Why we shouldn't pay off the national debt

So why is it that the dollar has been low for a good while now, but we're still seeing record trade and current account deficits?

Edited to add: it's a shame my posts seem to be invisible to Alby. It would have been interesting to see a nuanced discussion about the relationship between deficit spending and interest rates.

I'm with you on that 100%. Give me back my tax dollars which fund the schools and I'll just enroll my children into Private School. Sounds good to me...

Public education was intstituted for the same reason as public health initiatives -- it's for the good of the community. I mention public health because it provides the most clear-cut case for why paying taxes and pooling benefits can help even the people who are not helped directly.

Public health initiatives were instituted because rich people discovered it was darned inconvenient catching smallpox and other unpleasant diseases, and having the best doctor in the world didn't do anything to keep diseases from spreading amongst people who didn't have medical care, and who, annoyingly, lived in the same towns as the people who could afford doctors.

Likewise, public education started as a system to benefit the community as a whole. It's a benefit to employers, because it provides an educated workforce to work in their factories, offices, etc. It's a benefit to other members of the community such as shopkeepers and service providers, because it provides more gainfully employed consumers of goods and services instead of shiftless, crime-prone indigents with no skills. If only the wealthy could afford education for their children, even the wealthy would see a decline in the standard of living.

In addition, public education is an important part of the equality-of-opportunty social contract. Socialists want to see an equality of outcomes: even if you're an utterly worthless member of the workforce, you should still have a wonderfully comfortable standard of living. While that view has largely gone out of favor (and rightly so), even conservatives have traditionally supported equality of opportunity. That is, no matter whether someone's parents are billionaires or paupers, they should still have the same opportunity to succeed. It's then up to each individual to succeed or fail on their own merits.

If you jettison even this part of the American social contract in favor of privatization, I think you will find that capitalism is a much more fragile system than you thought. The moment people stop believing in equality of opportunity, they start believing in social class: that there are inherent haves and have nots. If they believe that, it's only logical for the have nots (who have no shot at succeeding on their own merits if there is no opportunity) to elect socialists or even overthrow the government. Review the last couple of hundred years of European history to see all the fun that can result.

The question I have is, is Alby real or is he a caricature?

I find it hard to believe someone could be so completely ignorant and incapable of engaging in rational dialogue -- so much so, that I'm convinced Alby is a construct of an otherwise normal individual. If so, was Alby created as a caricature to discredit those with a similar viewpoint or as a troll to satisfy a pathological need to torture a liberal forum audience?

~Ulrika~

Alby is Alby. We all know what that equates to.

Anyone who is not inline with his political beliefs or suggests an alternate idea is quickly dismissed as a damn hippie, which I thought went out of style along with Alby's fade. *shrugs*

Anyway.. I think he's more a caricature, than a real person. We see what side he wants us to.

I've often wondered that about Alby when reading some of his more extreme posts.

You're probably right. I'd say it's more likely it's to torture people who respond with traditional liberal ideas, because that's what he seems to take pleasure in when he responds to replies.

I think we've gotten off on a tangent. Public Health, thats another debate. Public Education, now lets kick it.

Public Education is a Local Issues 1st, a State issue 2nd, and a Federal issue 3rd. This is where you are misguided with your beliefs on making Public Education better.

First off, there are about 60,000,000 school age children in the United States. From your view point of The Federal Gov't paying for school education at a reasonable level of around $10,000 per student, it would cost $600,000,000,000/Billion dollars. Not really a good idea. That would eat up almost 50% of the money the Gov't collects in revenue every year. So you gotta go back to plan A, which is have the local governments fund public education.

So now you end up with a system where the local County taxes the population to afford education. What the county can't pay, it requests from the State. What the state can't pay, it requests it from the Federal Govt. By the time the request gets to Uncle Sam, it should be pennies on the dollar, not dollar for dollar as some lazy-panhandler Democrats would wish. And like I said before, the best way for the Local Gov't to pay for education is to promote growth of business in their community. Because the more money within that locale, the more money for schools. Capitalism Yields Education, which feeds back into Capitalism.

You see, the problem isn't with how much money the Federal Gov't is or isn't give to schools for education. The problem is when will liberals stop holding out their hand to government looking for solutions instead of spending time and effort on resolving the problem themselves? If you don't like the result of No Child Left Behind, fix it locally. Divert all Lottery ticket profits to schools. Send local officals to the EU or Asia and solicite companies to setup shop in your town. There are a million things that can be done without waiting, fussing, and coming up empty handed.

Thats the difference with Republicans and Democrats. Republicans see a problem and they fix it. Democrats see a problem and they look around for somebody else to fix it. Social Security is the prime example. Republicans see a looming problem and are working on getting the system fixed. Democrats are running around claiming "There is No Problem" and just wanna sit around and do nothing. Yet they fail to address how in the world they plan on paying for a all the people drawing Social Security Checks when the numbers go from around 30/million to 60/million starting in 2008-2017. But ohh well, I suppose that explains why the Democrats don't hold a single position of power in the Government anymore. The Republicans have taken over, The Democratic Party is Dead .

Your from San Francisco, you'll never understand so it pointless to even speak to you.
Let me know when you visit "The Real America".

See, you start to make sense and portray your ideas well, then you say something like this and crap all over whatever goodwill towards yourself you may have created.

Oh and could you let me in on when San Francisco decided to secede from the union? I must have missed it while getting high with my hippy friends and screwing up Real American's lives.

That is correct Juro. And your babble about Rainbow Economics just doesn't fly.

Keynes is your God. My God is Hayek. And Hayek's KungFu is much stronger then yours.

Alby makes some good points, I don't agree with everything, of course. But the fact that you're actually (at some points here) having a pretty two sided discussion about the topic proves that there's at least some truth to what he's saying. Why bother continuing to respond if someone isn't making any sense? There's good arguments both for and against debt here but it's lost in the crap.

It's too bad these debates always degenerate into personal or group attacks, it ruins what would otherwise be a pretty good brainstorming discussion people could learn from. You all suck.

And that should either officially kill this thread OR flame it up again!

Edit: "You all suck. " ....HMMMM am I detecting a new forum signature here?

What a relief! Thank your respective diety or lack thereof that we have Alby, the great one, to assign beliefs for us. You know me so well, you *must* know what I'm thinking right now Alby.

You are right, we always get side tracked with attacking one another that good ideas get lost in the mix.

I do. Your thinking about a nice phat Philly Steak and Cheese with CheeseWiz..

My beliefs? I agree entirely that education is mainly a local issue. I think the federal government should largely stay out of it. My post was in response to you saying it would be a good idea to just privatize schools entirely. I guess you were kidding.

Let's review No Child Left Behind: Bush campaigns for election on a massive new education program that places vast new mandates on local school districts, but promises to send a bunch of money to the local districts to pay for it. I thought that was a stupid idea in 2000, and I think it's a stupid idea today: the states are much better able to handle education reform than the federal government.

When the time came to actually pass legislation, all of the new mandates and regulations got passed, but the school districts didn't get the cash they were promised to implement them. So now, thanks to the heroic, problem-fixing Republicans you're lauding, the school districts actually have less money to spend on tasks like actually educating children. How did this help exactly?

Back in the days before the Republicans in Washington got drunk with power, they were the ones complaining about things like unfunded mandates. Now they're the ones responsible for them.



Actually, they're working to make it worse. Taking a program that is in trouble because it's too expensive and adding vast, expensive new parts to it doesn't even resemble fixing it. Now, even many Republicans are backing off the disastrous plan.