Pay off our debt

[The Rabbi]

A cynic is a man who knows the price of everything but the value of nothing.
Oscar Wilde

Every other major industrialized country has three distinctions.

1) Health care that cost less than HALF per capita than America.

2) Better outcomes, lower infant mortality rates, and lower adult mortality rates.

3) There is one factor common to the top 15 industrialized countries. They all have strong state funding of single-payer universal health care, instead of insurance based health care tied to employment. The bottom four countries – Germany, USA, Portugal and Switzerland – all depend more heavily on profit-based, private health insurance provided primarily through the employer/employee relationship.

American life expectancy at birth ranks 30th in the world. We remain 30th for the rest of our lives -- until we reach 65. Then, our rank rises until we reach 14th at 80. We can thank the remarkable access to health care provided by Medicare.

All those countries also share something else: Exploding health care costs that are bankrupting the state. I dont think we really want to emulate that.

America is the land of exploding health care costs that are bankrupting the state.

Irrelevant.

 

[flacaltenn]

The only reason there's a diff in costs of Medicare/Medicaid against Private Insurance in your wonderfully colorful graphs is that doctors and medical facilities are transferring costs to those covered by private insurance from the poorly reimbursed govt services.

Right now -- those providers are waiting for any excuse to shut off services to those Govt patients. Like the massive cuts in reimbursements contemplated by the Obama Admin to pay for MORE "Universal" insurance and healthcare.

NONE -- of those factoids EVER considers the actual costs of those programs. Like the cost of collecting and processing MEDICARE premiums which is borne LARGELY by the private sector. Or even the costs to PROVIDERS of submitting, arguing and RE-SUBMIT claims for their pitiful allowances. Those studies are not based on per incident of illness, but favor the elderly who have many more billings per incident of illness than the general population..

NO ONE wants to trust this govt --- the one that STOLE Soc Sec surpluses from workers for 30 years and now wants us to PAY AGAIN with DOUBLE INTEREST for their theft. They can't be trusted to run an elementary school bake sale.. Good luck with selling MORE Universal Anything when your most cherished Universal SS program gets turned into just another wealth transfer and redistribution scheme.. That's the leftist mantra isn't it? When they are backed into a corner and they have to admit that it is BANKRUPT TODAY? That just raising the income caps for "the rich" is all that is required to fix it?

No need to respond.. Everyone SHOULD know how corrupt and incapable Wash.DC. is by now. And I don't want time on FDR or the 30's or Reagan or ANY OTHER of the mystical histories that you are consumed by..

A cynic is a man who knows the price of everything but the value of nothing.
Oscar Wilde

Every other major industrialized country has three distinctions.

1) Health care that cost less than HALF per capita than America.

2) Better outcomes, lower infant mortality rates, and lower adult mortality rates.

3) There is one factor common to the top 15 industrialized countries. They all have strong state funding of single-payer universal health care, instead of insurance based health care tied to employment. The bottom four countries – Germany, USA, Portugal and Switzerland – all depend more heavily on profit-based, private health insurance provided primarily through the employer/employee relationship.

American life expectancy at birth ranks 30th in the world. We remain 30th for the rest of our lives -- until we reach 65. Then, our rank rises until we reach 14th at 80. We can thank the remarkable access to health care provided by Medicare.

Patients who NEED services are more interested in ACCESSIBILTY, ACCESS and APPROVAL than they are concerned about outcome or adding a cost burden to society..

We do transplants that the rest of your CIVILIZED world wouldn't touch. Same with joint replacements and other advanced surgical techniques. In those cases, you shouldn't be bragging about "outcomes" should you?

Medicare rules KILLED my father.. You are not gonna make me a fan. Medicare also declared my father DEAD before they killed him.. That only took me a Congressman and 4 months to fix.. Just because some nutbag data entry person put in a 21 instead of a 12.

Hope you need to beg and plead with a CongressCritter to get a rehearing on paperwork screw-up...

 

[Rozman]

The national debt did not cause this feeble economy.

The obsession about it is a GOP smokescreen for the real problems.

Which is, incidently, the GOP itself.

