We are doomed!
Posted by Storo 7 years, 4 months ago to Government
WE ARE DOOMED!
So a Republican controlled House, Senate and White House cannot find enough votes to repeal Obamacare. Even to pass Obamacare-lite, which I suppose repeals something, but leaves the mandates, taxes, and other aspects in place.
This shows that the many "repeal" votes taken during the Obama Administration were, as we all suspected, show votes by the GOP with no substance.
Sen. Lisa Murkowski said she would not vote for the latest repeal bill because of cuts included in the bill to Medicaid. Therein lies our doom.
If there is ever going to be any fiscal sanity brought to bear in Washington, and if the spending deficits and the National Debt is to ever be tackled, it MUST be by way of reforming entitlements. This would require changing of eligibility requirements, and an overall reduction in the size, scope and cost of these programs. But there is clearly no stomach for this among the Ruling Class in Washington because it would endanger the re-election hopes of anyone who votes to make these cuts. Why? Because 40% of the American people rely on government handouts to make ends meet. 45% are on food stamps. Illegal aliens - 20 Million of them - are allowed access to government benefits, making a bad situation even worse.
Given the lack of any appetite for cutting government spending on social programs, the only alternative path, short of armed revolution, is continuing down the road we are on, with increasing deficits, added trillions to the national debt, and eventual financial collapse. I.E. Doom.
http://mrkt.news/2-charts-show-next-recession-will-blow-us-budget/
So a Republican controlled House, Senate and White House cannot find enough votes to repeal Obamacare. Even to pass Obamacare-lite, which I suppose repeals something, but leaves the mandates, taxes, and other aspects in place.
This shows that the many "repeal" votes taken during the Obama Administration were, as we all suspected, show votes by the GOP with no substance.
Sen. Lisa Murkowski said she would not vote for the latest repeal bill because of cuts included in the bill to Medicaid. Therein lies our doom.
If there is ever going to be any fiscal sanity brought to bear in Washington, and if the spending deficits and the National Debt is to ever be tackled, it MUST be by way of reforming entitlements. This would require changing of eligibility requirements, and an overall reduction in the size, scope and cost of these programs. But there is clearly no stomach for this among the Ruling Class in Washington because it would endanger the re-election hopes of anyone who votes to make these cuts. Why? Because 40% of the American people rely on government handouts to make ends meet. 45% are on food stamps. Illegal aliens - 20 Million of them - are allowed access to government benefits, making a bad situation even worse.
Given the lack of any appetite for cutting government spending on social programs, the only alternative path, short of armed revolution, is continuing down the road we are on, with increasing deficits, added trillions to the national debt, and eventual financial collapse. I.E. Doom.
http://mrkt.news/2-charts-show-next-recession-will-blow-us-budget/
Previous comments...
Here's the one that goes, "Doom, doom doom!"
We're about to make $20 trillion in debt history, y'all. Yay!
And we all got to llive to see it!
Me dino remembers where I was when I heard JFK was assassinated.
Where will you be when you first hear about the Big Bad 20T?
Me dino just loves historical events. Don't you?
Someone gave me the Apollo 13 DVD for Christmas.
And I watched it all the way through one whole time!
Even though it is a pretty good movie . . . for a movie.
http://www.usdebtclock.org/
This situation is no surprise to me. I always expect Republicans spend equally to Democrats, borrow money even faster, and allow gov't to become even more intrusive, and they're doing just that. So I tend to vote Democrat, but the Democrats do not want to reduce gov't and debt, they just want to increase them a little slower-- an unimportant distinction. This is why I hold my Democratic and Republican senators (Baldwin and Johnson) both in equal regard. I actually think they're great people. I know Baldwin. She grew up down the road from me. But they're in a system that accepts a starting point that gov't will be expensive, intrusive, and funded by debt.
The compromises that come out of this system are everyone gets a little spending for themselves. It's ever everyone agreeing to cut spending. Many of the people who are indignant that we cannot stop spending on medicine for the poor would not be willing to dismantle our enormous military or not have a huge chunk of our population incarcerated or under supervision of the criminal justice system for non-violent drug offenses. Just as people who want to go back to the federal social safety net the Founders wanted, supporters of the military industrial complex will say "but people will die!" if you suggest returning to a well-regulated militia with a limited standing army for defense and if we returned to pre-20th century drug laws.
I do not know the solution or how it will play out. My sense is we can keep kicking the can for a long time, more than a century. The empire will decay like Rome, and in the future the US will be a decent place to live just as Rome is today.
John Galt would kick your statist ass out of the Gulch.
It's over. As a buddy of mine used to say - "O-f'ing-ver!"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kdqyG...
