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Since default is just 2 days away, I thought I'd make a thread.
So, what are everyone's thoughts on this? I think we need to raise the debt ceiling, cut military spending, and raise taxes on rich people and corporations.

Here's Pelosi on the Boehner bill.

Half of me is saying
"CRASH AND BURN"

The other half of me is saying
"JUST DO IT ALREADY"

Let it happen. I wanna watch the whole country burn and collapse into its own stupidity. Our government is incompetent, foolish, and complacent. The American people need a wake-up call.
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The only thing that needs more funding is education. Abolish the teachers unions and set higher standards for education, and lower spending on everything else. No need to raise taxes; we already pay more than enough, rich and poor alike. Its our spending that's the issue. We maintain an army larger and more expensive than any empire preceding us (besides possibly the USSR at its height) and we don't even conquer other nations. Hell, we take sixteen years suppressing a jungle strewn third world communist nation and lose, and we are still heavily invested in the middle east when we shouldn't be. Why do we even have an army if we don't use it properly?

The Republicans won't let anything go though. They are literally letting our country rot on the single fact they are to stubborn to let the Democrats or Obama do anything.

@Dr.Pepper
Letting the country burn and collapse would result in worldwide chaos and anarchy and war the likes of which has never been seen.
Our armies also cover the defense of every country in Nato, the entire hemisphere of the Americas, our allies in the Orient (Taiwan, Japan, S. Korea, etc) and Israel. Other countries need to start carrying their own weight because right now we have tens of thousands of troops protecting other countries.
We can't just reduce our armeis until other people start picking up some of the weight because after the U.S. the most powerful armies are China, Russia, N. Korea.

@Springfield
I do not trust any party which cannot get anything done when it had the majority in the house, Senate, and the office of the presidency. If they get stalled so easily then it means we need a new party. I hereby vote for the Republicrats, or the Democricans.

Get rid of unions?!

The teachers union specifically. It keeps bad teachers in their jobs. Teaching is not labour, it is a skilled profession that needs to be taken seriously and have high standards.

But that's unfair.

You can lose your doctor's license for malpractice. Is this unfair to the doctor or the patient? What might happen if that man was allowed to continue his practice?
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I find it extremely unfair that I received next to no education prior to arriving at a university. The public education system is a joke. Its a day care center for teenagers at best.

You're obviously not a teenager then.

Nineteen years of age. My birthday was two weeks ago.

It's really the Republicans' faults for shooting down every tax raise. I heard that one little tax raise could lower the debt by trillions of dollars and the Republicans shot it down immediately.

Ok. Here's my two bits. JUST FUCKING COME UP WITH SOMETHING!

You're supposed to compromise. You're not going to get every single fucking little thing that you want. You need to just work together. Democrats want to raise taxes, but the republicans don't want that. Republicans want to raise the debt limit, but democrats don't want to do that.

STOP YOUR FUCKING BITCHING AND DECIDE ALREADY! If we go into default it will make our nation look weak and will mostly be attacked by other countries that hate us. And guess what? That's a lot of countries.

Also my biggest problem with our debt. We have helped nations for a long time now, countless times.

Can a single one of them try to help us?

"Abolish the teachers' unions"
What

They already made an agreement.
In fact, it happened about the same time I made this thread.

http://www.usdebtclock.org/

Here is the Us debt uploaded in real time displaying all the US's expenditures, income, etc.
The current federal tax income is around 2 trillion, our current debt is around 14 trillion. So how is "one little tax raise" going to lower the debt by trillions? If you doubled the federal tax it would only reduce the debt by 2 more trillion.

Also, US workforce = 140 million, Food stamp recipients = 45 million

If we payed a little more taxes, then jobs would start to arise. It's how business works. As soon as they get money, jobs magically appear. Not only that, but it is going to take years to fix this, but those "little" taxes will help us in the long run. We could be in debt for 20 years, or we could be in debt for 10-15. Which would you prefer?

We could also raise the tax rate on big oil to 50% or higher.

Congress can't even get rid of the tax loopholes and subsidies going to oil companies right now. Before enacting some type of targeted tax hike on a specific group of companies they should stop subsidizing them and reform their tax code.

Well, the House just voted on the deal earlier. Now it's going to the Senate, where it will probably pass. It's nuts, and will cut spending to 1961 levels.
http://clerk.house.gov/evs/2011/roll690.xml

I'm glad my Representative voted no, because this is a really bad bill. Obama could have just raised the debt unconditionally, the Constitution gives him the power to do that.

Uhhhhhg…

America, you have 5 years to get your shit together. Or else I'm out of here! get's back to studying Japanese

I might be off to Canada.

What representative do you have? Wu or DeFazio?
Wu voted yes, DeFazio voted no.

If this keeps up, I'll become an eskimo once I feel like it.

Also my biggest problem with our debt. We have helped nations for a long time now, countless times.

Can a single one of them try to help us?

As far as I know, and very little of it, here in Europe we can't because we have our own problems. We actually depend a lot on the US's funds and that's why, if you fall, we most likely follow.
I don't know if we can be of any help at all.

Europe spends virtually no money on defense, yet they have super debt problems as well. If only Greece, Spain, and a few others go down they will drag down Germany, UK, and France, and then the whole continent goes up in flames. So yeah, no use in hoping for aide from them any time in the near future.

Europe spends virtually no money on defense…

Wait, what?
Granted, we don't have an overall European Army yet, but each country has its own defense system and thus they spend their own amount of money to it.

By the way, Greece did go down. They haven't dragged us down yet.

Well, our main problem is that the corporations will stop at nothing here to remove the power of the workers and consumers. What we need to do is put money in at the bottom to put pressure on the corporations to make more crap. If people are buying faster than the corporations can make things, then they will hire. A good way to do this is to raise the minimum wage to somewhere around 15 dollars.

Another thing we can do is to find as many ways as possible to eliminate consumer debt, such as nationalizing healthcare, and making tuition free. We've been trying for 105 years to do this. We also need to strengthen unions, so that more power will belong to the workers.

Also, "too big to fail" needs to stop.

France is 3rd in defense spending. UK is 4th. There are other powerful European countries in the top 10.

France and UK are about 11 times smaller than the US's.

http://www.rickety.us/2011/06/2010-defense-spending-by-country/
if you click on percent GNP spending--the amount of money each country is spending per its GNP-- then France and the UK are ranked 45th and 47th largest in the world. The only other European country ahead of them is Greece which is the 34th biggest spender in the world per its GNP. All European countries spend a lower percent of their GNP than countries like Chile(28) and Colombia(25) and the United States(11)