Do you have any idea how much money needs to be spent just on the interest payments
alone?

It's billions of dollars....
It's money we don't have.

Do you think that's not a problem?

We better take care of this while we still have some control over the situation.

 

[Bfgrn]

The only reason there's a diff in costs of Medicare/Medicaid against Private Insurance in your wonderfully colorful graphs is that doctors and medical facilities are transferring costs to those covered by private insurance from the poorly reimbursed govt services.

Right now -- those providers are waiting for any excuse to shut off services to those Govt patients. Like the massive cuts in reimbursements contemplated by the Obama Admin to pay for MORE "Universal" insurance and healthcare.

NONE -- of those factoids EVER considers the actual costs of those programs. Like the cost of collecting and processing MEDICARE premiums which is borne LARGELY by the private sector. Or even the costs to PROVIDERS of submitting, arguing and RE-SUBMIT claims for their pitiful allowances. Those studies are not based on per incident of illness, but favor the elderly who have many more billings per incident of illness than the general population..

NO ONE wants to trust this govt --- the one that STOLE Soc Sec surpluses from workers for 30 years and now wants us to PAY AGAIN with DOUBLE INTEREST for their theft. They can't be trusted to run an elementary school bake sale.. Good luck with selling MORE Universal Anything when your most cherished Universal SS program gets turned into just another wealth transfer and redistribution scheme.. That's the leftist mantra isn't it? When they are backed into a corner and they have to admit that it is BANKRUPT TODAY? That just raising the income caps for "the rich" is all that is required to fix it?

No need to respond.. Everyone SHOULD know how corrupt and incapable Wash.DC. is by now. And I don't want time on FDR or the 30's or Reagan or ANY OTHER of the mystical histories that you are consumed by..

A cynic is a man who knows the price of everything but the value of nothing.
Oscar Wilde

Every other major industrialized country has three distinctions.

1) Health care that cost less than HALF per capita than America.

2) Better outcomes, lower infant mortality rates, and lower adult mortality rates.

3) There is one factor common to the top 15 industrialized countries. They all have strong state funding of single-payer universal health care, instead of insurance based health care tied to employment. The bottom four countries – Germany, USA, Portugal and Switzerland – all depend more heavily on profit-based, private health insurance provided primarily through the employer/employee relationship.

American life expectancy at birth ranks 30th in the world. We remain 30th for the rest of our lives -- until we reach 65. Then, our rank rises until we reach 14th at 80. We can thank the remarkable access to health care provided by Medicare.

Patients who NEED services are more interested in ACCESSIBILTY, ACCESS and APPROVAL than they are concerned about outcome or adding a cost burden to society..

We do transplants that the rest of your CIVILIZED world wouldn't touch. Same with joint replacements and other advanced surgical techniques. In those cases, you shouldn't be bragging about "outcomes" should you?

Medicare rules KILLED my father.. You are not gonna make me a fan. Medicare also declared my father DEAD before they killed him.. That only took me a Congressman and 4 months to fix.. Just because some nutbag data entry person put in a 21 instead of a 12.

Hope you need to beg and plead with a CongressCritter to get a rehearing on paperwork screw-up...

Medicare saved my Grandfather's life and if he didn't have Medicare he would have lost his house and everything he and my Grandmother saved.

And of course, none of that happens in the private sector...

Surgery mix-ups surprisingly common

(Health.com) -- Unthinkable errors by doctors and surgeons -- such as amputating the wrong leg or removing organs from the wrong patient -- occur more frequently than previously believed, a new study suggests.

Over a period of 6.5 years, doctors in Colorado alone operated on the wrong patient at least 25 times and on the wrong part of the body in another 107 patients, according to the study, which appears in the Archives of Surgery.

 

[Kevin_Kennedy]

Here's an idea, let's have a telethon to help pay off our debt. People can volunteer to pay extra, if they can afford it. Once it paid off, everyone currently in office should be fired and not allowed to come back. All new people should be elected with the stipulation that they must balance the budget, any debts from here on out are their responsibility. It's not their money, it's ours.

