support a cut off date where, at such and such time, all social programs stop. The first thing I'd do, is transition them from the federal level (which the federal government actually has no power to manage to begin with) to the state level, so states can determine what is beneficial for their citizens. Then I'd begin to pare out the graft that encourages able bodied people to continue to leech off the government (and yes, there is lots of it... $60 billion annually in just Medicare if you believe the current administration's numbers). I'd setup maximum lifetime benefit allowances for any people that aren't permanently disabled.
The closer we are to the government, the better we can keep an eye on it and the more efficient it is. You're one of about 685,000 other voices your US Rep "listens" to and one of maybe 34 million people your US Senator listens to. On the other hand, your state representation has far fewer voices per representative, even moreso for your county and greatly moreso for your city or town. Again, looking at the healthcare bill, the federal system either has to grant exceptions at the cost of all other states (Nebraska) or has to force states to accept programs they don't want (say, a national speed limit or else you don't get any of your highway funds returned to you).
It will just make the lower income earners suffer and inevitably lead to less growth because of the downward cycle of poverty (no money, no education, no opportunity).
The problem aren't the permanently disabled... I believe we need to help the people that are truly incapable of taking care of themselves (though I believe it should be done more through charity and true caring than tax money since going the government route causes us to lose our humanity... and yes, I've sacrificed my own BS in computer engineering as well as career to take care of my disabled father over the last decade+, so I do put my money where my mouth is... and despite qualifying, neither of us takes welfare, though he does collect his SSI and Medicare benefits, which he paid into for 30+ years prior to becoming disabled).
The problem are the people who are satisfied with living on the dole and pass that onto their children. I have an aunt who has 7 kids, who has never had to get a job in her life and never will. When she was 51, her youngest was about to turn 18, kicking her off the welfare gravy train, so she popped out kid #7, which will take her to the age of 69, at which point she'll collect anyway. Of her 7 kids, 1 is dead (killed for trying to sell drugs on gang territory), 3 are in jail in connection with a driveby murder, 1 (the only female) has joined the dole herself with her own set of kids, 1 is still only 11 and can't support himself and 1 actually made a bit of a life providing for himself.
The problem is, the females are si
Buffett also supports the death tax in his belief that the government deserves your money to redistribute as they see fit... The key word being YOUR money, since Buffett has already signed over his fortune to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, obviously, because he believes the BMGF will redistribute his money in better ways than the government.
So what is it, the government should forcefully redistribute the wealth of people or that the foundation created by one of the few people richer than Buffett himself should be able to redistribute HIS money since they know better than the government... Again, Buffett believes in one set of rules for himself but a different set of rules for everyone else. If Buffett gave up half of his fortune to the government to distribute (he's conveniently getting rid of it now, which not only prevents it being taken by the death tax, but gives him nice fat tax writeoffs every year too, which, surprise, also would help him pay less tax than his secretary), he might have room to talk... instead, he's a complete hypocrite and I laugh every time someone brings up his tax arguments since he's deliberately flouting the rules he's supposedly supports... you know, for everyone EXCEPT him .
You're missing the problem of the unfunded entitlements. Boomers have officially started retiring and over the next decade, the costs associated that will quickly escalate. Current 2015 estimates project costs exceeding $2 trillion annually just for Social Security and Medicare compared to a little over $1 trillion back in 2005.
On top of that, we continue to spend money we don't have. GWB's $450ish billion deficit was bad, Obama's is 3 times that. If the government spending money actually produced growth, it should spend like there's no tomorrow (of course, that is the economic version of perpetual motion and it is just as false)... but it doesn't produce growth and it doesn't spend money efficiently, it tries to force the market into doing things that don't make sense (or private investment would already be in that market), which always results in waste. And yes, we do overspend on roads (bridges to nowhere anyone?), police (why do we have state troopers, sheriff deputies, town cops and university police all in my neighboring small college town of about 9000 people (college kids included) when the big crimes are vandalism, underage drinking and minor domestic disputes?), etc.
Further, you haven't disputed my claim that we've never, EVER reduced the debt in more than a century, we just pay the interest, and frequently, we have to borrow to pay that. Existing debt to GDP isn't all that meaningful of a statistic since it ignores things like the unfunded entitlements that are coming due, inflation, etc.
