Budget talks: This is getting nasty

Honestly, I have no idea. The principles of running of a small business are not a useful tool for anything relating to the public responsibility of federal government. Not at all.

 

In most cases, I would argue it does not remotely. A local sub shop can fail. People can say they don't want it and know they don't need it.

Government can't. When we talk about fiscal realities, that's the reality. If a town closes all its pools because it has no money, the local government must weigh the value of pools as recreation vs. upkeeping parks, and the value of that vs. an extra police officer in a certain neighborhood while considering the cost of his pension vs. the value of eliminating his bargaining rights, etc.

 

That's a funny thing to say by someone who has caused more threads to be locked than anyone else on this board.

 

This won't end well. (And honestly, I could have predicted that 33 pages ago.)

 

I crossed party lines to vote for Obama. I want him to succeed. But damn if he isn't the black Jimmy Carter.

 

LOOK AT ME!

 

Right on Carlton ....

 

I disagree. Either is destined to end up in ruins if expenses constantly exceed income. It's rather simple, actually.

 

Once again, no. The government can run a deficit indefinitely, because a government prints its own money and controls the money supply. It wouldn't be a good thing for the government to do so, because the value of the money would decline according to the excess amount needed, but it could do so quite easily and many have. The U.S. has consistently run deficits for 70 years, and it hasn't been a problem of much consequence, because the deficits were relatively small as a percentage of the economy. They are big now because of the Second Depression and because of 30 years of heedless tax cutting.
The choice is simple. We can abandon the elderly and poor to misery or we can raise taxes. We are choosing Door A, and my children, and those of you their age, will come to my age in a society where you will dread your 60th birthday as akin to a death sentence.

 

BO can be a remarkably-bad negotiator, no two ways about it.

 

This is always why I'm deeply, deeply suspicious of cries for "reform" in this area. Don't we have more pressing concerns coming up in the next 25 years? Like the end of relatively cheap oil? Or feeding the unimaginably huge world population in a decade's time?

If we got rid of social security and those funds went into the stock market, well, a lot of people are going to be fabulously rich.