If I had $16 trillion just laying around under no circumstances would I offer to pay off the federal government's debt, and nor would I donate any amount of money to pay it down. Even if this plan worked and you voted everybody out you'd still reelect more people who are going to continue to spend more, so it would end up being useless. Also, I didn't run up the debt, so why should I pay it off? The only option is default. It's the only practical option, and it's the only moral option.

 

[Bfgrn]

Here's an idea, let's have a telethon to help pay off our debt. People can volunteer to pay extra, if they can afford it. Once it paid off, everyone currently in office should be fired and not allowed to come back. All new people should be elected with the stipulation that they must balance the budget, any debts from here on out are their responsibility. It's not their money, it's ours.

If I had $16 trillion just laying around under no circumstances would I offer to pay off the federal government's debt, and nor would I donate any amount of money to pay it down. Even if this plan worked and you voted everybody out you'd still reelect more people who are going to continue to spend more, so it would end up being useless. Also, I didn't run up the debt, so why should I pay it off? The only option is default. It's the only practical option, and it's the only moral option.

Default? Even though the level of our national debt in relation to GDP is only a bit over half of what it was in 1946? And the debt held by the public is below where it was in the mid-1950s, and comparable to the early 1990s?....moral????

 

[Intense]

I put a lot into living within One's means. That goes for Government too. Things are tough enough for most of us. Better to keep the interest minimal.

 

[flacaltenn]

A cynic is a man who knows the price of everything but the value of nothing.
Oscar Wilde

Every other major industrialized country has three distinctions.

1) Health care that cost less than HALF per capita than America.

2) Better outcomes, lower infant mortality rates, and lower adult mortality rates.

3) There is one factor common to the top 15 industrialized countries. They all have strong state funding of single-payer universal health care, instead of insurance based health care tied to employment. The bottom four countries – Germany, USA, Portugal and Switzerland – all depend more heavily on profit-based, private health insurance provided primarily through the employer/employee relationship.

American life expectancy at birth ranks 30th in the world. We remain 30th for the rest of our lives -- until we reach 65. Then, our rank rises until we reach 14th at 80. We can thank the remarkable access to health care provided by Medicare.

Patients who NEED services are more interested in ACCESSIBILTY, ACCESS and APPROVAL than they are concerned about outcome or adding a cost burden to society..

We do transplants that the rest of your CIVILIZED world wouldn't touch. Same with joint replacements and other advanced surgical techniques. In those cases, you shouldn't be bragging about "outcomes" should you?

Medicare rules KILLED my father.. You are not gonna make me a fan. Medicare also declared my father DEAD before they killed him.. That only took me a Congressman and 4 months to fix.. Just because some nutbag data entry person put in a 21 instead of a 12.

Hope you need to beg and plead with a CongressCritter to get a rehearing on paperwork screw-up...

Medicare saved my Grandfather's life and if he didn't have Medicare he would have lost his house and everything he and my Grandmother saved.

And of course, none of that happens in the private sector...

Surgery mix-ups surprisingly common

(Health.com) -- Unthinkable errors by doctors and surgeons -- such as amputating the wrong leg or removing organs from the wrong patient -- occur more frequently than previously believed, a new study suggests.

Over a period of 6.5 years, doctors in Colorado alone operated on the wrong patient at least 25 times and on the wrong part of the body in another 107 patients, according to the study, which appears in the Archives of Surgery.

There you go jumping to conclusions and posting graffiti.. Had nothing to do with medical screw-ups and EVERYTHING to do with the trap of becoming dependent on ONE payer in a medical setting.

There was simple procedure required for which Medicare only reimbursed for local anesthesia. The doctor didn't believe my Dad would cooperate for the procedure which could be very uncomfortable. At that point -- I had full Medical Directive power and requested that the Doc put him fully under for the procedure. Doc says Medicare won't allow it. I said I'D PAY FOR IT -- he says -- Medicare doesn't allow private payment on a procedure already defined and covered.... Essentially -- do it the Medicare way or it doesn't happen.. EVEN IF -- I cover the diff in cost..

Procedure never happened. 3 weeks later my dad went into kidney failure due to these rules and it was all downhill from there.

