if you wish to stop children paying for todays debts… stop giving credit. make people pay on the spot for services, for property.
thats what we did before banks started offering home/school/business loans
if you want to buy your house without being able to afford it, you require credit. your debt then goes to the children when you die. did they gain nothing from having a house over their heads? should they be given a free pass since the person who contracted the debt is dead?
Everyone knock off the personal shots.
[ /Moderating ]
This is incorrect.
point taken. however i found some interesting reading material on the subject
“If title to the home was transferred from the estate to its heirs, the duty to repay the loan fell upon those new owners. However, those new owners shouldn’t have a legal and personal obligation to repay that loan. If the loan goes into default, the lender would foreclose on the home and sell the home to satisfy the debt. The credit history of the current owners of the home should not be affected.”
which in my eyes means that the bank gets to keep all money already paid for the house, and gets to foreclose to resell it for full value, unless the children wish to take on the debt.
keep the house, keep the debt. lose the house, debt is gone. sound right?
and to tie that to health care, if dad gets heart surgery, lives for 10 more years than he would have, and leaves the debt to the taxpayers when he dies… would you be the one to tell him he cant have surgery because he cant afford it? i personally am happy to pay taxes that assist people in need, maybe i am in the minority
I don’t think that’s right either. As I understand it, when a bank forecloses and sells a property, they keep only enough money from the sale to satisfy the unpaid portion of the loan.
Consider a worst case, a home with a single mortgage payment remaining when the owner dies. If the heirs choose not to make that payment, the bank can foreclose, keep enough money to make that final payment, and return the rest to the heirs.
Which would still kinda suck. I don’t see any incentive for the bank to really seek the best sale price for the home over and above what they’re owed. But the heirs don’t get completely screwed as you describe.
Interesting. Most adults wouldn’t dare take a lollipop away from a baby. Most adults would feel guilt (nevermind the irritation of the baby’s crying and screaming.)
But amazingly, we are absolutely fine with increasing THEIR tax burden to pay interest on the debt. How nice we are clever enough to engineer a financial scheme where they pay extra % of THEIR income to service OUR debt the Chinese hold. Also, the older Americans (who happen to hold treasury bills) also appreciate it that the young ones are slaving hard to keep the interest payments coming on their investment portfolio of govt bonds.
You’re killing the children with your generosity and kindness.
At least with a parent’s house, children can make a decision to walk away from it. Tomorrow’s citizens don’t have the choice – unless they start a revolution and install a new government that disowns the $13 trillion debt. Saudi Arabia, China, and Japan wouldn’t be happy with that. If that happens, say goodbye to imported fuel for our cars, electronics, etc. China might even shoot us over a nuclear warhead as a parting gift.
waits for the obiligatory “wont somebody PLEASE think of the children!”
Ok, if the nation wants a health care safety net, that’s an admiral goal.
At least design a system that pays for itself and adds zero public debt. This requires honest caps on spending.
We have not mastered that ability. Medicare is insolvent. Social Security is insolvent. Our track record of government shows we are dipshit stupid when it comes to engineering entitlements with fiscal responsibility.
so, by that argument, nothing is better than something that isn’t 100% efficient?
Less than 100% efficient equals “insolvent”? :dubious:
this would be an example of 100% efficiency
perhaps we should try to agree on an amount of in-efficiency that is acceptable. for example every 10 million spent on health care, 9 million has to be paid back. the rest is infused through taxes, income or sales or sin tax. the fairness of taxing isnt what im after tho, so please skip the flame over that 
plus… why are we requiring health care to be solvent? i certainly dont want the system to be taken advantage of to make some doctors rich… but i also dont see why we cant just write off some things as required to live our standard of life
What I believe you’re hearing is the sentiment that the government simply can’t pay out in the aggregate, over time, more than it takes in. The Senate bill, for example, has an $871B price tag, in theory offset by expense reductions elsewhere. That would be a form of what you’re advocating.
Skeptics (like me) point out that about $465B of these offsets (among other illusions) are supposedly permanent Medicare reductions, and we’re supposed to ignore the fact that simlar cuts, also targeted as program offsets, were ignored and not voted in for the past seven years.
So, minor inefficiency, I suppose, is one thing. Asking “how you really gonna pay for that?” given the Feds’ track record of efficiency (combined with their refusal to reduce entitlements elsewhere) is a reasonable question.
alot of the issue our government has with fiscal responsibility is the elected officials debt to the special interests that got them elected. if joe blow(hard) didn’t have to get a 300mil contract for Fedcare USA (made up names of course) then perhaps he would be more free to vote according to responsibility. some bills should have no pork rules maybe?
The whole thing has to be solvent because if the money runs out, there is no health care.
Can’t you just keep adding to the debt again and again? No, you can’t. Today it’s at $13 trillion. Can you increase it to $20 trillion? $100 trillion? You can’t do that because eventually there’s a certain point that other countries (“investors”) will no longer trust that debt – Saudi Arabia, China will think those American debts are so big that they are worthless. If I’m a Saudi guy, why would I want to trade my precious oil for your worthless dollars? I’d rather trade my oil for Euros or Japanese Yen.
For example, an MRI scanner runs on electricity. Electricity is generated by power plants fed with imported oil. If our debt becomes so high that USA dollars crashes in value, we will not be able buy enough oil energy cheaply to power our appliances, video games, and MRI scanner. Instead of MRI scanner costing $3000 per scan. It now costs $20,000 per scan (because electricity is now very expensive). It’s a price so high that you effectively create a situation where the MRI scanner might as well not exist at all – therefore no health care. We depend on the outside world to trust the value of our dollars and our IOUs – otherwise, we don’t have the materials necessary to “deliver” health care.
