Conservatives are the only ones who think about the long term.
Gay people have been around for thousands of years, but gay “marriage” less than decade. No one knows how it will affect society but all of a sudden it is a huge crisis. I know some people will think that the professionally aggrieved will be satisfied and we will stop hearing about this issue, but once we have paid the danegeld we will not be so easily rid of this issue.
America has the most liberal abortion laws in the world and one of the most religious electorates. Is pretending the constitution demands abortions really a long term stable solution in a democracy? The courts have been fighting this for over 40 years, why not allow democracy to solve this problem?
Socialized medicine is unsustainable. Government spending on Medicare has gone up 67% in the last 10 years, spending on Medicaid has gone up 37.8%. Entitlements plus interest payments will take up the entire amount raised in taxes and everything else will have to be borrowed. This is less than ten years away. So the solution is to give the government more responsibility to pay for health care? The only way to keep the government solvent is to cut spending and look to have it pay less. What happened to Detroit, and Greece will happen to the US if action is not taken.
We know that a society that has low taxes and low spending can work, because that was the US for most of its history. It created the richest country in the world, and no one starved in the streets. We also know that a government that keeps spending like tomorrow will never come will eventually have to have a reckoning. The US is speeding toward that reckoning and anyone who want to keep it from happening is accused of trying to kill the poor and old.
The tax structure was pretty good back then.
This is bullshit and you know it. Don’t make me school you.
- Honesty
I can understand the conservative viewpoint without agreeing with it.
Honesty, this sort of accusation of lying is explicitly forbidden by the ‘Lying and Liars’ sticky.
Warning issued, don’t do it again.
This is silly. Detroit did not drive away business with “liberal” policies. Detroit lost its tax base in the same way that a lot of rust belt cities lost theirs through white flight, rising crime, and a number of other issues. Efforts to restore or rescue the city were not thwarted by “liberal” policies, but by two specific corrupt administrations.
Detroit made serious efforts to bring industry back into the city. Unfortunately, bringing new and overhauled GM and Chrysler plants back did not have the desired effect when those companies ran into their own problems.
Many mistakes have been made in Detroit, but claiming that they have been “liberal” mistakes is to ignore reality.
As to the unions, they are simply trying to salvage the retirements of their membership–people who worked for the city for 30 and 40 years. I am sure that it is fun to accuse them of “liberal” policies, but I do not see any “conservatives” doing anything to prevent the need for bankruptcy or to protect the people who gave their service in good faith that they would not be kicked to the curb when they were too old to work. It may be that the unions are in a hopeless situation, but your accusation would make more sense if it was not couched in partisan rhetoric that ignored the facts on the ground.
Pull this stunt again and you will receive a Warning.
[ /Moderating ]
There’s more cherry-picking in this thread than… I dunno… one of your busier cherry orchards.
I’d say that the short-term thinking endemic in American politics is not a “conservative” thing. It’s a natural flaw of Republics and similar forms of governments with officials who serve for a short period of time and are thus always seeking reelection. If I am governor of a state, anything that does not begin to show positive results before the next election is not going to benefit me. It doesn’t matter if the program I instated will go down in flames twenty years from now; I’ll be long since retired by then, and the blame will fall onto whoever is unlucky enough to be in office at the time. All that matters to me if I’m keen on being reelected is that it looks good while I’m governor. For example, “Reaganomics” was a short term boon, but has over time greatly contributed to our current economic strife. Reagan didn’t pay for it.
As long as we have Republican and Democratic representative governments, that incentivization towards short-term thinking is going to be a major issue.
“Mistakes have been made in Detroit” by whom? By liberal politicians. Crime, white flight, and greedy unions are not natural phenomenon that just hit a city like a random tornado. They are results of liberal policies instituted by liberal governments. Crime in Detroit was a big issue during elections in the 60s. Liberals thought that the police force was overzealous and campaigned on a promise to reign in the police. They won the munincipal elections and crime skyrocketed.
From 1960 to 1970 the murder rate went up 300% and the robbery rate went up 750%.
You can’t expect people to live in a city that is not safe so everyone who could started to leave, first the rich, then the middle class, then the poor. The liberal politicians drafted the laws that allowed the city unions to have binding arbitration in disputes with the city and the resultant pensions they won bankrupted the city.
Liberal policies were behind the bankruptcy of Detroit.
The record high deficit increase was under Bush’s last year not Obama and even there, it was the result of an economic implosion.
Social security can be made solvent over the long term merely be removing the cap.
Medicare and Medicaid is where you are correct. There was an opportunity to address medicare and medicaid during the oabmacare debate but when the Democrats proposed modest reforms to medicare, the Republicans jumped on them. Then when Paul Ryan tried to address it from the right side of the aisle, the Democrats returned the favor. Paul Ryan’s plan sucked but there is a compromise that could be made if everyone wasn’t trying to use medicare to bludgeon the other side.