With ferocious speed, the financial crisis, recession and efforts to combat the recession have swung the U.S. debt from worrisome to ruinous, promising to handcuff the administration. Lost amid last month’s passage of the new health care law, the Congressional Budget Office issued a report showing that within this decade, President Obama’s own budget sends the U.S. government to a potential tipping point where the debt reaches 90 percent of gross domestic product.
Economists Carmen Reinhart of the University of Maryland and Kenneth Rogoff of Harvard University have recently shown that a 90 percent debt-to-GDP ratio usually touches off a crisis.
This year, the debt will reach 63 percent of GDP, a ratio that has ignited crises in smaller wealthy nations. Fiscal crises gripped Canada, Denmark, Sweden, Finland and Ireland when their debts were below where the United States is shortly headed.
Can’t be. We were assured that health care reform would cause a deficit reduction.
Here is what we should do. Everyone should pay out-of-pocket. When you go for your chemo or need a liver transplant, if you are a little short on cash, charge it. If you don’t have a credit card, just crawl into an alley and die quietly. By all means, let’s stop medicare now and every other “entitlement” –especially for all those welfare kids. We just can’t afford it. Do eat dog. Life’s hard. There’s really no problem here. Everyone knows that.
Enjoy your straw men much?
Well if liberals were taxes at 100% over 25K we might be able to afford it.
My son owns a restaurant, I asked him about the menu posted outside the entrance. Think about it. If you walk up and all you are able order is based upon what you have in your wallet, it just reads differently than when you slap plastic to pay. Slap platstic and the entire menu is in play. Pay with cash, you have to draw a line somewhere. While he’s glad his patrons slap plastic toward their tabs for the most part, is it a good idea for all of us, either as individuals or collectively? Just asking …..
All those countries have higher taxes and universal health care. How can they be spending less?
It only matters when China calls in the chips.
This is hardly news to anyone who has been paying attention for the last 10 years or more. Successive administrations and Congresses of both political parties have been playing fast and loose with the fiscal well being of the country. Neither party has had the courage to be honest with the American people. And as far as I can tell that has not changed. The simple truth is that there is no such thing as a free lunch.
For decades we have been living on the national credit card. We have been fudging the books to make the debt look smaller than it really is. (Hint: It’s not $12 Trillion. It’s somewhere between $60-100 Trillion if you calculate entitlements that we have made promises for without money.)
We have been running the public Treasury in like a giant ponzi scheme. It’s as if Bernie Madoff has been the Secretary of the Treasury for each administration going back at least to the 1980’s. We borrow money and spend it frivolously. When the bill is due we borrow more money, and pay just enough to cover the interest on the existing debt and then blow the rest frivolously. And we keep repeating this over and over. And the book keeping in Washington, had they been subject to the kind of accounting standards mandated for private businesses, would have gotten all of our former presidents and most members of Congress sent to prison for fraud.
I think every President and member of Congress going back to the 80’s has known what was going on. And I think they all said a quick prayer every night before bed to the effect of “Dear God, please let me be out of office before this all blows up.”
Well now that day has finally come. The party is over. The bar is closing down. And the tab is due.
#7 – the government learned it from Wall Street, methinks.
When it comes down, and it will with the current administration, it will be ugly. The obvious plan is to crete a crisis—no, I mean a real crisis—not like the one you think we just went through, this coming crisis will prevent your debit card from spewing cash. It’ll be bad. Then—no worry—the government will “step” in. They will offer food, clothing, and shelter. Your dollars will be worth pennies. Those who do not have dollars now, will not miss a beat. The government will still be supporting them. Those who own homes and have dollars, will be supported by the government, also. Except for those ( us ) it will be a huge change.
If you think I am dreaming, just look at how this happened in other countries. Our president’s mentor was a self avowed communist. Why would anyone think he would now, all of a sudden, turn away from this upbringing? The test is just observe how he governs. More and more debt with the ever increasing promises of “we’ll take care of everybody”. Get it?
Andrew717,
Straw men don’t need liver transplants or chemo. People do. Sometimes they are old and poor. Sometimes they are children of poor women. Sometimes they are disabled and unable to work. Sometimes they have limited skills, make low wages, and work for business that don’t provide health insurance. Straw men don;t have these problems. Americans do. What we don’t need is straw solutions. Whose entitlements do we want to cut? Who should go without? When you get down to cases not made of straw, that is, the real world, all of a sudden its not about “creeping socialism” but real human beings that need help.
And sometimes we need to proof before hitting submit.
Andrew717,
Straw men don’t need liver transplants or chemo. People do. Sometimes they are old and poor. Sometimes they are children of poor women. Sometimes they are disabled and unable to work. Sometimes they have limited skills, make low wages, and work for businesses that don’t provide health insurance. Straw men don’t have these problems. Americans do. What we don’t need is straw solutions. Whose entitlements do we want to cut? Who should go without? When you get down to cases not made of straw, that is, the real world, all of a sudden it’s not about “creeping socialism†but real human beings that need help.