Such is a system with NO FLEXIBILITY, TOO MANY hard rules, and too many people between the doctors and the patients and the family...

Can't imagine I'm the only one who's seen the idiocy of TYRANNICAL rules in Medicare up close and personal. And the doctors who have their payments held up for more than year whilst some bureaucracy second guesses whether it was "beneficial to the patient" are more familiar with the tyranny of faceless "single payers"...

 

[Bfgrn]

I put a lot into living within One's means. That goes for Government too. Things are tough enough for most of us. Better to keep the interest minimal.

Mere parsimony is not economy. Expense, and great expense, may be an essential part in true economy.
Edmund Burke

We can all agree that we need to change the trajectory of the debt. But not at the expense of fellow Americans.

And...

The Federal Budget is NOT like a Household Budget: Here’s Why

Whenever a demagogue wants to whip up hysteria about federal budget deficits, he or she invariably begins with an analogy to a household’s budget: “No household can continually spend more than its income, and neither can the federal government”. On the surface that, might appear sensible; dig deeper and it makes no sense at all. A sovereign government bears no obvious resemblance to a household. Let us enumerate some relevant differences.

1. The US federal government is 221 years old, if we date its birth to the adoption of the Constitution. Arguably, that is about as good a date as we can find, since the Constitution established a common market in the US, forbade states from interfering with interstate trade (for example, through taxation), gave to the federal government the power to levy and collect taxes, and reserved for the federal government the power to create money, to regulate its value, and to fix standards of weight and measurement-from whence our money of account, the dollar, comes. I don’t know any head of household with such an apparently indefinitely long lifespan. This might appear irrelevant, but it is not. When you die, your debts and assets need to be assumed and resolved. There is no “day of reckoning”, no final piper-paying date for the sovereign government. Nor do I know any household with the power to levy taxes, to give a name to — and issue — the currency we use, and to demand that those taxes are paid in the currency it issues.

2. With one brief exception, the federal government has been in debt every year since 1776. In January 1835, for the first and only time in U.S. history, the public debt was retired...

more

 

[flacaltenn]

Here's an idea, let's have a telethon to help pay off our debt. People can volunteer to pay extra, if they can afford it. Once it paid off, everyone currently in office should be fired and not allowed to come back. All new people should be elected with the stipulation that they must balance the budget, any debts from here on out are their responsibility. It's not their money, it's ours.

If I had $16 trillion just laying around under no circumstances would I offer to pay off the federal government's debt, and nor would I donate any amount of money to pay it down. Even if this plan worked and you voted everybody out you'd still reelect more people who are going to continue to spend more, so it would end up being useless. Also, I didn't run up the debt, so why should I pay it off? The only option is default. It's the only practical option, and it's the only moral option.

Default? Even though the level of our national debt in relation to GDP is only a bit over half of what it was in 1946? And the debt held by the public is below where it was in the mid-1950s, and comparable to the early 1990s?....moral????

I wouldn't mind an entertaining way to raise money to help neutralize the debt. Afterall, that's what State Lotteries already do. They are huge fundraisers for Govt. And the more creatively it is designed -- the more folks would be informed and involved in the process.

I'd stick with the GOP insistence to show some FISCAL responsibility BEFORE we ask for further sacrifice from the public tho.. I don't think the public has much stomach for watching the debt climb whilst they are shoveling THEIR OWN bucks in -- to try and keep it in check..

Doesn't HAVE TO cover the whole amount.. I think there's a valid public outreach concept here to get citizens enlisted in doing their proper oversight duties..

 

[Kevin_Kennedy]

Here's an idea, let's have a telethon to help pay off our debt. People can volunteer to pay extra, if they can afford it. Once it paid off, everyone currently in office should be fired and not allowed to come back. All new people should be elected with the stipulation that they must balance the budget, any debts from here on out are their responsibility. It's not their money, it's ours.

If I had $16 trillion just laying around under no circumstances would I offer to pay off the federal government's debt, and nor would I donate any amount of money to pay it down. Even if this plan worked and you voted everybody out you'd still reelect more people who are going to continue to spend more, so it would end up being useless. Also, I didn't run up the debt, so why should I pay it off? The only option is default. It's the only practical option, and it's the only moral option.

