>> ^newtboy:

I think debt is a bigger problem in Europe because they have much larger debts (per capita).

I'd say per capita isn't as important as debt/GDP ratios. By that measure, Greece is in terrible shape (148% of GDP), while places like Sweeden and Denmark and Finland are all in the 30-40% range. The US is at about 60%, which isn't great, but it's not terrible, and definitely nothing like Greece.

>> ^newtboy:
They do all have soverign currency still, don't they? I thought they all just added the euro, not replaced their currency. If you're right, YIKES!

It's true. Not every EU nation has given up their own currency, but all of the PIIGS (Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece, and Spain) have.

>> ^newtboy:
I disagree that we have control of our currency since we left the gold standard, but that's a different discussion althogether. We certainly do have the control to devalue it, just maybe not re-value it.

Well, Fed policies can reduce the money supply too. Any time the Fed raises interest rates, that's what it's doing.

>> ^newtboy:
You say 'at worst, inflation' as if that's just fine, but remember Germany after WW1, they 'just' had inflation to pay their crushing debt, it started with them needing a wheelbarrow full of deutchmarks to buy a loaf of bread, and ended with the creation of the Nazi's and WW2.

That's hyperinflation, i.e. a process where inflation doesn't just rise, but starts exponentially increasing. That's why central banks in modern times have explicit, stable inflation targets that they communicate publicly.

Adopting a higher inflation target definitely helps a government's long term fiscal position, at the cost of weakening its exchange rate, without risking any sort of runaway inflation.

Sometimes that's a worthwhile trade to make, especially if the alternative (default) is worse.

>> ^newtboy:
There's no need to focus solely on taxes either, it's a ballance thing.
...
Our 'friends across the pond' will shortly not be supplying these programs to their citizens either, they bankrupted themselves with these kinds of programs and lack of revenue, and now their bankrupting their partners in the EU. That's why it doesn't make sense to compare our social programs to theirs and say 'they can, why can't we?'...theirs bankrupted them.

That's the thing, you say it's the programs that "bankrupted them", I'm saying "no it didn't, they went bankrupt because they didn't ask people to pay the taxes to pay for the safety net they had".

You can balance the government budget at 18% of GDP or 50% of GDP. Having paid maternity leave doesn't bankrupt you. It's having paid maternity leave, and then cutting the taxes that pay for it that bankrupts you.

>> ^newtboy:
If we had the money, I would be all for it, and 3 months paid vacation, guaranteed retirement benifits, low or no taxes, etc.,

Well, having the money is a choice we make as a society. Our GDP, even in this crisis, is $14 trillion a year. I suspect maternity leave wouldn't even cost a thousandth of one percent of that.

Again, the size of government has nothing to do with your fiscal discipline. Fiscal discipline is saying that you want to be taxed at a rate that will pay for the government as it exists. Demanding other people sacrifice so that you don't have to pay higher taxes is the height of fiscal irresponsibility.

this would be funny if it wasn't actually so close to reality. An uncle of mine once met a russian girl in a eurorail trip with a few friends, and some time after that, she visited Portugal. (this was easily 17 or 18 years ago). My grandfather has a small farm, and she was amazed that there was fruit which fell from the trees just rotting away in the ground, and she wanted to pick it all up.

The above post was sponsored by the Greece/Ireland/Portugal Insolvency is America's Future Corporation.

I have to agree with Chaosengine. Being Portuguese I can assure you our problems are not a direct result of a socialist agenda. In fact, it's the direct result of governments borrowing more than we can pay, and leaving the tab for the next guy like the assholes that they are, and spending money on completely moronic things.

Did you know Portugal is actually one of the countries in the world with the best network of roads? There are no more, no less that 3 different roads, in parallel connecting Lisbon and Porto (the two biggest cities). You have the A1 (the most important highway), then the A17 (a newer highway) and the old N1 (just a regular 2 lane road). WHY? We don't need it.

A few years back, the then Minister of Defence (who is now the foreign affairs minister, a disgusting weasel) order 2 fucking submarines from Germany. They cost 500 million euros each (1 billion in total). Now... It's true that Portugal has an absolutely huge area of the Atlantic to survey, control, and administer, but anyone with half a brain knows that you do that with frigates and fast ships. That 1 billion euros could have been used to save a big famous shipyard which is on the brink of bankruptcy, and could have easily manufactured hundreds of smaller vessels. (oh.. and that shit head of a minister, when he was the defence minister actually told the people who worked at the shipyard that they would be building what I just said. Of course, they never did)

The previous government insisted against EVERYONE that Lisbon needed a new Airport. Of course, that is now on the shelf, be cause it was completely stupid and it would cost several billion euros.