10, so you want health care providers to render services for free. That’s mighty generous of you. I’ll bet that you render your services for free too. Oh, you don’t mean that? What you want is for government to take money from others by force (the ability of the state to raise taxes is always based on force in the end) to spend it as you think it ought to be spent. Again how generous of you to use other people’s money. What you need is a catchy slogan. How about:
From each according to his ability to each according to his need.
Oh and there is this:
[blockquote]Volcker, answering a question from the audience at a New York Historical Society event, said the value-added tax “was not as toxic an idea” as it has been in the past and also said a carbon or other energy-related tax may become necessary.
Though he acknowledged that both were still unpopular ideas, he said getting entitlement costs and the U.S. budget deficit under control may require such moves. “If at the end of the day we need to raise taxes, we should raise taxes,” he said.[/blockquote]
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE6355N520100406
[blockquote]Straw men don’t have these problems[/blockquote]
But straw men do ramble on about people dying in the streets. And [b]only[/b] straw men. Thus my point. Equating oposition to socialised medicine to wanting people to “just die quietly” is at least as absurd as the Birthers. It is not an either/or situation and you know it.
Br. Michael,
Are you serious? These same folks who make this argument want to take my taxes to capture and deport illegal aliens (when they’re not employing them to clean their toilets), fight wars in the billions based on manipulated intelligence, borrowing all the while to sustain tax breaks that my children will pay for, underwrite Wall Street when it falls, and make tax laws for the wealthy that even a five-year-old know are unjust, and then they oddly worry about health care.
We are taxed in any civilized Country. It is about what we value.
Andrew7171,
The straw is only in the failure to address the human beings in need. Focusing on rhetorical flourishes on either side would be an evasion of the persistent and real problem of what to do about health care access, cost, dropped coverage, and gross inequality. That’s my complaint here. It never gets back to the actual human beings. Just other day in Rite Aid, I saw an very elderly woman’s son pull all the cash he had out of his pocket, about 320 dollars, to pay the co-pays on his mother’s prescriptions. It was over a hundred dollars short. “What can you put back Mom?” Or the guy who showed up at the church because the AIDS drugs he had to get from the ER had run out because there were problems with his insurance coverage. I could go on, but then that would be about human beings. I want to hear about people. What do you want to do? Who do you want uncovered? If no one, how are we going to pay for this? Or which entitlements should be cut? The rest of the conversation is straw at best. We need to talk about the actual issue of the human beings. I think that we could agree on that.
13, I am very very serious. It is time to call a constitutional convention to pull back the illegal and unconstitutional growth of the power of the federal government both in the areas of social spending, commandeering states for a federal purpose and the ability to wage war overseas without a declaration of war. It is past time for you liberals to take your hands out of others pockets.
If you started with that, instead of the nonsense you did start with, I would have respected your arguments much more. As I do now. Stick with the real people, Albany, and we can talk. But your first post was cartoonish and impossible to take seriously. This is a complex situation, with much complex discussion and the solution (if there even is one, I am not always confident) will no doubt be extremely complex as well. There are legitimate concerns on both sides.
I would like for everyone to be covered. But how? At what cost? The resources simply aren’t there to simply say everyone is covered. Something somewhere must give way. And not just financial, either. Freedoms must also be cut and adjusted. I am not saying any of this is universally good or ill, only that it must be considered, and with great care. I worry greatly about unintended consequences, about an urge to pass something, anything, without really thinking how the whole mass will work together in ten or twenty years. Our current government is fiscally unsustainable, and that worries me as well. At some point, we will have to bring spending in line with income, and that day is fast approaching. We, or our children, will be faced with difficult choices, and I fear these will be accompanied by severe social dislocations as we raise taxes to crushing levels, make vast cuts to the social safety net, or unleash hyperinflation to inflate away our cumulative debt. Or more likely a terrible combination of some sort.
#15, et al. Imagine what the shape of the new constitution might be. Would right to privacy be explicitly stated to mean legal abortions? Would freedom of speech be explicitly stated to equal unlimited spending by corporations on political races and causes. I could go on and on. My fear of a constitutional convention is that there are too many lawyers and too many entrenched interests in the water. We have a hard enough with elections being finalized without court challenges, so I suspect an entirely new model of governance to simply more than could ever be accomplished. “Common sense is simply not common enough” as they say.
Br. Michael,
You would be surprised to hear that we may agree on more than you think. I think that there is a growing group of folks for whom there is as yet no political label. They are basically Libertarians who want a sensible social safety net and that’s about it out government.
Andrew717,
Fair enough points on my first post. Most of your concerns I share. I too believe that we are heading into a brick wall. I think the point at which the political conservatives and I would part is what should give in the overall governmental and tax system and how we got ourselves into this mess.
