I feel the Bern!

[Ham]

"Free college" and "free healthcare". Both are combinations of goods and services that cost real money to produce, but some feel that they are basic rights that they are entitled too. I would think that access to good healthcare and access to a good education are opportunities that state and federal governments should work to ensure, but someone is going to have to pay those costs. So it's really "free to me" and paid for by someone else.

Can you image how lazy some students would be if college was free? 4 years to screw off, get drunk, and chase girls. A lot of people behave that way now.  I'm in the middle of paying for my second child to go to college. I am VERY aware of the costs. I wish that the cost of college wasn't increasing much faster than other goods/services. Maybe the college professors and admistrators should take a big paycut. How about "free" textbooks? Or free digital versions of them? 

[mjk86]

16 hours ago, Jerry Rapp said:

how many senate votes has Trump missed?  Bernie is a communist mjk86. You will learn in due time.

Ill hedge my bets.

15 hours ago, Al Agnew said:

The federal debt is a huge political football, but I'd bet that very few people really understand it.  I know I didn't.  So I did a bit of research...typed in "national debt" in Google.  Website I got the most from was justfacts.com.  Here's some stuff that jumped out at me:

Federal debt was $18.8 trillion as of the end of 2015.  That's 104% of the annual gross domestic product.  539% of annual government revenue.  $58,361 for every person living in the U.S.

Sounds horrific, doesn't it?

So, one big question I had was, who do we owe all this money to?

$13.1 trillion is owed to non-federal entities (the publicly held debt).  $5.1 trillion is intragovernmental debt.  What the heck is all that?

Here's somewhat of a breakdown of the publicly held debt.  

Foreign and international entities (example is what we owe China that scares us so much):  $6.156 trillion.  Of this, China and Japan are our two biggest creditors by far, owning a little over $1.2 trillion each of our debt, or a bit over 20% each of the total foreign debt.  Nobody else comes close, including all the oil exporters we owe money to, which comes to a total of $293 billion.

Federal Reserve:  $2.46 trillion.  This is how much more money we've printed than what we have the backing for, I believe.

Nothing else comes close.  The rest of the publicly held debt is to entities like mutual funds, state and local governments, banks, and private pension funds.  

Here's a breakdown of the intragovernmental debt, which includes one biggie:  

Social Security trust fund:  $2.838 trillion.  The biggie.

Civil Service Retirement and Disability:  $740 billion.  

Military Retirement:  $532 billion.

Nothing else comes close, and the rest includes Medicare and the rest of the all federal employee retirement plans.

Now...how does this level of debt stack up to historic levels?  Well, we've owed people money since the country was founded, except for a few years in the 1830s.  You measure the true debt by what percentage it is of the Gross Domestic Product.  From 1790 to the beginning of WWII, debt ran anywhere from 5-40% of GDP.  But in WWII, it shot up to its highest level ever, about 118% of GDP.  After the war, thanks to the booming economy that economists say was partially caused by all that government spending during the war, it steadily dropped to lows of just over 30% from 1975 to 1982.  Note that time period...much of it was during the supposedly tax and spend Democratic administration of Jimmy Carter.  Then starting in 1982, it shot up to a high of about 65% during the Reagan administration and leveled off during the first of the Clinton administration, up to about 1994.  Then  iit dropped a bit to about 55% by the end of Clinton and first year of Bush...and then 9/11 and the Bush tax cuts happened, and it began to rise again.  It has definitely shot up faster, however, during the Obama administration, and now stands at that 104%.

Now, what are the causes?  Conventional wisdom is that it is simply spending more than you take in.  But it isn't quite that simple.  If you measure federal expenditures, as well as receipts, as a percentage of the GDP, then there have been a number of time periods in which the government has spent relatively more compared to what it took in than what's happening now.  During WWII, receipts were about 17-18% of GDP while expenditures were a whopping 32-33%.  During much of the Reagan administration, receipts were 17-18% and expenditures 22-24%.  During the first part of the Obama administration, due in significant part to stimulus spending while the economy had tanked and revenue was way down, at the same time the Bush tax cuts had been renewed, receipts had dropped to a low of 16% while expenditures climbed to a high of 25%.  But since then, the two have been gradually coming back into closer proximity, until now receipts are about 18% and expenditures 22.5% (note that this is less difference than during the Reagan administration).  And what happened after the Reagan administration?  During the last Clinton term, receipts actually exceeded expenditures, the only time this has happened since a two year period in the 1950s!