Default? Even though the level of our national debt in relation to GDP is only a bit over half of what it was in 1946? And the debt held by the public is below where it was in the mid-1950s, and comparable to the early 1990s?....moral????

Debt to GDP is a completely arbitrary figure, especially when GDP goes up when government spends. Yes, moral. I didn't create the debt, therefore it is immoral to take from me to pay the debt down.

The public debt transaction, then, is very different from private debt. Instead of a low-time-preference creditor exchanging money for an IOU from a high-time-preference debtor, the government now receives money from creditors, both parties realizing that the money will be paid back not out of the pockets or the hides of the politicians and bureaucrats, but out of the looted wallets and purses of the hapless taxpayers, the subjects of the state. The government gets the money by tax-coercion; and the public creditors, far from being innocents, know full well that their proceeds will come out of that selfsame coercion. In short, public creditors are willing to hand over money to the government now in order to receive a share of tax loot in the future. This is the opposite of a free market, or a genuinely voluntary transaction. Both parties are immorally contracting to participate in the violation of the property rights of citizens in the future. Both parties, therefore, are making agreements about other people's property, and both deserve the back of our hand. The public credit transaction is not a genuine contract that need be considered sacrosanct, any more than robbers parceling out their shares of loot in advance should be treated as some sort of sanctified contract...

Deficits and a mounting debt, therefore, are a growing and intolerable burden on the society and economy, both because they raise the tax burden and increasingly drain resources from the productive to the parasitic, counterproductive, "public" sector. Moreover, whenever deficits are financed by expanding bank credit — in other words, by creating new money — matters become still worse, since credit inflation creates permanent and rising price inflation as well as waves of boom-bust "business cycles."...

Unfortunately, paying off a national debt that will soon reach $4 trillion would quickly bankrupt the entire country. Think about the consequences of imposing new taxes of $4 trillion in the United States next year! Another way, and almost as devastating, a way to pay off the public debt would be to print $4 trillion of new money — either in paper dollars or by creating new bank credit. This method would be extraordinarily inflationary, and prices would quickly skyrocket, ruining all groups whose earnings did not increase to the same extent, and destroying the value of the dollar...

I propose, then, a seemingly drastic but actually far less destructive way of paying off the public debt at a single blow: outright debt repudiation. Consider this question: why should the poor, battered citizens of Russia or Poland or the other ex-Communist countries be bound by the debts contracted by their former Communist masters? In the Communist situation, the injustice is clear: that citizens struggling for freedom and for a free-market economy should be taxed to pay for debts contracted by the monstrous former ruling class. But this injustice only differs by degree from "normal" public debt. For, conversely, why should the Communist government of the Soviet Union have been bound by debts contracted by the Czarist government they hated and overthrew? And why should we, struggling American citizens of today, be bound by debts created by a past ruling elite who contracted these debts at our expense? One of the cogent arguments against paying blacks "reparations" for past slavery is that we, the living, were not slaveholders. Similarly, we the living did not contract for either the past or the present debts incurred by the politicians and bureaucrats in Washington...

Apart from the moral, or sanctity-of-contract argument against repudiation that we have already discussed, the standard economic argument is that such repudiation is disastrous, because who, in his right mind, would lend again to a repudiating government? But the effective counterargument has rarely been considered: why should more private capital be poured down government rat holes? It is precisely the drying up of future public credit that constitutes one of the main arguments for repudiation, for it means beneficially drying up a major channel for the wasteful destruction of the savings of the public. What we want is abundant savings and investment in private enterprises, and a lean, austere, low-budget, minimal government. The people and the economy can only wax fat and prosperous when their government is starved and puny.

Repudiating the National Debt - Murray N. Rothbard - Mises Daily

 

[flacaltenn]

I put a lot into living within One's means. That goes for Government too. Things are tough enough for most of us. Better to keep the interest minimal.

Mere parsimony is not economy. Expense, and great expense, may be an essential part in true economy.
Edmund Burke

We can all agree that we need to change the trajectory of the debt. But not at the expense of fellow Americans.

