Hillary as diplomat is definitely dicey at best. Really what I find the biggest issue about Hillary Clinton is that we are basically getting Bill Clinton part 2. Now love him or hate him, I think we can all agree that there is a point when you really just need to let it go and let other schools of thought/fresh ideas come around.

Absolutely; let's not go back to that awful time in the 90s with unemployment at under 4%, stable inflation and an actual surplus in the budget. :P

Hey, if that can honestly happen, I'm all for it :P

Sanders: He's the democratic equivalent of Ron Paul. Our country has a spending problem. He wants to give everyone 'free' college education, 'free' health care, 'free' everything. It's not free, someone has to pay for it, and that's us, the tax payers. He wants to drastically raise spending at a time when we've raised our debt ceiling three times in a row because we can't stop spending money. We're drowning in debt. The ONLY thing he's got right is the corruption big money has on our political system. If he was elected, he'd be a lame duck president from day one because he's so extreme left that nobody in congress would cooperate with him.

How is it that the richest nation on earth is drowning in debt, even without providing for basic things like education and healthcare (yes, of course it's not free, but the idea is that such things are provided even for people who can't afford them). Honest question - what's the money being spent on?

This link is pretty good:http://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/102914/top-reasons-behind-us-national-debt.asp

The tl:dr version: healthcare, social security, defense, and everything else is lumped into others.

I am a firm believer that the Nordic model cannot be applied to the US because the US is not a Nordic country: it's very different in some very key areas which make a huge difference.

I've heard this a lot, but no one has ever been able to give a convincing reason as to why. I've heard "Because the US is much bigger" and "Because the US is much more diverse". But those are reasons without reasons.

Can you elaborate on these key areas that make a huge difference, and why?

Sanders: He's the democratic equivalent of Ron Paul. Our country has a spending problem. He wants to give everyone 'free' college education, 'free' health care, 'free' everything. It's not free, someone has to pay for it, and that's us, the tax payers. He wants to drastically raise spending at a time when we've raised our debt ceiling three times in a row because we can't stop spending money. We're drowning in debt. The ONLY thing he's got right is the corruption big money has on our political system. If he was elected, he'd be a lame duck president from day one because he's so extreme left that nobody in congress would cooperate with him.

How is it that the richest nation on earth is drowning in debt, even without providing for basic things like education and healthcare (yes, of course it's not free, but the idea is that such things are provided even for people who can't afford them). Honest question - what's the money being spent on?

1. Military
2. Social Security
3. Infrastructure
4. Government
5. Medicare

Basically, we're spending much more money per year than we're bringing in, and its unsustainable. To put it into an analogy of family spending:

• Annual family income: $21,700
• Money the family spent: $38,200
• New debt on the credit card: $16,500
• Outstanding balance on the credit card: $142,710
• Total budget cuts: $385

Every time we raise the debt ceiling, we're pushing off the responsibility of the debt repayment, with interest, onto the future generations. Eventually, it's going to catch up to us and we're going to get crushed. It's time to be fiscally responsible, so what we NEED to do is raise taxes, cut spending like crazy, and use the difference in income to pay down the debt and get our income to expenses ratio inverted. The last thing we need right now is to add on more spending.

Every time we raise the debt ceiling, we're pushing off the responsibility of the debt repayment, with interest, onto the future generations. Eventually, it's going to catch up to us and we're going to get crushed. It's time to be fiscally responsible, so what we NEED to do is raise taxes, cut spending like crazy, and use the difference in income to pay down the debt and get our income to expenses ratio inverted. The last thing we need right now is to add on more spending.

And sadly that will never happen because no politician wants the career suicide of being "the guy that raised everyone's taxes and cut everyone's benefits.

I am a firm believer that the Nordic model cannot be applied to the US because the US is not a Nordic country: it's very different in some very key areas which make a huge difference.

I've heard this a lot, but no one has ever been able to give a convincing reason as to why. I've heard "Because the US is much bigger" and "Because the US is much more diverse". But those are reasons without reasons.

Can you elaborate on these key areas that make a huge difference, and why?