So in the end, it's really difficult to get a complete understanding of all this stuff.  But here's what I took away from it:

1.  This country and most developed countries have always run a debt.  The actual dollars involved (that $18 trillion that is so scary) is not as important a figure as the ratio of debt to GDP.  That figure has been higher at one other point in history, and did not result in catastrophe.  

2.  Due to all the stuff that is included in the debt, including a lot of stuff that continues and multiplies from year to year, the debt is not the same as the deficit.  And except for the last of the Clinton years, we've almost always spent more than we took in.  As percentages of GDP, the ratio of what we're taking in to what we're spending has been worse in the past and yet the debt has grown at a high rate.  So in and of itself, balancing the budget or spending less is NOT a recipe for reducing the debt, believe it or not.

3.  What most people compare the debt to is a household.  We all know that as a household, you can't indefinitely spend more than you take in, thus taking on more and more debt.  But government simply doesn't work quite the same way.  Really, a government borrows in order to grow the economy and accomplish ends that theoretically benefit society, always carrying debt, but hoping that in the good times when the economy is booming, the debt load will gradually be reduced.  It's always happened that way. 

4.  We are all scared that China or somebody will suddenly call in all their notes and bankrupt America.  But China and every other country that holds American debt knows that their own economic well-being depends upon a reasonably healthy American economy.  If John owes me a bunch of money and I know it's impossible for him to pay me back all at once, I'm not going to demand that he do so.  I'm not going to get more than a small percentage of my money back that way.  Instead, I hope that John stays prosperous enough to make the payments indefinitely, giving me a steady income.  If I do something to make John go belly up, I'm in big trouble myself.  And China already has its own debt load, which isn't far from what we have.

5.  While carrying debt in itself isn't really a problem, when the debt gets so big that too much of our annual revenue is being used  just to service the debt (make the payments on the loans, so to speak), then that leaves too little money for other stuff.  Some economists have postulated that once debt reaches 90% of annual receipts, economic growth slows because too little money is going to stuff that helps stimulate the economy.  According to them, we are too high now at 104%.  But we were worse off at the end of WWII and came out of it very nicely with exponential economic growth in the next ten years.  It apparently ain't that simple.

In conclusion, I agree the debt needs to be addressed.  But I don't raise this issue in itself to the level of my top 5 concerns.  If the economy takes off and goes into another boom phase, this will not look like such a big problem.  

 

 

Nicely said....i have such a hard time saying reasonable things without going into nonsensical gibberish.   I agree with everything here.  

2 hours ago, Quillback said:

Huge difference in today's economy and the post WWII economy.  We manufactured everything here in the 50's and 60's (cars, furniture, clothing, shoes, appliances, TV's, steel).  We'll never have an economic boom like that again, and to hope that we'll ever have an economic boom that will solve our debt is just going to get us further in the hole.  As Ness mentioned above we are committed to a huge amount of spending going forward, annual deficits are projected to head back to a trillion dollars per year, and that's assuming reasonable growth in GDP.  What if we have another recession?  Not to mention that interest rates are historically low and are being held down by Fed policy.  When rates normalize we're going to have to spend a huge chunk of money just to service that debt.

And if we ever have a government debt induced financial crisis, we'll be screwed, the risks are huge.  We can either control this debt through some kind of reasonable policy, or let it control us.  Doing nothing, and hoping that our economy will magically and painlessly solve this problem for us is a recipe for disaster.

We could manufacture new things!....For example, energy innovations like solar power (that like it or not, will have to be implemented eventually...why not get a head start)....what if americans put the energy and resources into developing super cheaply made, yet highly efficient solar devices....then americans can make them, and americans can sell the to the rest of the world which doesnt have that technology.  Very similar to the economic boom of the 1950's and 1960's, then we can tax the billionaires at the same rates we did during that time period. 

24 minutes ago, Ham said:

"Free college" and "free healthcare". Both are combinations of goods and services that cost real money to produce, but some feel that they are basic rights that they are entitled too. I would think that access to good healthcare and access to a good education are opportunities that state and federal governments should work to ensure, but someone is going to have to pay those costs. So it's really "free to me" and paid for by someone else.

Can you image how lazy some students would be if college was free? 4 years to screw off, get drunk, and chase girls. A lot of people behave that way now.  I'm in the middle of paying for my second child to go to college. I am VERY aware of the costs. I wish that the cost of college wasn't increasing much faster than other goods/services. Maybe the college professors and admistrators should take a big paycut. How about "free" textbooks? Or free digital versions of them? 