I usually think the problem is without Constitutional limits, people naturally vote themselves taxpayer money. Many people consume more calories than they should (I do) or spend more money than they have. Maybe representatives really do reflect us.
I also think politicians exploit "wedge" issues to give people a chance to be nasty in a sanctimonious way at the expense of accepting the business-as-usual bipartisan consensus. For some reason if it were Gary Johnson going up against Bernie Sanders and people were all fired up, I could accept it because they have radically different views. It's discouraging when people are fired up about almost nothing, as if they're pathetically looking for only the thinnest of pretenses to be a jerk, and for some reason they've chosen this. It makes the problem of getting the gov't to respect Constitutional limits seem intractable.
I am not knowledgeable about those people, but my sense is that limited gov't is not the default state for humankind. Even without a specific bad guy, people will expand gov't power and there for various reasons. There has to be a Constitution or some other force to prevent decay toward statism.
" I worry for my 15 year old daughter - in what kind of world are we going to leave her?"
This is an amazingly prosperous time in human history by almost any standard. But we ignore the looming problem of the gov't having so much influence in people's lives. I could see it breaking positively or negatively, which makes me concerned for the future too.
"I search for an actual Gulch."
I feel like people need to break away to some distant place analogous to what the Americas were to Europe. At first they'll be distant and poor. But the isolation and freedom makes them come up with new ideas that make them go from a backwater to the main world power in a few hundred years. I don't know where that is, though, because outer space is impractical, and remote regions like Antarctica aren't remote enough.
I think this is post hoc ergo propter hoc. I don't think a few bad guys are causing gov't cost and intrusiveness to increase. I think it's a natural process of democracy, which is why the Founders tried to create a republic.
Suppose for the moment, though, the cause can be traced backed to a few bad people. What do we do about it? The Constitution needs to make structures robust against bad people when they come along.
First, I agree that we have, in general, a two-name monoparty. But having watched politics for over 50 years it is my view that Democrats have been the party that wants to increase spending as much and as quickly as possible, while Republicans do the same, but a bit slower.
A good example of this is the prescription drug benefit for Medicare passed during the Clinton Administration. Dems put the plan forward, but it got major pushback from Repubs and others, and eventually failed. So the GOP put forth their own plan, slightly less costly by about $40 Billion, but it became a benefit nonetheless.
The second problem I have is that the Founding Fathers never, ever, ever wanted a "social safety net". They believed in liberty, freedom, and personal responsibility. They believed in small - very small - government, limited by the few powers listed in the Constitution, with everything else being under the jurisdiction of the several states. This is why many of us believe that if these social programs ever got a fair hearing before a Supreme Court made up of judges who were strict constructionist Constitutionalists, they would be declared unconstitutional. The document says what it says, with no mention of "social safety net".
I have exactly the opposite view, but it's of little consequence. Democrats did not contain spending when they controlled the gov't in 2009, and Republicans are not doing it now.
The most recent example is President Trump proposing a budget equal to the projected spending levels under President Obama-- no change. The deficit has been going down due to the economic cycle, from $1 trillion (staggering) to $400 billion. President Trump proposes increasing borrowing.
It's all splitting hairs. No one wants to phase in a real significant decrease. Both parties are doing what they need to get elected in a world where a third of GDP is gov't spending. Their constituents turn over a third of their income to the gov't. They have no hope of getting that cut significantly, so they do not lobby for spending cuts. They lobby to get a contract or grant for their business or a new regulation that will be difficult for new entrant competitors to comply with. And so the problem continues. Talking heads make a living by telling people what evil bastards are to blame, and no one fixes the broken system that makes lobbying for gov't monies/intervention an option.
"the prescription drug benefit for Medicare passed during the Clinton Administration."
Wasn't that during W Bush?
"The second problem I have is that the Founding Fathers never, ever, ever wanted a "social safety net". "
This is not an issue with the post you're responding to, which condemned over-spending in general and said "but people will die" can justify any spending or intrusion.
What makes me laugh are the "objectivists" who see your name and AUTOMATICALLY give you a down vote, regardless of what you've written. Somehow, to me, that's not even close to "objective" and more like the crowd with firebrands and pitchforks driving the evil witch from town because of their red hair...
Maybe you should look in a mirror... and decide if you really belong in a place where free speech is allowed...
imo, CG repeatedly states his opinion on GW without evidence to support it, and CG does not reply when asked for the objective evidence. Such an alternate view does not advance rational discussion, imo.
And for me, what I have seen is that when people (in general) are not presented with opposing viewpoints (even if they are found distasteful) they tend to become closed minded. That, to me, is a dangerous slope to start sliding down.
OF course, this is just my 2ยข... based on a small sample of this thread, and the trends I noticed upon it.