Quote:
Originally Posted by kane
One of the best illustrations I have seen of the debt is a plate of food that has a big piece of chicken, a large helping of mashed potatoes and a large helping of veggies. On the side it has a small piece of parsley. It was then explained that the chicken, veggies and potatoes represent defense, social/welfare stuff including social security and medicare, and pensions/interest. The parsley represented everything else. Once shown like that it becomes pretty clear that no serious debt reduction can happen until we start to carve into those big three. We could completely get rid of everything else and still have a massive amount of debt.
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Spot on.
Health and social security are very hard to slice into without people ending up dead and rioting. Defense is an obvious one, it puts a lot of workers and soldiers on the bread line, with the laws on firearms that's a bad situation.
The other problem is money circulates, trickles up and down. By pumping money in, an economy is often worse than the actual living standards. Stop borrowing and the effect would be the same as raising taxes, less money in people's pockets.
A solution would be to tax imports to balance the effect they have on an economy. This is an example, an imported car removes half a job for an American worker, so tax it to the level it costs. Same with $20,000 worth of imported clothing. This would be applied to the trade gap between countries.
Another one is a very strict immigration policy. So no one earning too little to really contribute is allowed to have a job, home, benefits, health care, etc. And once found is put into a camp or returned to their home country. The cost would be higher prices, the upside is more jobs for the nationals of that country. We have seen the effect of open borders here in Europe.
Will these measures be enough?
Look at the West during the 50s to 70s. Before were flooded with cheap imports and cheap workers. The American Dream is all about those years. Look at the countries where sales come from, how many are major suppliers?