Trump is in huge trouble following events of this past week. He and his Republicans already had plenty of political enemies to where they need every vote. They lost millions of votes with their spendthrift budget deal and wall funding failure. The swamp won and Trump helped. We will not forget. We will not vote for Democrats, obviously. We are not nuts. We will instead simply remain at home on voting day. Why bother to vote for Republicans when they are virtually as bad as Democrats?
Trump is running up the national debt faster even than Obama did!! There is no such thing as a free lunch. Young people, our kids and grandkids, are being saddled with an impossible situation. The fact they are too young and inexperienced to realize that yet is no excuse to destroy the lives of upcoming generations. Things are bad already. If interest rates normalize the debt service alone will become enough to screw the pooch for generations to come.
Today’s young people deserve the same opportunities I had when I was young. But adults back then nurtured and looked out for their young, and did not cast them into a hole of inescapable debt. Today’s adults are leeches, stealing from the young so they can live lives of excess to which they inexplicably feel entitled . . . but most assuredly are not. “Pay as you go” never even occurs to them.
It’s disappointing that there is no fiscally responsible party to vote for. There used to be conservatives who believed in smaller government and balanced budgets, but for that last couple decades, we’ve only had the current Republicans instead who believe in spending almost as much as the Democrats but on different things.
If the Fed (or the sovereign debt markets) force us to pay meaningfully higher interest on our national debt, we’ll end up like Greece at the rate we’re going. The fairly short duration on the national debt means that rising rates will increase interest expense and blow a huge hole in the budget. Sure, we can print our dollars unlike them since they gave up their national currency to join the EU, but if you need that point to manage your debt, your citizens are going to get screwed one way or the other.
That became obvious with that recent tax reform that added billions to the deficit on the off-chance that growth could ever pay for it. I remember watching Senator Paul blast it in the Senate and nobody seemed to care. This budget was just more of the same. Reps not having time to read it, loaded with pork as usual. If you had any hope to see the swamp drained, at this point, it’s hard not to feel cheated by the bait and switch. I don’t think it should go without consequences at the next elections but like you rightfully point out, it’s not clear who to vote for who are going to uphold fiscal sanity.
Agreed. Problem is there is only one political party now . . . similar to Red China.
The “Republicrats” are all vote whores, happy to buy votes any way they can while plunging America ever deeper into debt.
You mentioned Senator Paul. There remain a very small number of responsible legislators, like Senator Paul. But their numbers are insufficient to control events, and they are under vicious fire politically from the eager spenders on both sides of the political isle.
The situation appears hopeless from where I sit, and it is our young people who will be saddled with most of the horrible fallout in the future.
If they’re going to be going around spending lots of money, I’d rather have it spent on something at least nominally useful (infrastructure, military, research, NIH, etc) than handing them out willy nilly and have nothing to show for it in the end.
I think at this point, it’s pretty obvious that the only way forward for now is spend more.
Lower taxes, spend more, create crisis, maybe have a chance of addressing the causes that causing the deficit in the longer term?
Trump promised to simplify the tax code but ultimately made it more complex with additional loopholes. The tax attorneys and lawyers are going to make a fortune off the nonsense.
This is something to which I have devoted a good deal of thought. I am nevertheless unable to come up with a satisfactory answer to the following:
If we leave the SSA, where to go?
Years ago Canada appeared a possibility. But now under Trudeau, and given the nut cases inhabiting Toronto, Canada is actually worse than here. I have always liked Newfoundland, having visited there several times. Land there is inexpensive and a rural-living person like me could get along there quite well. But Newfoundland is deeply, overwhelmingly, terminally socialist. Living there would be much worse than living here in the good old USA.
We need a venue which is traditionally capitalist, one which has not gone over to the kind of socialism/Marxism, even communism, which seems to be trending in so many places now. Where is that country? I don’t know much about Costa Rica. Is that a possibility?
It’s a real dilemma. I’m old and will probably die here in the USA. But I strongly agree, were I a younger person, I would unquestionably consider bailing rather than remain here and spend my years paying off the kind of debt currently being run up by today’s selfish old folks.
Off the top of my head without delving too deeply into the policies of the countries, my short list would probably include Australia, New Zealand, Ireland, Austria, Switzerland, Chile, St. Lucia, and Malaysia.
You might want to delve a little deeper into policies if they are on your short list of places that would have better policies of liberty than a prospective “soviet states of america”.
Nice place to visit.
OK place to do business as a foreigner.
Not a place I would want to live for more than a few months at a time.
Never been, just looking at economic freedom rankings, thanks for the heads up though. I’ll scratch it off my list that I will likely never bother with.
“Economic freedom” – couldn’t really say, but since they are adjacent to Singapore, I’d assume their treatment of money and taxes would need to be fairly competitive to attract business to KL or Shah Alam.
“Religious freedom” and freedom of speech – they are pretty terrible.
They have a class system that heavily favors native-born ethnic Malay - who by law are required to be Muslim (over other natural-born citizens – generally Christian/Catholic ethnic Tamil Indians or Buddhist ethnic Chinese)
So in business, if you are a white westerner, you can probably do well because you have the look and background to be a face toward other international business partners.
But if you’re not, and you’re not muslim, you are bottom of the heap, socially and economically.
Last time I was there on business, there was actually coverage in the local newspapers about Christian churches being fire-bombed because the Malay-translation of the Bible referred to God as “Allah”, and it upset the Muslim majority.
EDIT: it is definitely a place worth visiting, though, for a week, or so, if you are ever in the region.
The blend of SE Asia and Muslim cultures leads to some very unique cuisine that I’ve never encountered anywhere else.
No. Certainly not as a generalization of what most people are doing.
And even the article is talking about “some” – where “some” is much less than the majority, and as was pointed out upthread, matches up with similar percentages from almost all other age groups.
I have no objection to being quoted here, or anywhere else. But when another poster edits what I wrote, and then posts their version of my words with attribution solely to me, that is a dirty and unacceptable tactic, and it pisses me off.
I think most contributors here will agree it is possible to slant, or even change completely, the meaning of what another person wrote by quoting only a portion of the other person’s words.
In the present instance, here is what I wrote in full:
“If we leave the SSA, where to go?”
Feel free to quote me in full. Or at least put in some stars or dashes or something where you have left something out. But do not make up a new quote and then attribute it to me. I would not do that to you.
Yes, it is possible to change the meaning completely by changing words. But that’s not what meed did. Meed was not trying to change the meaning and the meaning remained the same.
Despite your desire to add extraneous and/or ridiculous comparisons, removing them doesn’t change the meaning at all.
So while I generally agree that if you’re quoting you should notate where changes are made, in this case, why are you complaining so much?
Also, just fyi- you changed the quote you were quoting when you bolded the first letters of those words. No one cares because it doesn’t matter, but you still did it.
I didn’t quote it specifically to quote you, but simply to point out what I was replying to.
Then I made the mistake of answering the question I wanted to answer, but not your question, as I don’t want to refer to our country as the SSA.
This was partly why I removed “SSA” in my reply. We’re not the SSA and I don’t think we’re close to becoming the SSA. I have no intention of leaving the US and, at this very moment, can’t think of a single country on earth I would rather make a living and raise a family. There aren’t many evils here that I think I could avoid simply by moving.