My assistant is from Boston so I say retarded too much as I hear it applied to everything. This morning her espresso machine was retarded. However Arnie is retarded. The US does not get great value for it's social spending is a fair argument. However the reasons for this.. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/arti...ole-struggles-to-keep-up-with-booming-tourism
The US is neither a good example of Socialism nor Capitalism. We now have multiple large sectors of the economy where capitalism no longer exists. Since Reagan's tax cuts I can't think of a single large program which has benefited tax paying americans or even all current Americans in general. However, we have seen plenty of sectors degraded by a mix of govt and crony. College tuition... designed to extract the most money possible from each consumer. Pricing allocated based on ability to pay rather than the capitalist idea of a market price being set by supply and demand. If you spend five minutes thinking about this system being designed to extract money from the rich and give it to the poor that is one thing. O.K. cool top schools could easily get away with "overcharging" and redistributing. Fine. But, then when you add in govt guaranteed loans you realize its not just robin hood its robbery throughout the whole system. Tuition prices get to jacked up much higher than a private robin hood system would allow. This system is far worse than free tuition. Its worse than communism. Its cronumism. Health care is now set up the same way. Its designed to soak up all available dollars. And consumers were not even allowed to say no. They were forced to pay third parties. The exchange system is the opposite of supply and demand pricing. Not capitalism where the market forces are allowed to work. Not socialism where the govt could be paying for health care. But, the very worst type of set up Cronunism. The banking crisis and bailout was a disgrace. The very thing we as a country needed. Drucker or Schumpeter ideas of healthy creative destruction was avoided at the cost of trillions and massive inflation. In other areas of the economy we are seeing markets and prices distorted by benefit cliffs. Polices designed to keep the lower income segments from moving up the economic ladder. We are not Capitalists anymore. Don't blame this long term economic destruction of the middle class on capitalism, blame it on our govt / crony partnership or what I call corruption.
Yes, a disgraceful system that has vastly enriched university administrators at the expense of students and their parents. Government "aid" is just transferred to colleges via increased fees.
Again, exactly right. We have socialism for the lower and upper classes, the rest of us get to pay for it. The banking bailout was socialism for the rich. No one even lost their bonuses, not to mention their jobs or faced prosecution. There may have been an argument for bailing out some parts of the financial system, but there should be an ironclad rule that the entire top floor gets the axe if that happens. You want a bailout, you forfeit your job, your bonus and your future employment in that industry.