And...

The Federal Budget is NOT like a Household Budget: Here’s Why

Whenever a demagogue wants to whip up hysteria about federal budget deficits, he or she invariably begins with an analogy to a household’s budget: “No household can continually spend more than its income, and neither can the federal government”. On the surface that, might appear sensible; dig deeper and it makes no sense at all. A sovereign government bears no obvious resemblance to a household. Let us enumerate some relevant differences.

1. The US federal government is 221 years old, if we date its birth to the adoption of the Constitution. Arguably, that is about as good a date as we can find, since the Constitution established a common market in the US, forbade states from interfering with interstate trade (for example, through taxation), gave to the federal government the power to levy and collect taxes, and reserved for the federal government the power to create money, to regulate its value, and to fix standards of weight and measurement-from whence our money of account, the dollar, comes. I don’t know any head of household with such an apparently indefinitely long lifespan. This might appear irrelevant, but it is not. When you die, your debts and assets need to be assumed and resolved. There is no “day of reckoning”, no final piper-paying date for the sovereign government. Nor do I know any household with the power to levy taxes, to give a name to — and issue — the currency we use, and to demand that those taxes are paid in the currency it issues.

2. With one brief exception, the federal government has been in debt every year since 1776. In January 1835, for the first and only time in U.S. history, the public debt was retired...

more

"No day of reckoning" for an ETERNAL Sovereign government? Tell that to the Greeks and the Spaniards.

 

[FA_Q2]

Here's an idea, let's have a telethon to help pay off our debt. People can volunteer to pay extra, if they can afford it. Once it paid off, everyone currently in office should be fired and not allowed to come back. All new people should be elected with the stipulation that they must balance the budget, any debts from here on out are their responsibility. It's not their money, it's ours.

If I had $16 trillion just laying around under no circumstances would I offer to pay off the federal government's debt, and nor would I donate any amount of money to pay it down. Even if this plan worked and you voted everybody out you'd still reelect more people who are going to continue to spend more, so it would end up being useless. Also, I didn't run up the debt, so why should I pay it off? The only option is default. It's the only practical option, and it's the only moral option.

Default is neither a practical or moral. It is the exact opposite in fact. When you promise to do something, you do it. Our nation made a promise to pay those funds back in the future and it needs to follow through with that promise. It surprises me that you seem to think lying and cheating those out of what was promised them is ‘moral.’ There is simply no way to construe that.

Further, you seem to have no idea exactly how damaging such an actions would be. Our word as a nation would become worthless. Others would refuse to deal with us and millions of Americans wealth would be impacted as significant portions of that debt is held by private AMERICAN citizens. No, default is ASININE to say the least and a dangerous road to go down.

 

[Kevin_Kennedy]

Here's an idea, let's have a telethon to help pay off our debt. People can volunteer to pay extra, if they can afford it. Once it paid off, everyone currently in office should be fired and not allowed to come back. All new people should be elected with the stipulation that they must balance the budget, any debts from here on out are their responsibility. It's not their money, it's ours.

If I had $16 trillion just laying around under no circumstances would I offer to pay off the federal government's debt, and nor would I donate any amount of money to pay it down. Even if this plan worked and you voted everybody out you'd still reelect more people who are going to continue to spend more, so it would end up being useless. Also, I didn't run up the debt, so why should I pay it off? The only option is default. It's the only practical option, and it's the only moral option.

Default is neither a practical or moral. It is the exact opposite in fact. When you promise to do something, you do it. Our nation made a promise to pay those funds back in the future and it needs to follow through with that promise. It surprises me that you seem to think lying and cheating those out of what was promised them is ‘moral.’ There is simply no way to construe that.

Further, you seem to have no idea exactly how damaging such an actions would be. Our word as a nation would become worthless. Others would refuse to deal with us and millions of Americans wealth would be impacted as significant portions of that debt is held by private AMERICAN citizens. No, default is ASININE to say the least and a dangerous road to go down.