Once upon a time people thought that 8 hour work days, and decent working conditions with decent pay were basic rights.  Education used to be a privilege for only the wealthy, now we all feel that everyone would benefit from a high school education.  This could absolutely be expanded to higher education...more education is good IMO.  The beauty of progress is that with a little effort people can make the world better for the humans that inhabit it, and possibly the ones that inhabit it next!  Do you consider a socialized police or fire department to be problematic? MODOT?  Much of american society is (and always has been) socialized, we just pick and choose what is good and bad.  I would die a happy man if the things that i thought were "pie in the sky" ideas in my lifetime were considered basic rights to my son, and his kids. 

[SpoonDog]

to/too.

 

It's a common misconception that professors are highly paid, in reality they're making about as much as any other profession which requires a phd, and bear in mind they're not being paid or barely being paid the 10+ years they're in school.   They're not working 40 hour weeks.  And adjuncts?  The folks most  likely to be teaching freshman-sophomore level, intro-level college courses?  They're making 20-25k a year, without bennies. 

A few professors make a lot of money.  In many instances it isn't because of lavish university salaries but because they get grants from other sources (NIH, NSF, NASA, ...your buddies in the military/ defense industry spend obscene amounts of money padding the pockets of chemistry and engineering profs).  If the conservative mantra is rewarding hard work, the last thing in the universe you'd be advocating is cutting the pay of the profs who go out on their own and put in the time finding funding, securing grants, and producing research. 

 If you can prove need universities will knock tons off the sticker price, sometimes >50%.  They don't just eat that cost, they make it up through the folks paying full-price.  It doesn't cost a university in Missouri twice as much to educate a student from Chicago as one from St. Louis, yet they'll gouge the out-of-state student with tuition and use those revenues to defray the cost to residents.  Tuition's always been a shell game.   If you're paying tuition right now for your kid, you're paying part of someone else's too- and someone else is paying part of yours.

About half of the founding fathers went to college, folks like Jefferson and Franklin were scientists and inventors, and free public education- especially for the underprivileged- has a long history since colonial times.  Heck, the founding fathers set up instruments like the Senate and the Electoral college not because they trusted the collective wisdom of the masses but because they understood the importance of an education (self-taught or formal).  The people who made this country thought an education was pretty dang important, necessary for the health and functioning of the nation.

I think of "free education" the same way I think of "free vaccines"- they're an inoculation against stupidity.  If we need educated folks to keep this country running, I see no societal value in putting up a toll-booth in front of our institutions.  I see no societal value in denying citizens higher education because it's prohibitively expensive.  It isn't just about textbook learning and it doesn't just benefit the poor students, either- affluent students or rural students are interacting with folks from different economic, social, religious or cultural groups, sometimes for the first time in their lives.   Folks they'd never meet or interact with, otherwise.   Maybe folks from both sides of the political spectrum would be a little more tolerant if they had to engage with folks from different backgrounds.

I don't think education is necessarily a right, but I do think it should be accessible to everyone, and I think our form of government works best with an educated population. Getting drunk and chasing girls is an aspect of college culture- just like sexual assault or disability fraud is an aspect of military culture- but I don't see anyone suggesting we disband the Marines.  I don't see the societal value or the rational sense in penalizing the people who want an education because of the people who don't. 

[SpoonDog]

16 hours ago, Jerry Rapp said:

Seriously.  You guys are pinning the salvation of the country on a guy with no voting record, a guy who trades in distorting facts, a guy who's business model is getting people to buy into his brand, a guy who doesn't feel accountable to anyone.  If the big criticism of Obama is that he acts unilaterally as though he's a king, the last person in the universe you'd pick to head the Republican ticket is a megalomaniac with his own television show where he's "the boss." 

That's the thing that leaves a foul taste in my mouth when it comes to the republican candidates- and hillary, too.  The actions don't match the rhetoric.

[MOPanfisher]

And that is a consistent theme among pretty much all candidates, rhetoric, actions not matching their words or claims etc.

 

I have no problem with the higher education portion being something you have to earn, don't keep your GPA up to a passing grade, you get one semester to straighten up and no more subsidy.  Problem is that it adds a layer of bureaucracy to the idea, and either the Gov't gets to do it, (bad idea) or the university has to do it, either way it costs money.  You don't get a choice of colleges, there may be say 4 or 5 in a state to choose from, don't want to get a degree from them pay out of your own pocket.  Other option that still exists is military service, wear the uniform get tuition paid.  (not quite that simple but you understand.)

[Quillback]

I'm not totally opposed to government funded college education, but I'd also like to see a credible plan that pay for it, and you can tax billionaires, but even they don't have enough dough to pay for this plan.  And I don't want to hear the old rising economy will pay for it argument either.  Put together a tax plan that is real and pays for the cost.

