Yeah, Colbert and Stewart are just hilarious...until you realize that America is burning while the 21st Century Nero fiddles with his teleprompter. If we do not change course soon, if we do not end this economic malaise and restore the beacon of light on the hill, America will burn to the ground. These modern day court jesters could care less. Heck, maybe they enjoy watching America burn? Either way, shame on them. Shame on all liberals, whose ideology is rotting America from within.
Well if you look at history, it teaches us a few things. Most people dont realize that belt-tightening by the federal government after the crash of 1929 caused another recession in 1936 and lengthened the recovery by up to a decade. It was the WRONG policy. I believe the stimulus, temporary propping of key banks and business like General Motors, and infrastructure projects are the right policies, even if the debt balloons for a while. The debt is scary to me also, but it the lesser of the evils IMO. 99% of economists agree on this. The US is fortunately still in a good position of world economic power, so the effects of large debt are not catastrophic to us right now. The reality is that the debt is mostly due to policies by the previous administration, and 2 wars. The stimulus by Obamas administration only accounts for a small fraction of the debt that has been accumulated. If we were Greece, then maybe these would be bad policies. However even Greece, France and England are now suffering low GNPs and replacing their administrations with anti-austerity leaders that dont cut government spending and welfare programs. They are realizing that they will NEVER recover with this kind of austerity in the goverment. If you knew how many US citizens were employed by the government, you would be concerned about austerity measures too. Under Romney, the unemployment rolls will undoubtedly increase due to this.
I look at this like a corporation who has great products, but the market for their products is just cratering for temporary economic reasons. When things get better, they will be in a position to excel. Is it better to let the corporation fold and then have to spend all of the money and time to rebuild the product line in another corporation, or maybe allow foreign companies to own the market? I dont think so. Its a waste of money when the capability and products are already there. This is why it was the right thing to bail-out General Motors.
We already made this mistake with robotics over the last decade, which the Japanese own. Just try to buy an industrial robot from anyone else.
It is important to protect our industries or they may be lost forever.
The US government defunding hundreds of critical programs and leaving this up to the states will be a disaster IMO. The states can barely handle medicaid now.
Think about this: Is is smarter and more efficient to consolidate a process like health care in one bureau with resident experts and management or have it duplicated and distributed 50 times?
Based on the performance of states like Florida, who cannot even execute the simplest tasks, like administering a voting process, I believe many states will be in real trouble taking on much of what the federal government does now. They just dont have the resident experts and management, and they cannot afford them even if they did.
Big government is one of the things that makes a country great. Without it, we would not have the best higher education system in the world. We would not have the clean-power hydroelectric system we have. We would not have a 99% cure for childhood Leukemia. We would not have many of the modern conveniences and advances that were developed during the ramp-up to WWII. It is WWII and goverment spending that finally lifted us out of the depression and following recession. After WWII, the following prosperity and growth of the middle class was fueled by the spending of the federal government, including the GI bill and other great programs.
A free country is great, but freedom means little if there are no opportunities. Left to the greed of the free market, opportunities decline. Its only a level playing field that enables opportunity. This country has a large population of immigrants now, much like just before and after WWII. We need these immigrants to get educated and have opportunities to succeed so that when we are ready to retire, the system can give us security. The population of this country is aging and the burden on the medical system will continue to grow larger, maybe even exponentially due to the obesity problem in this country. We need these young people to be successful in order to insure our own survival and longevity.