Oh, did I mention the TGV? (the high speed train). Porto and Lisbon are connected by a train called the Pendular, which looks a lot like a tgv, and is supposed to reach speeds of 250 km/h (which is great really. At that speed the trip between the two cities would take no more than 2 hours) the problem is, greedy incompetent assholes always get their hands on government funded programs, and they built the whole line between Porto and Lisbon (which is about 350km's in lenght) and the only place the train can achieve the top speed is between my city and another one to the south, in a journey of no more than 50km's (it's not a safety thing mind you, it's just the track wasn't built like it was supposed to) The rest of the time, the train hops along a 150.. 170km/h. WHY THE FUCK WOULD WE NEED A TGV between the two cities when the existing train is already great IF it had been properly built. Thankfully that's also in the shelf.

The European Championship of 2004... it was great. Portugal almost won the championship, which would have been great, since we were the hosts. And everything went great. Several new stadiums were built, the festivities were very nice, etc. The problem is, most of these stadiums are now a maintenance nightmare, because the ones left with the bill are the cities and not the government. My own city is 200 million in the red because of all this shit (a city of less than 80,000 people. although the whole district has a lot more people. About 600,000).

These are just a few examples, and not ONE of them is a result of socialism, but of stupid management and capitalism, and wanting to buy shiny things.

AND then we also get fucked nice and royally in the ass by most atrocious capitalist system in the world, the american one, which has the 3 most notorious rating agencies spewing nothing but stupidity, speculation, lies, and anything that gets their fuck buddies some extra euros or dollars. The United States was 2 days away from going into default, and only came up with a ridiculous temporary measure. Yet, none of the agencies touched the american rating. How curious! Portugal was bailed out by the IMF, it has a majority government, consensus from the people that sacrifices must be done even though they suck and in some cases are completely unfair, was actually going beyond what the IMF requested, and still Moody's slashed the rating to junk.

In short... this whole financial crisis was caused by over-consumption, really shitty management, and a lot of business practices that should, quite frankly be a crime!

>> ^Winstonfield_Pennypacker:


Socialism doesn’t work. European governments across the spectrum are being forced to increase privatization and cut social benefits in order to stave of fiscal collapse. When BM glowing describes all the great stuff European countries have (health care etc…) he totally ignores report after report after report of these so-called ‘services’ being abject, utter, complete failures. The UK health care system is being forced to ration SURGERIES (IE death panels) or collapse. Spain, Greece, Italy, France, UK, Germany, Portugal… The list of European socialist nations tottering on the edge of failure and having to pass ‘austerity measures’ to survive is myriad.

Ouch. That's pretty damning. Shame it's not true.

The problem with the NHS in the UK is lack of funding, caused by (surprise, surprise) Thatcher. Most people in the UK, while critical of some of the ways the NHS is run are broadly supportive of the concept, and almost every country with socialised medicine views the US system as backward at best and barbaric at worst.

As for Spain, Greece, Italy, Portugal and Ireland, they were poor countries to begin with and their problems have much less to do with socialism than they do with rampant borrowing (i.e. capitalism). In fact, Ireland is one of the worst off economies and it has nothing close to a socialist government. All it's problems are down to banks loaning property developers ludicrous sums of money in the hope of short term capital gain. Hmmm, that doesn't sound like a socialist issue to me. Meanwhile France and Germany are still strong economies, and the Scandinavian socialist countries continue to rate high in every metric we have for measuring society. The main problems that Germany is facing are due to having to pay for the idiocies of other countries in the EU.


>> ^Winstonfield_Pennypacker:

Maher calling Palin a retard is like a severed head calling Cain Velasquez a cripple.


No, anyone calling Palin a retard is like any sane person calling a retard a retard.

[citation needed]

In reply to this comment by Winstonfield_Pennypacker:
Hm – well I’ll give the racist bigot host a 50% for being half right.

It is true that US citizens do have a hypocritical relationship with the big government’s socialist voter-bribery scams. However, he is dead wrong when he claims ‘socialism works’.

Socialism doesn’t work. European governments across the spectrum are being forced to increase privatization and cut social benefits in order to stave of fiscal collapse. When BM glowing describes all the great stuff European countries have (health care etc…) he totally ignores report after report after report of these so-called ‘services’ being abject, utter, complete failures. The UK health care system is being forced to ration SURGERIES (IE death panels) or collapse. Spain, Greece, Italy, France, UK, Germany, Portugal… The list of European socialist nations tottering on the edge of failure and having to pass ‘austerity measures’ to survive is myriad.