There is no magic “black hole” to unload debt and “write it off.” The only ways to ignore the debt are to default on it or install a new government that disowns it (which is just another way of defaulting on it).
Getting back to stealing from the next generation (the children)… let’s say we incur extra debt to pay for our healthcare, which then results in children (and grandchildren) paying extra 5% of their paycheck as taxes towards interest payments. That’s 5% they couldn’t spend on their own health care. Isn’t it presumptuous for you to consider that your healthcare is more important than theirs?
If you create a system that pays for itself as it goes, you don’t burden the next generation with costs they didn’t even vote to pay for. In other words, consider how you treat the “weak” as you mentioned earlier.
follow the money…
if our nation doesn’t create enough money to pay for its debts, is that because of our health care? our social services? or is it because someone has padded a bill with pork that goes directly into someones pocket.
A lot of you gloomier Guses ignore factors which we might as well think of as the efficiency of progress. Or the progress of efficiency.
Take the aforementioned MRI, lately the techno-darling of medicine. It’s a sumbitch, no two ways about it. Also very, very expensive. Hence, factoring in costs for increasing demand for this machine by patients gives a very hefty price tag for the future.
Except that the machine is likely to get cheaper. Nerds will tinker, improvements will be made, and maybe, just maybe, a really bright bulb will discover something that can make the MRI as common as the desktop computer. Hell, I’d love to have one! (And my own Hubble and an electron microscope, if you’re listening, Santa…)
Every new milestone discovery is expensive at first, you are likely to overestimate the expense of the discovery if you don’t factor in the efficiency of progress.
And then, of course, there is another unquantifiable factor, and that is the health of our citizenry. Is anyone fool enough to deny that healthy citizens are, by definition, more likely to be productive? More efficient than someone who should have had his gallstones removed six months ago, but couldn’t afford it? Need we belabor that point, that treating our citizens well is likely to have hard, bottom line benefits? One would be ashamed to need to.
Will such efficiencies of progress make our debt worries evaporate? Probably not, but I don’t know, and the unquantifiable makes a poor ground for argument beyond educated guess.
But if there is a reasonable chance that it may and that it will bring great benefit to our fellow Americans, oughtn’t we take such a risk? A poker player will say calling a five dollar bet to get a ten to chance to win isn’t a good bet, but if there’s a thousand dollars in the pot, its a darn good bet, even if the odds are against you.
And, of course, there are other possible efficiencies of budget to consider. Perhaps the next time somebody wants to build a super-whizzbang jet fighter that doesn’t work in the rain, they can hold a bake sale. Or the next time they want to go haring off on a military adventure, they think twice. And again, twice. Few more, for good measure.
It already is cheaper, at least in some parts of the world. My doctor said I needed an MRI, among other things, last week, so I went round to several clinics here in Oaxaca. All the clinics are privately owned and not, AFAIK, given any government funding. At least three offered MRI, ultrasound, and so on. I could walk into a clean, cheerful looking clinic, fill out a form, walk into the MRI room and get inside the gadget, and have the results later that afternoon. The cost at all three clinics ranged from 3000 to 5000 pesos - US$240- $400. Ultrasound was US$100-120. The owners obviously are making a profit or they wouldn’t stay in business.
You LIE! It is impossible to get good quality health care anywhere but in America! And certainly not at a discount price. We have the best possible care in the whole entire world that’s why we have to pay so much. Or maybe you’re just deluded into thinking you’re getting quality health care at a fraction of the cost. That’s it! You have brain damage due to your poor quality health care. Whew, glad I figured that one out.
As an aside, if electricity ever costs that much to run an MRI it’s game over man, we’ve already lost. **Ruminator ** where did you get your info that most of our electric production comes from imported oil? This site says the percent was only 1.1 for 2008 (seems a bit low to me). Do you have a better data source?
I don’t have an exact source at the moment. I’ve read various stats in several places (books about energy crisis, books about balance of trade, books about American’s involvment in the Middle East.) I know it’s not 1%.
Keep in mind that yes, many plants run on coal or (natural gas) but that coal doesn’t just pop up out of the ground at the electric plant ready to throw into the furnaces. Petroleum plays an indirect (but substantial) part in the infrastructure: mining the coal, transporting it, etc. (If the USA wants to generate “free” energy decoupled from oil, we can recruit the scientists to build a giant boiler over Yellowstone’s thermal gysers. Only problem is that one unpredictable volcanic eruption would wipe out that capital investment.) Also, we are able to use natural gas in power plants because we don’t have to divert it to other processes that use cheap oil. If oil skyrocketed, natural gas would also skyrocket because we’d try to find more situations to substitute natural gas in place of oil. Energy has to come from somewhere or the standard of living goes down.
In any case, people should be educated enough to envision how accumulating debt comes at a price. Debt is not some “abstract” thing that’s displayed on a billboard as trivia. It’s a real obligation to real bondholders (both foreign and domestic) that affects the prices we pay at the grocery store for food and price of imported energy. It affects the interest rates we pay for cars, mortgages, and business loans. People like noxxer say, “i also dont see why we cant just write off some things”. He thinks debt is something abstract that we can just wish away by waving a magic wand.