Well, let's take Finland for example. It has the best education system in the world. They pretty much do everything opposite to the US. Why can't America adopt the finnish education system? We should, but the system of education extends far beyond just the school systems in place. In America, people generally hate school and its 'cool' to hate it. American parents generally don't care about the education of their kids either because its not a high value / priority for them. These educational attitudes and social standards get passed down from generation to generation, and it becomes the societal standard. Then there's the teachers in our schools. In america, we have a saying, "If you can't do, you teach.", meaning teachers are pulled from the lower echelons of our skilled work force. In Finland, it's the total opposite. The top 1% of a class go on to become teachers. The teachers are selected from the cream of the crop. Teachers are highly respected professions which are on par with lawyers and doctors in America, but American teachers are treated as glorified baby sitters, which they pretty much have to be because parents raise shitty kids. Add on top of that the fact that America is highly diverse. We've got people living here with backgrounds from all around the world, and with those backgrounds, come very different value systems. Teaching methods / techniques which work for some people don't work for others. Nobody is the same, so an effective blanket teaching methodology is impossible. Finland on the other hand, is 92% homogenous. Everyone thinks and acts the same, relatively speaking. What you do effectively for one person has a 92% chance of being effective for the next person. Everyone comes from roughly the same socio-economic background as well, so there really aren't poor inner city schools with struggling students. Finland is also a much smaller country, with a population of about 5 million, whereas america is pushing 300 million. So, it's harder for a massive school system like America's to adapt to change through policy.

This is just the disparity between education systems. To get America on the same page, we'd have to have a massive shift in cultural values to make education a key priority across the board. That's not something you can just throw money at or pass a law to change, so its 'really hard' and few people are going to try to change it. The difference in the education systems is just a microcosm of the differences in all of the systems between america and nordic countries.

Every time we raise the debt ceiling, we're pushing off the responsibility of the debt repayment, with interest, onto the future generations. Eventually, it's going to catch up to us and we're going to get crushed. It's time to be fiscally responsible, so what we NEED to do is raise taxes, cut spending like crazy, and use the difference in income to pay down the debt and get our income to expenses ratio inverted. The last thing we need right now is to add on more spending.

And sadly that will never happen because no politician wants the career suicide of being "the guy that raised everyone's taxes and cut everyone's benefits.

Well, someone's gotta do it. If that's how it is, someone should take one for the team, sacrifice their personal career for the long term betterment of the country and its economic health.

Every time we raise the debt ceiling, we're pushing off the responsibility of the debt repayment, with interest, onto the future generations. Eventually, it's going to catch up to us and we're going to get crushed. It's time to be fiscally responsible, so what we NEED to do is raise taxes, cut spending like crazy, and use the difference in income to pay down the debt and get our income to expenses ratio inverted. The last thing we need right now is to add on more spending.

First of all, that's not what the debt ceiling is. Raising the debt ceiling just means that you pay back the money you already spent.

Second of all, what you're talking about is called austerity, and while it sounds great in principle, in reality, it never works. (Ask Greece or Ireland).

The problem is that when you raise taxes, cut spending and so on, the economy comes to a grinding halt, because everyone is too poor to do anything other than stay at home and be miserable (or get angry and start riots, etc). So your tax take plummets and the interest on your debt overtakes any hope you have of paying it off.

You simply cannot apply the same ideas that make sense for a home or a business at a national scale. It's like Newtonian physics. It works perfectly well at a scale we are used to (humans, cars, buildings, etc) but it completely breaks down when things get either very small (particles) or very large (stars, black holes, etc).

So, yes. As insanely counter-intuitive as it sounds, on a national level, you do spend your way out of debt. How do we know this? Because it's worked before (the new deal).

The problem is that these days, no-one feels they should pay taxes. Taxes on the very wealthy are at an all-time low, and multinational companies are legally obligated to avoid as much tax as possible by routing profits through low tax systems and costs through high tax systems.

Bernie's plan might actually work. Jesus, at the very least, it's something different.

You simply cannot apply the same ideas that make sense for a home or a business at a national scale. It's like Newtonian physics. It works perfectly well at a scale we are used to (humans, cars, buildings, etc) but it completely breaks down when things get either very small (particles) or very large (stars, black holes, etc).