But the reaction that citizens have to cuts in socialist services in Europe is no different than that of the pork addicted public in the US when anyone suggests that shutting off the spigot. The riots in Greece prove that. It is nothing more than the principle Thatcher nailed so accurately in 1975… “The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people’s money.” This is merely an extension of Tytler’s argument that “democracy can only survive until the majority discovers it can vote itself largesse out of the public treasury. After that, the majority always votes for the candidate promising the most benefits with the result the democracy collapses because of the loose fiscal policy ensuing, always to be followed by a dictatorship.” Which then leads to his subsequent “Cycle of Tyranny” (Liberty, Complacency, Dependancy, Tyranny, Revolution).

Maher (and other of his ilk) love to pretend that socialism works. Problem is that every factual analysis of socialism proves quite conclusively the exact opposite. Socialism doesn’t work. It is failure after failure on parade. And the reason the US is failing is BECAUSE it has so much socialism in it already. We better hope the Tea Party can talk more citizens into agreeing to ditch socialism, or the US is destined to financial collapse and subsequent balkanization.

As a side note – oh YEAH Bill Maher… The US budget entirely goes to military spending and corporate tax breaks, eh? What a complete moron. Whenever he opens his mouth to vainly try and sound intelligent, he proves himself ever more conclusively to be an absolute idiot. The 60 trillion in unfunded federal obligations is for socialism, dummy. The biggest budget items are socialism, idiot. Defense spending could be cut to zero tomorrow and we’d still be 59.2 trillion in debt for all those wonderful social programs that everyone loves so much.

Maher calling Palin a retard is like a severed head calling Cain Velasquez a cripple.

Hm – well I’ll give the racist bigot host a 50% for being half right.

It is true that US citizens do have a hypocritical relationship with the big government’s socialist voter-bribery scams. However, he is dead wrong when he claims ‘socialism works’.

Socialism doesn’t work. European governments across the spectrum are being forced to increase privatization and cut social benefits in order to stave of fiscal collapse. When BM glowing describes all the great stuff European countries have (health care etc…) he totally ignores report after report after report of these so-called ‘services’ being abject, utter, complete failures. The UK health care system is being forced to ration SURGERIES (IE death panels) or collapse. Spain, Greece, Italy, France, UK, Germany, Portugal… The list of European socialist nations tottering on the edge of failure and having to pass ‘austerity measures’ to survive is myriad.

But the reaction that citizens have to cuts in socialist services in Europe is no different than that of the pork addicted public in the US when anyone suggests that shutting off the spigot. The riots in Greece prove that. It is nothing more than the principle Thatcher nailed so accurately in 1975… “The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people’s money.” This is merely an extension of Tytler’s argument that “democracy can only survive until the majority discovers it can vote itself largesse out of the public treasury. After that, the majority always votes for the candidate promising the most benefits with the result the democracy collapses because of the loose fiscal policy ensuing, always to be followed by a dictatorship.” Which then leads to his subsequent “Cycle of Tyranny” (Liberty, Complacency, Dependancy, Tyranny, Revolution).

Maher (and other of his ilk) love to pretend that socialism works. Problem is that every factual analysis of socialism proves quite conclusively the exact opposite. Socialism doesn’t work. It is failure after failure on parade. And the reason the US is failing is BECAUSE it has so much socialism in it already. We better hope the Tea Party can talk more citizens into agreeing to ditch socialism, or the US is destined to financial collapse and subsequent balkanization.

As a side note – oh YEAH Bill Maher… The US budget entirely goes to military spending and corporate tax breaks, eh? What a complete moron. Whenever he opens his mouth to vainly try and sound intelligent, he proves himself ever more conclusively to be an absolute idiot. The 60 trillion in unfunded federal obligations is for socialism, dummy. The biggest budget items are socialism, idiot. Defense spending could be cut to zero tomorrow and we’d still be 59.2 trillion in debt for all those wonderful social programs that everyone loves so much.

Maher calling Palin a retard is like a severed head calling Cain Velasquez a cripple.

Yeah, I gotta say... even as someone from a country being heavily attacked by speculators (Portugal's rating was downgraded to junk level by Moody's a couple of days ago for absolutely no reason, when there is political consensus, a majority in parliament and the government has not only agreed to do what the IMF asked, but beyond. Oh, and we're not Greece, and no one is protesting in the streets) this video is just full of moronic ideas, and personal beliefs (and some of them down right insulting towards certain nationalities).

upvote for politics.

obvious fault w/ this video. if you're going to complain about war on drugs, don't pick a young black man to argue for amnesty. pick a soccer mom.

also worth mentioning Portugal, who has ended the war on drugs with good sucess.

Oh, i'm from Portugal, so I'm already prepared for the shit-fest this country is going to be in the next few years, to be able to comply with the IMF's demands.


