Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
Increasing debt is a structural problem that takes generations to accumulate, and probably generations to fully manifest itself. Like many of our core problems today, it remains insidious and not all that relevant to today's workers, investors or retirees.
Debt is one of those things that doesn't seem relevant...until it is. Surely you've seen how quickly things changed in Greece. I certainly agree reducing debt takes a long time and requires long term thinking, which is hard. That's the problem America has had for a long time. No one wants to do anything hard.
Quote:
Originally Posted by ohio_peasant
There's an even deeper issue here: America's unique advantages, its primacy in the world, allows it to hide or delay the implications of runaway debt. Forever? No, of course not. But as I've been grousing in the Investment forum, for some reason America continues to enjoy unparalleled advantage as global engine of profit, as global center for investment. While this holds, the US dollar will hold, and while that holds, the mounting debt will continue as looming burden... looming, yes, but not quite yet an actual catastrophe.
I agree with all of that. But our situation can change on a dime. Americans don't believe that. People like me are written off as alarmist or paranoid.
Quote:
Originally Posted by ohio_peasant
As for your brief statement about solutions, I'm curious, and invite you to please lay out a summary. Indeed, it would be good for all of us regular-contributors to maybe take the time to write out our personal "manifesto".
I think you've read my posting history enough to guess.
My biggest pet peeve is health care. I really think the approach to health care in this video--everyone comprehensively working to prevent chronic disease before it happens--is the way to go. Fighting about how much the bill is and who should pay for it is a huge waste of energy.
Reducing health care costs would have a significant positive effect on the deficit:
How many years does it take to save enough to buy a house?
How many years does it take to save enough to buy a car outright?
How many years (in USA) does it take to pay off a student loan?
I think you've read my posting history enough to guess.
My biggest pet peeve is health care. I really think the approach to health care in this video--everyone comprehensively working to prevent chronic disease before it happens--is the way to go. Fighting about how much the bill is and who should pay for it is a huge waste of energy.
Reducing health care costs would have a significant positive effect on the deficit:...
Indubitably, a healthier population, with less obesity, better diet and more partaking of exercise, means lower healthcare costs, and probably also higher productivity and all sorts of cascading improvements. But is this the principal source of our high health-care costs? The anecdotal number is $13K/year on every man/woman/child in America, in annual healthcare spending. That supports at lot of jobs – good, high-paying jobs.
To really reduce costs, we need to start paying our MDs like we pay our PhDs, and our LPNs like we pay our paralegals or admin-assistants. But if we did that, we’d take away opportunity from lots of motivated, ambitious people. We would excise a large chunk of our economy.
Then there’s the question of how much of really costly healthcare is in the final months of life, typically in deep old age. Take a well-disciplined upper-middle-class professional, who regularly runs in community 5Ks, eats organic foods and watches his weight. He makes it to age 80, costing the healthcare system very little… and then gets Alzheimer’s. Five years later, he gets pancreatic cancer. Finally he dies at 86, having cost the system $2M in care, in the final 5-6 years of life. Meanwhile, Joe Sixpack smokes two packs a day. He’s fat and sedentary. He gets hooked on opiates, and goes on disability at age 45. At 55 he gets a diabetic stroke, and dies. Sure, society lost Joe’s productivity, and had to support him as a parasite, whereas the aforementioned upper-middle-class guy was an electrical engineer at NASA. But in the end, who cost the system more?
Cost-savings involves harsh compromises. Some people are going to essentially be sentenced death. Many will lose well-paying jobs. The whole economy would have to get reorganized, finding other sources for driving profits and employing clever, ambitious people.
Some of our problems stem from laziness, bad judgment, collective denial. We want something for nothing, in any of a number of imaginable forms. There are real savings to be attained from better discipline and personal initiative. Your point is well-taken! But so many of our problems stem from prosperity itself. We wouldn’t have such runaway healthcare costs if we didn’t have so many advanced technologies that defer death from dreadful diseases. If many of our children died from typhoid in youth, our women died from childbirth, our youth from tuberculosis, our peasants from malnutrition, our sailors from scurvy, our soldiers from trench-foot, our middle-aged men from prostate cancer, our miners from black-lung, our welders and blacksmiths from noxious gasses, and so forth…. If we accepted losing 2 out of 5 children as being normal, and living to 55 as being exceptionally old, then our healthcare costs – not to mention retirement-costs – might be substantially lower.
