In any case, who I “would” vote for makes no difference at all. In the long run, the success of your system, or any system, depends on the actions of millions of individuals, not on policies set at the top. You can vote for someone who will promise to implement your favored policies, but votes alone will not make them succeed. And right now, your economic policies have produced chronic and accelerating debt at all levels: government debt, which has now reached 76% of your GDP; accelerating commercial and household debt, which totals to $23 trillion dollars.

Overall, foreigners hold over $12 trillion dollars of US IOUs. To pay that off at your current rates of exports, you would have to import nothing for eight and a half years (no beamers, no cheap toys from China to sell at WalMart, no imported oil) and export at your 2006 rate of 1.4 trillion. Just to stop digging yourself into the hole, you would have to consume three quarters of a trillion dollars less in goods and services.

To put this in more perspective: you say the Canadian system only succeeds because the US provides a safety valve (unless you have specific facts of figures to back up your use of the word “pretend” in this context, it only reveals your emotional reaction to the facts). The Canadian Health Insurance systems do, in fact, contract services to American providers when Canadian hospitals experience a surge in demand, or a Canadian patient needs a highly specialized procedure or service. In other words, we practice socialized medicine, not North Korean autarky. Just as Americans (and Canadians) go to India for medical care, some Canadians go to the United States. When we do so, we pay for what we get; if you have evidence that Canadians get any kind of free ride on health care, please post a reference. But your system depends on the willingness of the Chinese (and others) to go on lending you money. In that sense, your system, not ours, cannot continue forever.

One further comment: if you respond to my request for an actual reference by saying you don’t have one, but you’ll look it up, then I have to assume you might find a reference. If you tell me to give it up and question my eyesight, then I know you have no reference, and I assume you haven’t enough confidence in your own case to look for one.

“but they do compete on the market of capital investment”

And for the best and brightest people. The US attracts the world’s best professionals and even workers… they want to come here not only for the social stability but also the taxes are reasonable (for now)… If they do great work, they can do well or even better than well… So, we end up with the best people and it has really helped our economy. Now, why move here when the taxes are going to be higher than France? Answer: you won’t.

I’m not claiming it will be a wash or anything, but it will push forward inflation that will wipe out part of the economic gains the lefties expect the poor to get out of ‘spreading the wealth’… You’ll notice the lefty redistributive countries always have crazy inflation issues that they can never seem to get a handle on….

Indeed. There are none so blind as those who refuse to see.

The problem is that these two statements contradict each other. History teaches that societies that try to spread the wealth “more equally” as you suggest — that is, socialist and communist societies — are no good at all at creating extravagant wealth. The societies that are good at that are the ones that spread wealth around not according to a government-manufactured standard of “equality” but instead, by allowing individuals equal freedom to create their own wealth. If we put the government in charge of “spreading wealth equally” we will lose our extravagant wealth not long after we lose our entrepreneurial freedom to create it. It’s fundamental economics, fundamental history. The two concepts cannot exist side by side for long in one society without one destroying the other.

That’s for the mound of information. I do have some reading to do, eh?

Thank god I’m good looking. That makes up for the lack of knowledge.

All this time I was hopeful MLMJR was the saint he has been painted to be. I wonder sometimes though, if people pursue some of these groups just to learn tactics, not ideology………….naaaaaaaa.

For God’s sake, give it up, Spragge. Are you blind?