Default is inevitable, for starters. There's no way $16 trillion will ever be paid off. So yes, one way or another the U.S. government will default. This being the case, sooner rather than later is obviously the moral position to take. The longer it takes the worse it will be.

I'll also refer you to a post I already made in defense of this position as well.

http://www.usmessageboard.com/5924560-post51.html

 

[FA_Q2]

If I had $16 trillion just laying around under no circumstances would I offer to pay off the federal government's debt, and nor would I donate any amount of money to pay it down. Even if this plan worked and you voted everybody out you'd still reelect more people who are going to continue to spend more, so it would end up being useless. Also, I didn't run up the debt, so why should I pay it off? The only option is default. It's the only practical option, and it's the only moral option.

Default is neither a practical or moral. It is the exact opposite in fact. When you promise to do something, you do it. Our nation made a promise to pay those funds back in the future and it needs to follow through with that promise. It surprises me that you seem to think lying and cheating those out of what was promised them is ‘moral.’ There is simply no way to construe that.

Further, you seem to have no idea exactly how damaging such an actions would be. Our word as a nation would become worthless. Others would refuse to deal with us and millions of Americans wealth would be impacted as significant portions of that debt is held by private AMERICAN citizens. No, default is ASININE to say the least and a dangerous road to go down.

Default is inevitable, for starters. There's no way $16 trillion will ever be paid off. So yes, one way or another the U.S. government will default. This being the case, sooner rather than later is obviously the moral position to take. The longer it takes the worse it will be.

I'll also refer you to a post I already made in defense of this position as well.

http://www.usmessageboard.com/5924560-post51.html

You didn’t defend your position, you linked to someone else doing it. That is not defending. That is saying ‘see look, someone else says that’s a good idea.’

Further, your ‘cite’ fails to deal with the problem of locally held debt and makes asinine claims like it is impossible to pay down the debt. Of course it is possible. Hell, it’s not like it needs to be paid off now. We can take 100 years to pay it off, as long as it’s going in the right direction. See, the debt is not the problem, the deficit is. The deficit would not be a problem if the debt was not already there. That is the single largest reason that we need to get the debt under control anyway. The government needs to spend more money than it takes in during some periods of economic or military hardships. With a debt as large as ours is now, there is little room left to borrow.

 

[Kevin_Kennedy]

Default is neither a practical or moral. It is the exact opposite in fact. When you promise to do something, you do it. Our nation made a promise to pay those funds back in the future and it needs to follow through with that promise. It surprises me that you seem to think lying and cheating those out of what was promised them is ‘moral.’ There is simply no way to construe that.

Further, you seem to have no idea exactly how damaging such an actions would be. Our word as a nation would become worthless. Others would refuse to deal with us and millions of Americans wealth would be impacted as significant portions of that debt is held by private AMERICAN citizens. No, default is ASININE to say the least and a dangerous road to go down.

Default is inevitable, for starters. There's no way $16 trillion will ever be paid off. So yes, one way or another the U.S. government will default. This being the case, sooner rather than later is obviously the moral position to take. The longer it takes the worse it will be.

I'll also refer you to a post I already made in defense of this position as well.

http://www.usmessageboard.com/5924560-post51.html

You didn’t defend your position, you linked to someone else doing it. That is not defending. That is saying ‘see look, someone else says that’s a good idea.’

Further, your ‘cite’ fails to deal with the problem of locally held debt and makes asinine claims like it is impossible to pay down the debt. Of course it is possible. Hell, it’s not like it needs to be paid off now. We can take 100 years to pay it off, as long as it’s going in the right direction. See, the debt is not the problem, the deficit is. The deficit would not be a problem if the debt was not already there. That is the single largest reason that we need to get the debt under control anyway. The government needs to spend more money than it takes in during some periods of economic or military hardships. With a debt as large as ours is now, there is little room left to borrow.

I linked to Rothbard's piece to flesh out my own position. Nobody is coming up with any original economic thoughts here, I believe somebody said we're all slaves to some defunct economist.

Regardless, how do you propose we pay off this debt? Clearly we'd have to cut our military spending drastically, along with all of our social welfare programs as well. Only then could we even begin to make a dent. There's absolutely zero political incentive for that to happen, thus it will not happen until it's too late. I'd love to hear your theories, however.