But prosperity is costly. If we all diet and forego soft-drinks or alcohol or processed foods, we might reduce the per-capita annual healthcare cost from $13K to $11K. That’s a worthy goal, and again, not one that I dismiss peremptorily. But it’s still too much. The debt will still grow. To really cut costs, we have to accept a lower standard of living. We either take the “liberal” approach, of much higher taxes and reduced personal-choice, or the “conservative” approach of sink-or-swim cruelty.
Simply put, to be sustainable, life has to get worse.
The economy is certainly not good - which in most eyes makes it bad. This is measurable in various ways, some of them rock-solid, others less so....
1. If the economy were good, we wouldn't be going further into deficit....we were paying it down before. Now we have to borrow more to makes ends meet (the government).
2. If the economy were good, the admin wouldn't have to threaten The Fed to force them to change their policies....so they could still give money away at less-than-market rates so people can borrow more and pay their bil
3. If the economy were good, the Stock Market would have went up 15-20% in the last 15 months - instead of 0 to 5%.
4. If the economy were great, car sales would be booming instead of stable or down.
5. If the economy were good, "tax cuts" would have created a boom on top of a boom instead of barely keeping our heads above water...
Simply speaking, if the economy is good the government and individuals don't need to go more in debt to support the same lifestyle they had before. But yet both are...going into more debt.
Simply put, to be sustainable, life has to get worse.
Only for certain values of "worse." Most of which would devolve to some form of "losing freedom." That's the conservative view in general, that the quixotic notion of small government and the idea that every vague concept of freedom takes precedence over... rationality.
So we ban sugar-loaded, high-calorie drinks. The notions of lost freedom are hard to justify except in that irrational way.
Or we ban all marketing of grossly unhealthy foods and the like. How's that freedom, or "worse," for you?
How many years does it take to save enough to buy a house?
How many years does it take to save enough to buy a car outright?
How many years (in USA) does it take to pay off a student loan?
Maybe that's why?
It has always taken a long time to save to buy a house, a car, or pay off student loan debt.
We bought our home in 2010. It took us seven years to save up for a down payment. We could have had a home long before that if it has not been for how bad I had been with money. You get older and learn new things.
Paying off the home is our goal now. I would prefer to put our money into our retirement, my wife doesn't want any debt. We are paying down the home faster now with a goal to be debt free in 6 years.
Cars can be purchased with cash in 3 to 5 years. Instead of making payments to someone else, make payments to yourself. Pay cash when you have the money.
Many have student loans, including me. I will have mine paid off in five years. I tell my kids though to make sure that what ever career you choose will have an income that will cover your student loan debt. Lots of people went to school and have degrees that will never cover the cost of the loans that they took out. I also know plenty of people that did not need a degree for the work they do. In my department of 20 + people only three of us have a degree.
My wife and I don't drive new cars. I drive our family van, a 2003 Chevy Astro Van. My wife drives a 2011 Honda Accord. We live within our means. We save money, fund our retirement accounts, and keep our debt down. That is what you have to do to make it I would think.
The economy is certainly not good - which in most eyes makes it bad. This is measurable in various ways, some of them rock-solid, others less so....
1. If the economy were good, we wouldn't be going further into deficit....we were paying it down before. Now we have to borrow more to makes ends meet (the government).
2. If the economy were good, the admin wouldn't have to threaten The Fed to force them to change their policies....so they could still give money away at less-than-market rates so people can borrow more and pay their bil
3. If the economy were good, the Stock Market would have went up 15-20% in the last 15 months - instead of 0 to 5%.
4. If the economy were great, car sales would be booming instead of stable or down.
5. If the economy were good, "tax cuts" would have created a boom on top of a boom instead of barely keeping our heads above water...
Simply speaking, if the economy is good the government and individuals don't need to go more in debt to support the same lifestyle they had before. But yet both are...going into more debt.
We have more money now and are reducing debt. Don't know about others.
Please register to post and access all features of our very popular forum. It is free and quick. Over $68,000 in prizes has already been given out to active posters on our forum. Additional giveaways are planned.
Detailed information about all U.S. cities, counties, and zip codes on our site: City-data.com.
Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
Like the Mad Max movie correct?