We ARE in the same type of deep shit as the morons that bought the $1 million house despite an income of $28k a year... For the first 5 years, all we had to pay was $800 a month on our interest only loan, a mere fraction of our GDP, er, income, but now, our first balloon payment is coming due and our interest rates are about to reset higher. Just like the house buyer that didn't understand the terms of his mortgage, don't forget about the bigger picture of unfunded entitlements nor that fact that our debts are being sold around the world and sooner or later, someone is going to want to cash in...
The solution is to cut our losses and stop spending on things that aren't absolutely vital. Instead, Obama doubled down on Bush's mistakes just like FDR did with Hoover's, and we're being setup for at least a decade of misery... only this time, I don't see the military collapse of Europe or China on the horizon as a means to us jumpstarting our domestic economy again. In fact, thanks to the mistakes of nearly every President and Congress over the last century+, we may already be too sick to recover even if we were to somehow suddenly become the world's virtual sole manufacturer again.
The debt simply is not payable. You could confiscate 100% of the wealth of the Forbes 400 richest Americans and you'd still only get $1.27 trillion, or roughly enough to pay off just this year's deficit. And that means they have no assets for you to tax in the future... If we were to cut the entire military budget to $0, ignoring that we'd immediately be attacked, it would take decades just to pay off the principle of the existing debt, ignoring the rapidly oncoming entitlement spending owed to the boomers (which will grow from about $1 trillion to $2 trillion over the period of 2005-2015). Seriously, we're screwed... the only thing that might help is deep, deep cuts. But good luck getting any of that through with the political environment we have today where people, corporations and special interests demand "their" share of your money that the government took for them. Really, I don't understand how you can't see that we really are screwed, especially if you're as into statistics as your moniker would suggest.
Actual debt hasn't decreased in the lifetime of any American alive today, it has continually increased (and yes, that includes the Enron-style accounting that produced a "surplus" at the end of Clinton's term, but you'll notice national debt continued to increase, proving there wasn't really a surplus). Your claim that it decreased relative to GDP is true, however, the Keynesians never paid it down, they simply ignored it while the American economy took off due to the collapse of European manufacturing post-WWII.
Further, in 1967, the Democrats made a modification to the Social Security Act which allowed them to take the surpluses generated by Social Security to pay off the increasing debts that proved we already couldn't afford from the 4 year old welfare state as well as the increased spending from the escalation in Vietnam. Now we're left with a massive national debt as well as a further $111 trillion in unfunded social program liabilities ($15 trillion SSI, $19 trillion Medicare D, $77 trillion Medicare) that are already starting to come due. Social Security is already in the red this year and the only place to make up that money is through the general fund, which doesn't have the money to pay back what it started taking 43 years ago. So, take the $14 trillion, add in a further $111 trillion and we're suddenly in the neighborhood of debt+liabilities exceeding GDP by almost tenfold. Interest alone on already accrued debt will gain parity with defense spending before the decade is out.
In short, we're screwed... most people just don't realize it yet because the numbers are mindbogglingly huge, people think that "it can't happen to us" and the feds (almost all of them regardless of party) have done their best to hide the reality of the situation because it keeps them in office. Spoil the people today at the expense of the people tomorrow and by the time it has to be dealt with, you'll likely at least be out of office, if not already six feet under.
O'Reilly has dialed back his aggressive style... it first became obvious during the 2008 campaign, especially with his sit down interview with Obama, where he refused to ask the really hard questions. Sure, he threw a couple hard pitches just for his cred, but he did nothing to hold his feet to the fire like he used to do with guests a decade ago, when guests used to storm off set on occasion. He's gone from railing on Jesse Jackson and questions of tax evasion to sitting next to Jackson at dinner parties (about 2:50 in).
O'Reilly has become a part of the establishment. He's had the #1 rated cable news program for, what, 9 or so years now? He's also getting older and has become more focused on his family than on the "no spin" tough guy that he still likes to portray himself as. He's living on past glory with a long, fat contract, secure with the knowledge that Fox isn't going to let him leave for a competitor, especially as long as he stays at #1. People at the top almost always lost the edge that got them there.
