There's no easy answer here and the conversation has to be had in a honest sober tone, not faggot emotional arguments where just bringing up the grown up conversation you're called someone that wants to kill old people.

Pull up a chart of medicare/medicaid/ss spend graph over last years and future projections. At some point this is going to start to crowd out other spend, like infrastructure, like military, like schools, and so on.

Personally i'm okay with cutting down on the military spend but that wont be enough in the long term. There is a inherent limit on what we spend money on, you can't have everything, if you keep one thing that's not sustainable, ultimately something else will suffer.

i'm using your 3 meals a day story.. don't get freaked out, this is your idea.. LOL

You keep bringing up generalities because you cant point to any tangible effort by Republicans to actually reform these programs.

Not to mention that social welfare problems are somehow not affordable, despite the fact that they've successfully led to an immense increase in quality of life all over the civilized world.

Yeah, it's just another version of "WE CAN'T AFFORD THINGS THAT EVERY OTHER COUNTRY IN THE WORLD DOES!" because the corporate overlords don't want it.

Europe has different demographics. There is a reason why kenya still doesnt have clean water.

Spend less or change it. It’s that simple, that’s the solution. I can keep repeating this over and over but you and half of the country refuse to hear it. That’s been the republican message for quite a while.

And there have been numerous attempts to putting this into policy. Ryan tried, others have as well do some research.

This post was edited by ofthevoid on Aug 29 2020 12:07pm

And once he sees us making this point, he'll resort to:

* "But look at those waiting lines for doctors!" because someone on the internet told him that this is a problem.
* "But people will become freeloaders!" because apparently socially democratic countries have higher unemployment rates than the USA.
* "But those people all have a degree and the degree becomes useless!" because apparently a the purpose of a college degree is to make someone feel special, instead of to prepare people for the job market.
* "But eventually you run out of other people's money to spend!" because apparently education and health-care are cheaper in a free market than when regulated as basic necessities.
* "But the free market leads to innovation, and if you don't like that you should stop using the internet!" because apparently NASA and other government sponsored corporations are not responsible for 90% of the technological advancements that the USA made in the 20th century.

I hope I have saved ofthevoid some time by making these points for him.

This post was edited by Leevee on Aug 29 2020 12:05pm

Abolish social security and employer healthcare mandates

Abolishing employer health mandates won't make any meaningful change, and will likely just make insurance more expensive as the people will lose collective bargaining power. Without a real public option employers negotiating for health insurance is probably the next best thing. The only thing that will reasonably bring down healthcare costs, besides removing the for-profit middle men, would be collectively bargaining prices.