<p>Yes, we should be spending, AND we should not raise taxes right now. Neither policy will get us where we need to be.</p>
<p>We should stop this aggressive regulation and we should protect our jobs. It should not be “tax the rich” but tax the job exporters and tax the products they bring back until it is economically unfeasable to outsource all of our manufacturing.</p>
<p>Tarrif China until they stop with the currency manipulation instead of trying to canibalize the 250,000 per year job creators.</p>
<p>As Buffet pointed out, yesterday, he does not endorse the so called Buffet plan. He is not talking about those with an income of 250000 per year, he is only talking about those who make millions a year.</p>
<p>ETA: this whole deficit argument might be a good one to have in prosperous times, but it is a ridiculous coopting of the issues when what we need right now is money in the economy. Tax the rich might be a good one to have in prosperous times, but it, too, is a political game and not a solution for the exact same reason.</p>
<p>My son has been out on the streets on this issue. My understanding is that it is more about the stranglehold corporations have had on this country for most of our history. Abraham Lincoln was very worried about this after the Civil War. So was DD Eisenhower post WWII. Eisenhower went for big taxes on the wealthy and I think it did have positive results. GI benefits meant people could go to college and buy houses. They became taxpayers. My H and I are very willing to pay higher taxes. Class warfare?! Some people don’t have enough money to feed their kids. Some elderly citizens can’t afford the bare basics of life. We bail out the banks and they stop giving loans. We bail out AIG and they keep giving huge bonuses and lavish parties. We can’t afford to let our seniors, our kids, our low income citizens and our middle class fall to ruin like this.</p>
<p>I actually happen to agree with what you just said.</p>
<p>But, we will not bring more middle class jobs back until we start to deal with the global economic situation, which requires us to stop acting as if the world is a free trade zone while other countries do not play by the same rules. We are being run over by this lunacy, and it is the middle class who are suffereing the losses.</p>
<p>You want to see our future? Take a look at Japan…perhaps not as bad, or as long, but we will follow the same path…interest rates will NOT rise for years,the stock market will not surpass its all time highs in the next 5 years, and housing is not going to visit it’s 2005 peak for 10 + years…policy won’t help, and no matter who is in office, there is little they can do…</p>
<p>^And that might be the best case scenario. Worse case might include either massive inflation or deflation (depending upon your school of thought), massive civil unrest, world-wide depression, a society of seniors who can’t afford to support themselves (perfect storm…record number of baby boomers retiring with very little savings) and certainly aren’t going to be ‘stimulating’ the economy with their meager savings, wide-spread crime, empty houses, shops and office buildings, multi-generations of families having to live under one roof…</p>
<p>I think most Americans have finally come to the conclusion we’re in deep trouble and it’s going to be a very long time before we climb out of this hole. Despite the recession, my family hasn’t taken a hit in income, nor have we decreased our spending but we’ve finally decided that we need to slow down and chunk as much money as we can into savings because things aren’t looking very pretty at the moment and who knows how much worse it will get. I feel certain that there are many others out there that feel the same way.</p>
<p>I think the reason for that is that the so-called “job creators” aren’t stupid - they’re not going to invest in business expansion until there are consumers to buy the goods and services. That’s why corporations are sitting on mountains of cash, and why cutting taxes to unprecedented lows over the past 10 years hasn’t resulted in job growth. A return of tax rates for the wealthy to Clinton-era levels won’t hurt the economy, decrease growth of GDP, or inhibit job creation. But it would lessen the annual deficit and take the pressure to “cut cut cut” off a little bit, leaving some leeway for government jobs and contracts not to be cut - something that does hurt employment, the economy, and the GDP.</p>
<p>You want to fix the economy and get the deficit under control- get our health care spending/costs to the same percentage level of GDP as our other industrialized competitors.We spend at least double the amount as a % of GDP and we do not have better health care results in comparison to longevity and more importantly years spent in poor health.
Rising Health care costs are eroding the average Americans standard of living on a year to year basis by at least $1000 a year. When the average family earns $50k that $1000 has a significant impact.</p>
<p>How do you get our health care costs down? what do you do to make that happen?</p>
<p>Kluge: I dont care if they raise the taxes. It’s not personal for me. I just think it’s a silly idea right now, given what is going on, just as I think it is ridiculous to be talking about spending cuts. Both are ill-advised, but a two party system makes these guys and gals have to come out with these “differentiating” qualities which really have very little to do with reality, and reality is: these kids need jobs! Need. Not want.</p>
<p>We are heading into another recession and it has little to do with corporations. The protesters are idiots who have no idea how to fix anything.</p>
<p>poet- I would try one of the various national systems- here for example is the latest industrialized country that went to a national system</p>
<p>In Switzerland, compulsory health insurance covers the costs of medical treatment and hospitalization of the insured. The Swiss healthcare system is a combination of public, subsidized private and totally private healthcare providers, where the insured person has full freedom of choice among the providers in his region. Insurance companies independently set their price points for different age groups, but are forbidden from setting prices based on health risk. In 2000, Switzerland topped all European countries’ health care expenditure when calculated as per capita expenditure in US dollar purchasing parity terms.[79]</p>
<p>The Swiss health care system is interesting as it was the last for-profit system in Europe. In the 1990s, after the private carriers began to deny coverage for pre-existing conditions—and when the uninsured population of Switzerland reached 5%–the Swiss held a referendum (1995) and adopted their present system.</p>
<p>The Swiss spend about 50% less than us as a % of GDP. That is the second highest in the world. I also am not against trying various systems by States to see what works best. For example if some State wants to try Singapore’s system I say go for it.</p>
<p>VT is working on a single payer health care system. Get the insurance companies out of the equation. Train more Physicians Assistants and Nurse Practitioners. There are all kinds of ways to make health care work.</p>
<p>My son is a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of a great college, who is amazingly savvy about the political system. He is not an idiot.</p>
<p>In the interviews I have seen of some of the protesters, they are adults. If they are angry, tell them to get in line. We are going into another recession because of people like them who want the government to provide for them while paying nothing for government services. </p>
<p>They appear to be seeking an end to capitalism. They are obviously not good students. Socialism and communism have failed. Russia tried communism and went bankrupt. When China was actually practicing communism they were extremely poor. Now that they have adopted capitalism, they are growing in wealth. There is only one economic theory that results in the creation of wealth and that is capitalism.</p>
<p>^^ bethievt, good luck to VT with that single payer system. Nurses are unfortunately going to find it harder to become nurse practitioners in the near future. It will be required that they have a doctoral degree first! Making them Dr. Nurse? I’m sure it won’t save anyone money making that change, especially the students.</p>
<p>How do we bring health insurance costs down? Insurance 101: Spread the risk. Increasingly, healthy people are opting out when faced with the ruinous premiums charged by private insurers. Which means the insured pool is getting sicker and sicker, which means more expensive. It also means that when the healthy uninsured get sick, they tend to get the most expensive care – at ERs – which we all then have to pay for. There’s only one sane solution: Get everyone into the pool. EVERYONE into the SAME pool.</p>
<p>What these “kids” ought to be protesting is all of the debt they will be forced to pay over their lifetimes because of the greed of senior citizens today. Corrupt organizations like the AARP have ensured that seniors get three, four, five or more times what they put into the social security system even after accounting for interest and inflation. The protesters should be holding up signs saying “Pay Your Own Debts!”</p>