dckingsfan wrote:And Bernie (and now dragging Hillary along) are advocating policies that have decimated far more states and utterly decimated the federal budget. And Reid wouldn't even consider steps to make entitlements whole.
Kind of like we don't have a lot of good choices right now :)
The federal budget has been decimated by both parties but its been going on for 40 years. The 1980s saw the biggest deficits ever, it kind of went away in the 1990s, and then we had the 2 wars and tax cuts that weren't paid for until 2011... plus the financial crisis. I blame stupid neo-liberalism and the worship of the military industrial complex. It's always cut all the social spending and only increase defense spending to record highes. Yet we spend more than the next 7 countries combine and there's a lot of waste and other BS.
The reason? The near complete takeover of the political system of the Financiers and Corporations, the US is no longer a democracy. We have the illusion of choice. These same entities care only about profits, they are like parasites that will consume and consume till the host dies and they will die with it.
Apart form the parasitic entities the US is healthy, it has huge natural resources, vast and skilled human resources and lots of land.
I don't think Bernie's policies are at all unrealistic in terms of if this country can take them. They're unrealistic because of the system that's over the political process. I think there'll be more like him because the American people support a lot of what he's saying on a basic, organic level. His 8 years of Mayor duty in Burlington would lead me to believe he's not this radical but that he can work with other on an executive level. It's a shame that Vermont isn't a bigger, more diverse state with a higher profile and then he may have a chance at this thing.
Our country would be a lot better off if we had invested in infrastructure, health care reform, SS reform of lifting the cap in the early 2000s rather than invading two countries and spending trillions of dollars overseas.
If you're going to do perform deficit spending, invest it at home.
Like nate said, For governments that issue their own fiat currency, there is no revenue constraint. They don't need to "raise" taxes to spend since they FIRST spend then collect taxes. The only real constraint is the real resource base of the country. And with a lot of idle and underutilized resources (higher unemployment rate, for example) deficit spending is perfectly sustainable without risking insane inflation. "Cutting your way to prosperity" is ironically similar to what the IMF has been imposing on poor defenseless third world countries for decades. I think people in those countries are having feelings of schadenfreude to seeing the US and European middle classes suffering the same way.
