I know democrats want to blame Bush and say budget hawks are hypocrites, and republicans want to act like obama created the entire mess. Let's be bipartisan and say both sides have some valid points. The problem however is that it is not an academic or even political exercise. It is a financial disaster in the making. We are running an enormous deficit. We have no credible plans to cut it back, much less eliminate it. In fact, pretty much everything congress or Obama propose will increase it by truly frightening amounts. Please, no one post talking points about how obama will eliminate the deficit. We all know those plans are fairy tales. A budget deficit will not cure itself, particularly when the government keeps coming up with more ways to waste truly large sums of money. Once it reaches a tipping point, eg Greece, everything you try to do to cut it back will end up making it worse because it creates a recession or worse.
Another solution I have which is much more drastic, would be to tell every single non skilled government worker(i know that is an oxymoron but bear with me) And tell them there pay is being cut right now by 30%, if they dont like this tell them to walk, there is a plethora of people who would READILY work for 25-40k a year right now, these union government thugs who are currently holding our country hostage want to walk, then so be it, we will have their jobs filled within a day. You can not tell me it would be tough to train someone to pick up garbage, or to train someone to enforce parking tickets, I know someone who is getting paid 55k a year(when you include his benefits) and will retire when he is 52 who walks around checking parking meters all day. This is the kind of stuff which has gotten way out of hand. All we would have to do is follow through on the promise inside of a couple states, and all of a sudden, all these guys would fold like a cheap suit, they think they have bargaining power based on their union, but wait until 1 state says "see ya later" to every single union thug, when they try to hold their own, these guys would be begging for their jobs back at 1 third the cost. I know this will never happen with the current administration/congress/senate, I can only hope that when the republicans get back into power after Obama is finished making a mess that they actually practice fiscal conservatism.
What you are suggesting is to put a taste of "free enterprise" back in gov't work. A little employment fear like the rest of us outsiders have had to endure. I like the idea of a good cage-rattling.
Exactly, that is the problem, as it stands these guys have ZERO fear, and the guys who Obama has created jobs for have ZERO fear, everything is an entitlement. I will tell everyone on this site how wrong i was the day that i see a head line reading " Large amount of Temporary government employees hired through stimulus get fired" but it will never happen, not in a million years. You want a good example? the other day i was chatting with a government employee, and he told me he had a PAID long weekend, on a day which was not a long weekend. So i asked him why he gets the day off. He told me it was an EDO. Does anyone here know what an EDO is for a government employee? It is called an "Earned day off." So basically for showing up for his job every day (which is what would be expected of any person working at any place) he gets a certain amount of time off per year. This is the kind of stuff that makes my blood boil. Elementary school teachers work somewhere around half the year, you really want to tell me it is tough to train someone to teach 5 year olds how to fingerpaint for 60k a year? I am not saying that every single one is bad, there is a few decent ones, but this shit has to stop or else we are all fucked.
TripleA you know just as well as I that this problem will only get worse. Greece was "fortunate" in the sense that they had a higher power to make them toe the line. We don't. There is a double digit percentage of the population that would take a new Mercedes today even if it meant certain death tomorrow. People do not take to the lessons of responsibility well. For most of us, it needs to be pounded into our brains time and time again. A big part of that pounding is done by reality and a big part by society. Reality lets us know that when we eat our cake, we no longer have it. Society lets us know by putting us in jail for eating our neighbor's cake. Since we've brought government in to help the misfortunates who have eaten their cake and would like it back, we've reduced the impact of that lesson. Since we've taken pity on people who have eaten the cakes of others, we've knocked that back. Now, we've got a lot of voters who would be astonished to eat their cake and not have it. You cannot convince these people that this cannot last. You especially cannot convince them of that when there is some power hungry mob standing beside you telling them that you are wrong. Why, you might even say: We are so screwed.
This is exactly what I have been trying to demonstrate, it is the proverbial, "Damned if you do, damned if you dont" scenario. There is no way people will currently allow taxes to go up, and many studies, as well as many economics courses show if you raise taxes, you hit a wall, where all of a sudden you start to deal with diminishing returns, and you could increase taxes to 99%, and you will not help to generate more tax revenue, because you cripple business. So basically the only solution is to cut spending, the problem is that cutting spending and all the entitlement programs is wildly unpopular, so basically whether it is republicans, or democrats, we are fucked unless people decide to start accepting personal responsiblity, as you have mentioned. What we need is a warren Buffet like president who is able to look 25 years into the future and act accordingly, no more basing current decisions on the speed of the output, this is how i have come to the realisation that no matter what we do we are screwed. We live in a society that functions based on "what have you done for me lately" tmentality, unless there is a major shift in our thinking we are screwed. Also just so that all the people on the left fully understand what i am talking about, i would fully support pulling 4-500 billion out of the military as well, the biggest threat to our sovereignty is not some terrorists abroad, it is our own unwillingness to think of how we can benefit ourselves in the future by sacrificing today. We have created a "NOW NOW NOW ME ME ME" society, in the end history will prove that this is what crippled us.
The achilles heel of any democracy is the fact that at some point, people realize that they can vote to help themselves to other people's property. Our Founding Fathers were far wiser and more responsible than our current politicians and realized this. They hadn't risked their lives to create a country that would immediately descend into the sort of organized theft we face today. The Constitution they crafted offered multiple layers of protection. They carefully limited what congress could do, a limitation that is blithely ignored today. They restricted voting to property owning men. Why allow people with no stake in the system to have a voice in running it? They gave the states great power to act as a counterforce to the federal government. They set up a system of co-equal branches of government to prevent, eg a runaway president getting the country overextended in foreign adventures. Senators were selected by state legislatures and were thus more insulated from popular passions, more protective of their states' interests and less likely to be John Edwards/Barrack Obama-style pretty boys with no experience. We have a frightening structural problem in our government today because all these protections are gone. Congress recognizes no limits on its authority to meddle. The currrent president treats laws protecting investment and property as nonbinding. The courts make up previously unimagined entitlements and call them constitutional rights. More ominously, calls to restrict voting to actual citizens who have some idea what they are voting on are attacked as racism and anti-immigrant oppression. There will be a massive effort to allow voting by whatever means necessary for upwards of 40 million illegal immigrants in the next presidential election. Of course, we will be expected to pay for their health care, education and probably bail out their mortgages. Margaret Thacther famously observed that the problem withsocialism is that eventually you run out of other people's money to pay for it. The problem she may have overlooked is that we now are borrowing that money. Paying it back will be someone else's problem.
So what exactly is the solution to this problem since we clearly know that Republicans are not interested to solve this especially since they created all the mess?