Quote (JayKwik @ Apr 30 2013 05:20pm)
We don't need a 30 minute video for this. The absurdity of our budget problem can be simplified into one sentence: There are a lot of people in our government that only pretend to care about the fiscal health of the country, instead of actually enacting policies that show that they're interested in improving it.
We need to throw out all the clowns that just regurgitate rhetoric of the "hurr fucking durr I'm a fiscal conservative, we have to control our out of control spending hurr hurr hurr" variety and replace them with people that will make a fucking deal in good faith, regardless of party, and then build on the agreements with future improvements. If the incumbents won't even come to the table on fixing things like tax policy, military expenditures, Medicare, and/or corporate welfare then throw them out. There are office-seekers out there that know the kind of changes we have to make, and they need to be supported.
...and this, ladies and gentlemen, is indicative of the fact that people think the problem is so simple when it is anything of the sort.
Quote (me)
This mess was a long time in the making. America was doing ok with a little socialism up until about 1965, and then we got the Great Society. Then we left the gold standard completely - which further reinforced Congress' ability to spend via their pet banking cartel, and just after that, we passed the budget "control" act of 1974 - which basically absolved Congress of the annual responsibility of budgeting by instituting baseline budgeting while simultaneously ushering in the modern era of pork barrel projects. Spending never got a chance to shrink when it needed to (something lefty hero Keynes requires in his theory during "good times"), and Congress started stealing the surpluses of Social Security in earnest to pay for the Great Society and other social (and defense) programs.
We have problems that are varied and compounding. Fucking morons that like to hurl around herp and derp followed by stereotypes and false generalizations would have you believe our solutions are simple, just get rid of "those guys" and their ideas, and all will be fucking peachy.