Quote:
Originally Posted by JohnR
I read this yesterday. I can't fathom what we are going to do. What can they do? Probably what some wanted to do all along - abolish money.
But what will be your baseline of trade? "I'll give you 100 bushels of corn for one carbon credit?"
It is not sustainable. It is math. How have we come to here?
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"What can they do?"
They can raise taxes and cut SS and Medicare benefits and cut other spending. The CBO thiks that would help. But for 40 years, no one has been willing to tackle this. Or more accurately, not nearly enough folks have been willing to tackle this.
"abolish money" - I doubt anything that extreme. But who knows, because we haven't been through anything like this.
"It is math" Correct. And we're not talking higher-order calculus here, this is simple arithmetic.
"How have we come to here?" That's the only thing to answer. For 40 years, we have known this is coming. We got here, because a large number of elected officials (not all Democrats, but a majority of whom are Democrats) decided that they want to get re-elected more than they want to serve the Republic. And the easiest way to get elected, is to convince the voters that you will give them more goodies than the other guy, and to make them afraid of the fact that the other guy may indeed reduce your freebies, regardless of whether or not the reduction is necessary.
The beauty is that if it hits the fan in 15 years, that will be exactly when I'm leveraged to th emax to send my kids to college, and when I'd like to think that a comfortable retirement is around the corner.
We are in unchartered waters here. And we better wise up. But I see no evodence of that.
One good thing. If it gets bad, that could be the end of liberalism for a generation, because it could be so bad, that no one can deny that we should have listened to Paul Ryan in 2012, and that everyone who attacked Ryan for saying we needed to change entitlement programs (i.e., all the liberals) were as wrong as you can be.
I think your kids are just a bit older than mine. It's terrifying. Unless you are in tehy small minority who are wealthy enough to ride out anything, it's terrifying. And it was all avoidable, if we had the discipline to live within our means. I predict history will view Obama as having done unspeakable damage to the country, more than Al Queda could have ever hoped to inflict.