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Old 06-11-2014, 10:07 AM
 
Location: Metro Detroit
1,786 posts, read 2,654,134 times
Reputation: 3603

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Debating politics can be interesting. Typically you're not doing anything but further convincing yourself of your own beliefs as we've all heard the arguments and neither person is going to say "Oh, now that you mention it I see things your way now. You were right all along. Silly me."

That being said there are 3 things in American politics that I think we should all just accept, move on, and get back to the important stuff.

1. Gay Marriage - This is going to happen. Regardless of what you want and what your religion says (or even my religion says, I live in ultra-gay-unfriendly Utah and I realize that we're doing it wrong here) this is going to happen. This is the civil rights of our era. Fifty years from now movies will be made about those d-bag anti-gay types, who tried to keep down the opportunity to marry for ~10% of our nation and an arbitrary hero who marched in some pride parade and gave a speech. Really think forward a little - can you imagine any non-apocalyptic version of 2064 where this is not the case?

2. $15 Minimum Wage - This is not going to happen. Well, technically it will eventually, like - when inflation makes it sensible for it to happen, maybe 20 years from now, but this year? No. Next year? No. The people requesting it are high-balling in hopes of bumping it up a dollar or so, which is a reasonable increase. That dollar will create inflation until 3-4 years from now $8.50 is worth the same as $7.25 is today and the requests will be for a $17.50 minimum wage. I have worked with (underpaid) engineers who made $17.50 an hour, can you imagine the absurdity of if they could quit their job in engineering and go get hired at Subway, but only take a $2.50 pay cut? That's stupid. It would ruin society.

3. National Debt - I'm wording hazy, I know, but the point is that yes our national debt is a too-large percentage of our GDP. No, that is not sustainable. We can debate until we're blue in the face about whether to blame Bush or Obama (or Reagan) but the reality is we're all to blame. We want want want. "Give me hand outs, working is too hard. Give me a big army, we must enforce our Western ways. Stimulate the economy, I need to retire soon. Don't you dare tax me though, I work for a living!" We all realize this isn't working and yeah that big rough patch we hit in 2007-10 certainly hurt things. Eventually, and hopefully sooner rather than later, we figure this out. We will elect leaders who have no choice but to fix it. We'll pay for the financial mistakes of the last 10+ (or 30+, who's counting?) years, but it has to be fixed. Less handouts (and certainly less federal unemployment extension), less needless wars, less bailing out of Wall Street and more taxes on people with truly disposable income. Overly-simplified? Yes. OP knows jack about advanced economics? Yes. Needs to happen anyway? Yes.

If we'd all just accept the first two and then try and work together on the third one we'll be a lot happier and be able to focus on things that really matter, like... how to resurrect our passion for science and exploration. How to truly maximize our youth's public education experience, so we can all have a basic understanding of how science works while not losing our cultural passion for the arts. How to make sure that we don't ruin our way of life some other unforeseen way.

Thank you for reading. Remember, Geo-Aggie 2016 ;-D
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