>> ^quantumushroom:

You should probably save your energy (and money) for the next country to be bailed out of the EU's failed model. And if you're in Canada...my apologies..that you're in Canada.
>> ^EMPIRE:
I'm sorry to say americans... but when you have people like Rick Perry (and unfortunately many others like him) in politics, you are all fucked.
I am still confused how a country can be one of the most powerful nations of the world, and still have such retardation in its political scenery.

this is not particular to spain. lo and behold, nudity can be somewhat common in europe. Hell, here in portugal a lot of prime-time soap operas have these really generic, bland, crappy intros, and a few of them have had breasts. There's also a good amount of shampoo or body wash commercial showing boobs (or at the very least ass).

And surprisingly, no one is fornicating in the streets (well, not entirely true. We're in full campaign mode for the elections next sunday, so there's been a lot of fucking going on in the streets, but it's mostly done by politicians to everyone's ass).

Hahahaha... If my country was as fucked as Greece is, I would be making animal noises as well!





Wait.... that's right, I'm in Portugal.

Woof, Woof, Meow

No, I don't mean the assault weapons ban. Firearm regulation has a long history in the United States, and Bazookas are still heavily regulated federally and often banned locally. They are "Destructive Devices" under Title 2:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Title_II_weapons

By heavily regulating or banning these weapons it has made it harder for bank robbers to acquire them.

The 95% and 5% numbers were hypothetical, as should have been clear. I imagine those numbers are approximately right, though. Huge amounts of Americans drink alcohol occasionally and never run in to a problem with it. I'm skeptical that there are many active, long term heroin users who are maintaining healthy lives. If you have contrary statistics on that I'm curious to see them.

Amsterdam has similar laws to Portugal. I actually don't know why you'd bring that up as it is contrary to what you've been arguing and supportive of what I've been saying. While the Netherlands has a "non-enforcement" policy for illegal drugs such as marijuana, they come down hard against hard drugs like the ones I am arguing should be illegal.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drug_policy_of_the_Netherlands
Drug usage and imprisonment in the Netherlands is not really exceptional compared to the rest of Europe. "The rate of imprisonment for drug crimes is about the same as in Sweden, which has a zero tolerance policy for drug crimes."

Anyway, I agree with you that drug law in the Netherlands is quite reasonable, and I'm glad that you agree that it is "pretty goddamn close" to being a silver bullet. They emphasize treating addicts rather than putting them in prison, but still put drug traffickers in prison for a long time. None-the-less, any drug use in unambiguously illegal.

I take it by your rejection of my hypothetical situation that you believe that any drug use, even if clearly expected to be harmful to other people, should be legal. You are very strongly libertarian. But I believe that personal freedom ends where harm to others begins.

Also, you come across as very hostile for some reason. What are you trying to get out of this dialogue, exactly? I personally am pleased to see contrary opinions and re-evaluate the beliefs I hold.

>> ^smooman:

>> ^rychan:
<em>>> <It just seems like a useless exercise to me to try to give people the freedom to use a drug like heroin when it will only cause terrible repercussions.

insert alcohol for heroin in that statement and you get the mindset that gave us prohibition. go the fuck away


I don't think "go the fuck away" is an attitude that's welcome on the sift.

As far as your statement about prohibition, yes, you're right. My attitude is the same that prompted alcohol prohibition, which clear didn't work out. But that doesn't mean that all types of prohibition are folly. We have assault weapon prohibitions, as well, which inhibit your personal freedom to buy a bazooka.

Also, I'd say that alcohol is used responsibly* about 95% of the the time, and heroin about 5% of the time. Unfortunately, alcohol, by virtue of being legal and relatively inexpensive, is used vastly more than heroin so that 5% of irresponsible alcohol use is extremely damaging.

*responsible usage means that your safety and the safety of those around you, your financial well-being, and your social relationships are not negatively influenced.

Prohibition has all sorts of nasty side-effects, as BansheeX points out. We could try to be stricter, like Singapore or China, and that seems to make the drug prohibition much more effective. Or we could decriminalize consumption of drugs, but still require mandatory treatment, like Portugal. Regardless, no country seems to have found the silver bullet to deal with hard drugs.

I think these drugs are well-engineered human poisons, which damage your brain, sometimes permanently, and damage a society enormously. Others disagree, or say that even if this is the case, it should be legal.

What if there were a drug specifically engineered to send a user into a murderous rampage? They might not actually go on a killing spree every time they use it, but it is a common and expected side effect. Should it still be legal to use such a drug?

Yes, this is Portugal. And he didn't drive badly at all, although he is obviously a moron. What he says after getting back in the car is: "huh... Slick tires!" which I'm pretty sure everyone knows are completely illegal in a road car, and that's probably why he lost control. There was probably the tiniest amount of water or oil on the road, and a car with regular tires would've been able to keep on driving like it was nothing.