As for the rest of Fox News, as a conservative/libertarian/tea party type, I've become increasingly disgusted with it over the years and at this point, I really only tune in for Cavuto, Red Eye, John Stossel and Andrew Napolitano. Fox and Friends has been horrendous since they canned ED Hill and replaced her with Gretchen Carlson - I would have preferred Kiran Chetry. The day time has gone from hard news to soft news and sensationalism and, in particular, I don't like the choice of Jenna Lee replacing Jane Skinner. I've had a grudge against Shepard Smith since the JFK Jr search when he told a viewer off because the viewer said 24/7 coverage, which ignored all of the other news for a guy of, really, little importance, was ridiculous. Beck is quickly turning into the 700 Club, Special Report isn't the same without Brit Hume, Hannity was always pretty meh but without anyone to challenge him he's completely lame, and Greta, well, she's not bad, but I'm generally not interested in her frequently Lifetime feeling show. With the exception of Smith, who is clearly the token liberal meant to prove that Fox doesn't completely lean right, it's clear that the channel has moved on from reporting to pandering for audience.
The sad part, is that MSNBC has followed them over an even bigger cliff on the opposite side (back in the late 90s, they were my news channel of choice, but today they are virtually unwatchable, much for the same reason that Air America was unlistenable - they're all attack with little substance. It's both boring and tiring unless you're a cheerleader and even then, it's inane (see Hannity for those on the right)). CNN is just outright lost. Seriously, Client Number Nine gets his own show and to balance him out, he gets a token conservative woman, with whom he has no chemistry, that no conservative believes is any further to the right than he is, and that's the show that was going to bail CNN out from its morass? Thankfully, I can find a pretty wide variety of news on the internet these days, since all three big cable stations are failing in that respect (informing the populace matters way less than generating eyeballs to bring in revenue).
The original MSNBC clip:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UYKQJ4-N7LI
An interview with the same guy on another local channel:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7syx26QtQIM&NR=1
If you don't find that informative enough, google "msnbc black man assault rifle" for about 16,600 results.
A homeless shelter where they can work for their food, what a novel idea. Most people seem to think that's "slave labor" or "forced labor" something though, as if "forced" labor is necessarily bad (the average American is "forced" to labor, too... otherwise, they lose their job, money, house, food, etc).
The average American is forced to labor to provide for those unwilling or unable to provide for themselves as well. Obviously, those unable to provide for themselves need help, but a non-trivial amount of money goes to support those who have routinely made poor choices and either refuse to help themselves (like my drunk uncle that can't hold a job since it interferes with his whiskey) or find themselves in a situation where they simply can't work (like my aunt with 7 kids that has been on welfare her entire life "can't" work because she has to raise (read neglect) her children).
At the federal level, we're spending roughly $275 billion on Medicaid, $68 billion on housing, $72 bilion on SNAP, and $188 billion on various public assistance programs. That's $603 billion on various social welfare programs (not counting SCHIP, WIC, etc since children fall into the "unable to take care of themselves" category nor unemployment, education, etc since those are supposed to be going to otherwise productive people). That's about $2000 in extra tax for every adult and child in the country and that's just the federal spending, states spend a ton more and some states spend obscenely more. Your average family of 4 could have a significantly better life with an extra $4-8k (hard to pinpoint a number off the top of my head given the progressive income tax system) to invest in their homes, education, medical care, etc.
A lot of people used to like to quote Ben Franklin around here when the last President was in office (they seem to mysteriously have forgotten the quote today)... but Franklin had opinions on a lot of things. He was certainly a charitable man, founding the first public library and hospital in the US, not to mention helping to found a college... but he also wrote:
"I am for doing good to the poor, but I differ in opinion of the means. I think the best way of doing good to the poor, is not making them easy in poverty, but leading or driving them out of it. In my youth I traveled much, and I observed in different countries, that the more public provisions were made for the poor, the less they provided for themselves, and of course became poorer. And, on the contrary, the less was done for them, the more they did for themselves, and became richer."
Indeed, many of the poor in America have become complacent and they have no qualms about existing solely at the expense of the rest of society... stated another way, enslaving society to provide for them, extorting them with threats of theft and violence if society refuses their economic conscription.