But I can no longer restrain myself. Gotta say: You go, Gray and FredHjr!!!

(Started to go at it again tonight, but decided instead to call a temporary moratorium and pray.)

(Kidding….but it might just be a good idea…)

That’s what makes your beefing about the US defict so disingenuous.

But I just have one question: do you believe that any congress you can plausibly expect to see elected tomorrow will actually cut entitlements?

No, but there is a congress and president that can make it even worse; and take my plasma TV and give it to some one else, as you pointed out.

If not, do you want to see your country hit a debt wall in order to cut those entitlements?

Of course I do. What’s the alternative?

The bastards are getting 49% of my income. At long last, is that enough? How much do you want of my income?

How much is enough?–there is no upper limit to need and want, but there is an upper limit to my income?

What percentage of my income should the government take to make you feel good all over?

FredHjr: Kindly quote the place where I claimed you “oppressed” anyone.

Mr. Spragge is essentially saying that our country oppresses Canada and the rest of the world. That’s the overarching theme of many of his posts. We are allegedly racist, homophobic, greedy capitalist pig dogs. He thinks we would be better if we were more like Canadians.

No thank you. And it has been awhile since I took my money up to Canada to spend it. And it will be a long time before I do so again.

You can.

But I see now way you will ever grow your way out of your debts while your government borrows half a trillion dollars in one month.

That’s why we have to cut entitlements and wealth transfer payments.

As I showed above, my family lives on 30% of my income. Why would I vote for a president who will take away more?

What more can they take?

Especially Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, welfare and the new prescription drug benefit.

I’m against entitlements as well. Cut spending!

I’m a working father of two with a stay-at-home wife. I make good money. I have private health insurance for the family; private dental insurance; I have a private retirement fund 401K.

Beyond paying my families healthcare and saving for my own retirement, I am a producer and I get taxed heavily with state, federal, local, home tax, gross receipts tax, social security tax, payroll tax, vehicle tax and local sales tax.

Added all together, I am taxed 49% of my income; then add private insurance and saving for my, and my wife’s retirement and you’ll see my family actually lives on 30% of my income.

Are you saying I’m ‘consuming’ 30% of my income plus $1500 of government services? Really?

Like what?

Cut gov spending and cut my taxes and the government will come out ahead!

On your comment about the US federal deficit, you read the story I linked to with care, you will discover that:

1) Your government ran up a trillion dollars in debt between July 21 and October 31

2) Your government only started to disburse the money from the $700 billion dollar bailout last week, so that the vast majority of the new debt has yet to come from the bailout program.

On all the other issues you have raised, we can probably agree to disagree, as you agree to disagree with so many of your compatriots, and even some fellow conservatives. But when it comes to debts, we have, or I assume we have, largely shared values. You can’t go into debt indefinitely. Recovering from a debt of ten or eleven trillion dollars, with five trillion run up over the past eight years, will not prove easy, and I see no way you can make it painless. Yet neither do I see any way you can justify passing it to your children. I think you have to keep this, among many other things, in mind when you choose your new president.

FredHjr: Last month, your government borrowed half a trillion dollars. In a single month. In effect, your government borrowed about eighty dollars from every man, woman and child on the planet; eighty dollars the rest of us did not use to start businesses, buy homes, educate our kids, or otherwise invest in ourselves. Last year, you imported about 700 billion dollars more than you exported, and you now owe a total of twelve trillion dollars to people outside the US, which again means the rest of us have less to invest in starting businesses, educating our kids, and so on. And that means we have less ability to buy what you want to sell, which creates a vicious circle. At some point, you have to end it. In the most basic capitalist terms, you cannot go into debt forever.

Regardless of whatever else come our way in the years to come, whether we need to worry about peak oil or global warming or any of a million other problems, at some point you have to stop consuming more than you produce.

As for what I write and your reaction to it: I have written repeatedly of the reality of your situation. I have written about where the logic of that situation, and your current course, will lead you. But I have not ever told you what to do. I have endorsed no candidates for public office in your country.

dane: Dane, you can’t expand any economic pie indefinitely. Money buys three things in our culture: people’s time, resources, and knowledge. We only have so much of the first two. Besides, when we have an unlimited supply of anything, it eventually ends up leaving the money economy. Look, for example, at software. Precisely because we can expand the supply of a piece of software indefinitely, you can get a very good operating system licensed under the General Public License without paying any money. Accusations of class warfare have little if anything to do with this; it has to do with debts that you have bound yourselves to pay. If you believe you can grow your way out of your debts, fine. But I see now way you will ever grow your way out of your debts while your government borrows half a trillion dollars in one month.

I was just going to finish by saying your words show a very shallow knowledge, not really the best upon which to base conclusions, instruct what we need to do, and who would be a better President. But then, many of our citizens — probably most of them, are just as clueless.

PS Your statement earlier:

“….didn’t think it would get this bad: in under a month, the US federal debt has increased by five hundred billion dollars. At that rate, you would double your current debt in a little over one and a half years…”

Once again you extrapolate without understanding FACT:
Five hundred billion was the “bailout pkg.” Congress passed in an attempt to loosen frozen credit lending to allow our economy to function before it prevented the operation of business all the way down to the smallest businesses.

To use that as a measure of an increasing rate of indebtedness is absurd and only indicates more ignorance of what has happened, and the measure taken in effort to “fix” the problem. How you can interpret this as a new “rate of spending” only reveals your complete lack of understanding.

(Ugh! Another long-winded post, but felt compelled to reply to Mr. Spragge)

PSS Mr. Spragge, Pls. don’t let us scare you away from neo’s posts — she’s just terrific! (which is why we all come here)

The rest of us readers are just passionate and do enjoy spirited “conversation.” And not sure whether you are aware or not — most of us in this virtual community are ex-liberals who each for our own reasons, at some point looked at the world more clearly, moving us to the Right and what we believe is a perspective more in tune with reality.