And putting people through diploma mills doesn't mean that when they get out that there will be good jobs waiting for them, part of the problem I'm hearing now is that kids are graduating from college with tuition debt and they then can't find a good paying job.  We need quality jobs also for the graduates.

[Ham]

Please tell us who you're pinning your hopes on Spoondog? I'm not a Trump guy. I think he's a narcacist and a bully. That has bought charisma with his billions. He's tapped into frustrations, but I don't think he's electable and I don't think he could live up to the rhetoric.

conservative minded folks need to understand that there is more of them than there is of us and if we don't run a candidate that at least some of the other folks will vote for we will get another 4-8 years of a jackass in the White House. 

 

[Al Agnew]

Look, I'm not saying that today is equivalent to the 1940s.  Nor am I saying to just relax and hope the rising economy fixes the debt problem.  What I'm saying is that a rising economy has always fixed it, to the extent it's been fixed, in the past.  One of the other things I got from my little bit of research is that in real dollars, EVERY type of government spending has been trending downward except for the biggest one of all, social programs.  We're spending less on the military, we're spending less overall on discretionary programs.  But social programs are the gorilla in the room, and nobody has a clue how to really cut them without a whole lot of unpalatable unintended consequences.   One of the big reasons social spending shot up during the Obama administration was the safety net for all the newly unemployed that came with the Great Recession.  Some of those never became employed again and cycled into other safety net programs.  And if you are just certain that there are vast numbers of deadbeats out there continually raking in government money, do a little research on your own and you'll find that there isn't quite as much of that as you think.  The fact is that a large part of social spending is due to a sputtering economy.  So do you just stop the spending, or do you try to figure out how to fix the economy?  

Just stop and think a bit.  Let's say we cut all social programs by 25%.  Yep, that would balance the budget, might even give us a surplus (and it's the only segment where cutting that "little" of a percentage would do it).  But then you'd have a lot more people, including a lot more kids, suffering.  Few of us want to penalize kids, even if we think their parents are deadbeats.  And then you'd also have a huge number of people in fairly desperate straits.  People with few job skills, living in places with few jobs.  What are they gonna do?  I'll tell you--crime would go through the roof (and perhaps explode out of the inner cities and other poor areas and into the richer suburban enclaves).  

But how do you fix the economy?  Well, I'm not a big fan of government stimulus programs.  But you probably don't fix it by cutting government spending, either, because like it or not, government spending fuels large segments of the economy, not to mention that the more people employed directly or indirectly by the government, the more jobs there are to go around in the strictly private sector.

Heck, I don't have any answers.   But I'm pretty sure that there AREN'T any easy answers.

[mjk86]

27 minutes ago, Quillback said:

I'm not totally opposed to government funded college education, but I'd also like to see a credible plan that pay for it, and you can tax billionaires, but even they don't have enough dough to pay for this plan.  And I don't want to hear the old rising economy will pay for it argument either.  Put together a tax plan that is real and pays for the cost.

And putting people through diploma mills doesn't mean that when they get out that there will be good jobs waiting for them, part of the problem I'm hearing now is that kids are graduating from college with tuition debt and they then can't find a good paying job.  We need quality jobs also for the graduates.

This was well said.  Plenty of college grads with nowhere to go, and too many nonsense college degrees.  I also think that too many college educated folks are leaning more toward finance type degrees where there is more of an immediate return on the "investment", instead of STEM type degrees that drive innovation and development.  There just isnt really any financial incentive to pursue such degrees.

[jolicious]

I'll borrow from one of the questions / thoughts posed throughout these 7 pages (5 things that need the most attention, more or less) and list the first 5 things I'd love to see a

President do:

1. No Inaugural Ball.  It's a civic duty, not the super bowl. I know that estimates range (literally) from $200MM to $170Billion - and I think $5 is too much to spend.

2. Says "I don't know" when asked something that he/she really doesn't know. Follows that up quickly with "But, I'll find out"

3.  Set up a  televised Q/A session once a month (1 hour) where emails are received the previous three weeks, and a set (equal) number of congressmen from each side of the fence weigh in on which questions the President will answer. Will there be a crazy amount of questions asked, but only a few answered? Surely, but we have to start somewhere.

4.  Thanks the Lord in his/her speech for the opportunity to lead a Nation that was founded on His teachings.

5.  Tell the truth, all the time, every time. Even if the truth is "That's none of your business", I can at least accept and appreciate that.