Every time we raise the debt ceiling, we're pushing off the responsibility of the debt repayment, with interest, onto the future generations. Eventually, it's going to catch up to us and we're going to get crushed. It's time to be fiscally responsible, so what we NEED to do is raise taxes, cut spending like crazy, and use the difference in income to pay down the debt and get our income to expenses ratio inverted. The last thing we need right now is to add on more spending.

First of all, that's not what the debt ceiling is. Raising the debt ceiling just means that you pay back the money you already spent.

Second of all, what you're talking about is called austerity, and while it sounds great in principle, in reality, it never works. (Ask Greece or Ireland).

The problem is that when you raise taxes, cut spending and so on, the economy comes to a grinding halt, because everyone is too poor to do anything other than stay at home and be miserable (or get angry and start riots, etc). So your tax take plummets and the interest on your debt overtakes any hope you have of paying it off.

You simply cannot apply the same ideas that make sense for a home or a business at a national scale. It's like Newtonian physics. It works perfectly well at a scale we are used to (humans, cars, buildings, etc) but it completely breaks down when things get either very small (particles) or very large (stars, black holes, etc).

So, yes. As insanely counter-intuitive as it sounds, on a national level, you do spend your way out of debt. How do we know this? Because it's worked before (the new deal).

The problem is that these days, no-one feels they should pay taxes. Taxes on the very wealthy are at an all-time low, and multinational companies are legally obligated to avoid as much tax as possible by routing profits through low tax systems and costs through high tax systems.

Bernie's plan might actually work. Jesus, at the very least, it's something different.

Greece has no economy. They haven't had one for 15+ years. The reason their economy sucks is because everything globalized. It's cheaper for companies to produce their products in countries where labor is cheap and legal laws are lax. When it costs you $0.45 to produce a pair of jeans and you can sell them for $65, the margin is so large that you're practically printing money. Other countries with textile industries saw them vanish. So, your local economy becomes either a 90% service oriented economy or it becomes a tourism based economy. When your country doesn't produce anything anymore, your economy will be slowly bleeding out its capital until there's nothing left. When your social programs depend on tax revenue to finance them, and your tax revenue depends on a strong vibrant economy, to fund those in turn, and your economy goes south due to global competition for labor and production, everything across the board will suffer. That's how you get cases like Greece. In the past, the greeks would just inflate their currency by printing off more dracmas, which is really just another form of taxation. However, they switched to the Euro currency, which has controls on it because everyone in the EU gets taxed when the currency inflates. One country can't just print their way out of their financial woes anymore, so Greece is having hard times now because what they did in the past no longer flies.

I believe austerity can work. You have to cut programs which don't help the country stay alive, and I think a good place to start would be with cutting military spending. You don't need to reduce the wages of the troops, you can reduce the number of troops you have on active duty, switch units to reserve, stop wasting money on the F-35 JSF program, quit building tanks the army doesn't want or need, and reduce the military responsibility footprint of your global empire. Start shutting down bases. At the same time, raise taxes and start invoking policies which promote and strengthen your own national economy. Start imposing blanket tarrifs on goods coming into the country from abroad. Use a scaled ramping percentage, where you put a 5% fee on year one, 10% on year two, 15% on year three, and put a flat fee on commodities less than $1. The bedrock of our society is going to depend on a talented work force, and that comes from a solid education system, so we need to invest heavily in STEM education and programs like NASA to inspire future generations. When we get our economy to thrive, we can gradually reduce our tax rate, which in turn increases economic growth.

Whatever course of action we end up taking, it has to be different from the current course we're on because that eventually leads to financial ruin. Look no further than the over extended roman empire for the consequences of that.

You simply cannot apply the same ideas that make sense for a home or a business at a national scale. It's like Newtonian physics. It works perfectly well at a scale we are used to (humans, cars, buildings, etc) but it completely breaks down when things get either very small (particles) or very large (stars, black holes, etc).

Do you have any links to a thorough explanation of why this is? I know at least one person who is much better versed in economics (and indeed, an entire political party in Canada!) who believes otherwise.

It's exactly as he described. Our markets/hiring/spending practices are speculative, and Austerity destroys them and crashes the market.

Spending for effect is a key principle of Keysnian economics. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keynesian_economics