In point of fact, alleys aside, the lack of health insurance or simply inadequate health insurance does injure and kill people. Most often this occurs in the cases that are not “acute care” “emergency in nature ER trips” which can’t be denied but health issues long-term in nature, like cancer, kidney and heart disease management, and it is almost always entitlement programs that remedy the problem to the extent that it is remedied.
17, that’s a risk we need to take to restore the Constitution. The Supreme Court is a sitting Constitutional convention as it is and the Congress and President routinely ignore it. The fact that the commerce clause has been expanded to eliminate the concept of limed federal powers without there ever having been a Constitutional Convention makes the point. It’s all been done under the subterfuge of “interpretation” and that means that the government looses its legitimacy to govern.
#20. Point taken. An activist SCOTUS functions with only the slightest point of accountability: impeachment. As we have learned from Clinton’s impeachment, it makes political theater go white hot.
21, to make it even worse if the Court is evenly split, the ability to, in effect amend the Constitution, rests with the swing vote. That is one person who can accomplish what it takes the 2/3s of the Congress and 3/4s of the States to do. This being the case I would propose that all SCOTUS decisions that purport to interpret the Constitution require ratification by 3/4s of the States.
[blockquote]and it is almost always entitlement programs that remedy the problem to the extent that it is remedied.[/blockquote]
That has been true in the recent past, but I don’t know if that’s the way we should go in the future, at least long term. I would rather see something like tax-free Health Savings Accounts to pay for chronic and day to day stuff, with no insurance, coupled with insurance for the proverbial cancer and the like, with the associated crushing bills. Not necessarily high deductible, but something that doesn’t kick in until a threshold is reached. Combine this with a complete overhaul of the tort system (I like the idea from IIRC New Zealand, where a table lays out the damages for different wrongs, preventing vast jury awards) and I think many of the worst ills could be solved. I’m even fine with a gov’t option for the “disaster insurance.”
The problem is this would require LOTS of political capital, not the least of which is essentialy destroying the ambulance-chaser-lottery which sends vast sums into campaign funds.
23, I like that idea.
22, while a nice idea such a requirement is utterly unworkable in practice. The problem is fundementally different theories of law and the courts; to wit, do the courts exist only to interpret the law as it exists, or to further justice as the court sees it? There is a (probably apocryphal) story about Oliver Wendell Holmes and (I think) Benjamin Cardozo. After having lunch one dropped off the other and was pulling away in his carriage. The one stood on the steps of his building as called out “Do Justice sir, do Justice!” The other halted his carriage, got out, and walked back. “No sir! We must interpret the law!”
The problem is, the “do Justice” school has been dominant for the last century or so. The constitution, by becoming a “living document” has been transformed into a dead letter.
Wish I could take credit. Can’t remember where I first saw it, might well have been in comments here.
Andrew717, I think it should be tried. As it is there is no effective check on SCOTUS.
“I saw an very elderly woman’s son pull all the cash he had out of his pocket, about 320 dollars, to pay the co-pays on his mother’s prescriptions. It was over a hundred dollars short. “What can you put back Mom?†Or the guy who showed up at the church because the AIDS drugs he had to get from the ER had run out”
The problem is, we will all eventually die. None of us will escape. After the age of about 70 (younger if you have a serious chronic disease such as HIV) every year that you live will bring a new disease which will require yet another medicine or intervention to keep you on your feet. By the time you are 90, most people have 1-4 life threatening disorders that decompensate every 6 months, putting them in the hospital.
There is not enough money in the entire WORLD to keep everybody alive in the US forever. We have already stolen the education funds of the generations who follow us. We had good public schools growing up, and our college was cheap. Thanks to the need to squeeze every last month of life for our own generations, we have forced Gen X and the Millenialls into lousy public K-12s whose main purpose is to serve as a jobs program for the educationally minded of our generation, and then into colleges whose tuition is 10 times what we paid, which they are required to take on debt to pay.
The only way to bring down costs is to ration care. That is how Europe brings down costs. If you are over 50 you do not get dialysis. You “die quietly” instead. No country’s resources are limitless and even the richest nation cannot buy immortality.
We pretend that it is evil to ration in medicine. However we already ration. If you are a sick child you will have Medicaid which means that you will have serious difficulty finding a specialist to treat a serious ailment. Such children already “die quietly”. They die quietly because the greatest part of medical expenditure is spent making sure that the old who make the most noise have far better funded medicare which still is sufficiently profitable to ensure s supply of providers who can stay in business accepting it.
We already ration. We ration irrationally, ensuring that the lives of the very old are protected before the lives of the very young. And we do it because the young are willing to die quietly. And the old are afraid to, and will do anything to squeeze yet another month of life from the generations whom they have already bancrupted.
Maybe, given what they have done to this country, and to the generations who follow them, our generation, the Boomers and the Silent Generation, are right to fear death.