 

[FA_Q2]

Default is inevitable, for starters. There's no way $16 trillion will ever be paid off. So yes, one way or another the U.S. government will default. This being the case, sooner rather than later is obviously the moral position to take. The longer it takes the worse it will be.

I'll also refer you to a post I already made in defense of this position as well.

http://www.usmessageboard.com/5924560-post51.html

You didn’t defend your position, you linked to someone else doing it. That is not defending. That is saying ‘see look, someone else says that’s a good idea.’

Further, your ‘cite’ fails to deal with the problem of locally held debt and makes asinine claims like it is impossible to pay down the debt. Of course it is possible. Hell, it’s not like it needs to be paid off now. We can take 100 years to pay it off, as long as it’s going in the right direction. See, the debt is not the problem, the deficit is. The deficit would not be a problem if the debt was not already there. That is the single largest reason that we need to get the debt under control anyway. The government needs to spend more money than it takes in during some periods of economic or military hardships. With a debt as large as ours is now, there is little room left to borrow.

I linked to Rothbard's piece to flesh out my own position. Nobody is coming up with any original economic thoughts here, I believe somebody said we're all slaves to some defunct economist.

Regardless, how do you propose we pay off this debt? Clearly we'd have to cut our military spending drastically, along with all of our social welfare programs as well. Only then could we even begin to make a dent. There's absolutely zero political incentive for that to happen, thus it will not happen until it's too late. I'd love to hear your theories, however.

You summarized it rather well. I would:

1 - Pull almost all out international forces back and close most bases leaving a single base in Germany, Italy and Japan. Current standing forces at those locations would be cut to a minimum (we are talking hundreds here instead of the current tens of thousands that are at each location not counting the hundreds of other bases overseas).

2 - Make other DoD cuts to include reworking the entire contracting process

3 - Rework the corporate tax structure, essentially eliminating corporate taxes but also eliminating corporate welfare projects. ZERO federal funds would go to private companies unless the government was purchasing something directly from them.

4 - Bump the age requirements for both SS and Meicare in addition to much needed reform in those programs. I would like to see a private option for SS with limited control.

5 - Drastically reduce the DOE and return most of that back to the states. What is the federal government getting involved in that for anyway.

6 - Welfare, food stamps etc. all need reform. For starters, they need to be combined and administered as a single program and should be run much close to the way WIC is handled. The more local we can get the administration, the better. Ideally, the federal part of those programs would disappear entirely so the state can set up their own programs. Such would need to be phased in unilaterally though.

7 - Eliminate ALL tax credits. That is not what taxes are for.

8 - Eliminate most tax write offs and essentially simplify the tax code to a tiered flat tax. Here is where the ‘rich’ might see some tax raises.

9 - Tax raises are inevitable. That needs to be looked at AFTER spending is reigned in.

10 - Do away with ‘free’ trade with countries who are not trading with us on equal grounds. Such trading partners would be subject to import taxes.

11 - Eliminate redundant federal bureaucracies and unnecessary ones altogether. There is a lot that the federal government creates bureaucracies for that are totally unnecessary.

12 - drastically reduce the regulations on businesses. We need to get back to simply protecting the customers and leaving the rest up to the people. This ties in closely with 11.

Well that’s a start. Just off the top of my head. There is a lot more that we need to do but all of this would take time and a voting populous that actually cared. Unfortunately, we are missing that part. The most important one.

 

[The Rabbi]

If the economy grew at historical averages and we were able to rein in spending we wouldn't be having this discussion.

 

[OohPooPahDoo]

Here's an idea, let's have a telethon to help pay off our debt. People can volunteer to pay extra, if they can afford it. Once it paid off, everyone currently in office should be fired and not allowed to come back. All new people should be elected with the stipulation that they must balance the budget, any debts from here on out are their responsibility. It's not their money, it's ours.

Cool story, bro.

 

[Bfgrn]

If the economy grew at historical averages and we were able to rein in spending we wouldn't be having this discussion.

We already have the perfect model...