PeterS wrote:
Do you think the "average American" rejected social security and then Medicare when they were offered? Did they scream NO, SOCIALISM to education for their children? These are all elements of our economy that weren't addressed by Capitalism. There were no private schools for the average or below American. The average American wasn't paid enough to save for his retirement. And health care? You could forget it. Capitalism didn't address health care and it still doesn't address health care. And if we can provide K-12 then we can provide 4 more years or 2 years of technical training.
None of that is outlandish or something the "Average American" object's too. No, the only ones who will object are the radical right and no one else. There is nothing average about you at all. You are 20% to 30% of the population and nothing more. You are a minority and one that isn't worth listening to.
Right now, the only reason for our "booming" economy is because we are borrowing a trillion dollars a year and pumping it into the economy and Billionaires bank account. That isn't Capitalism. Capitalism doesn't revolve around an endless number of handouts disguised as tax cuts to the wealthy.
Do you think the "average American" reje... (
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Social Security, at least the retirement variety, isn't socialism, one pays into it all one's working life and then receives it back in pieces later -- and it's not an "entitlement," because the same money invested in an interest drawing instrument would, over the same period of 40+ years, be worth more than double what one ends up getting back.
Medicaid is for those who are poor for whatever reason, this being America. We can't very well allow those who truly can't afford it to die when it can be prevented. We are a country that values life, with the exception of those of you who favor infanticide.
The rest of us pay for health insurance. In a socialist country, we wouldn't have that option, we'd all (except the folks on top, of course -- look at the double standards of top Democrats now, for example) have to live with the same "free" substandard healthcare that cost us the pleasure of being taxed into the next century.
"Tax cuts for the rich" and corporate taxes are totally different things. The people who run the corporations still have to pay their personal income tax, while taxing corporations less leaves them more
capital to use to make more profits, which inevitably entails creating more jobs.
The more people working, the less people collecting "benefits" from the government. Less collectors of benefits means smaller government bureaucracies, which in turn means more funds to shrink deficits and rebuild infrastructure.
Socialism is a pipe dream for the naive, the heavy taxation needed to supply all those wonderful, free things, again, inevitably represses productivity, kills meaningful employment for millions and produces substandard services as does any enterprise run by career politicians, who are good at one thing and one thing only: jacking their jaws.
Did you ever see a Russian, during their early immigration here after the USSR ended, in a store looking to buy anything of a mechanical nature? If nobody stopped them, some of these guys would've taken the product apart to inspect it -- they were used to Communist Bloc products being mostly junk, because there was no incentive to excel.
If you lived in Venezuela, by now one of your neighbors, if not you yourself, having eaten all the grass from the front lawn and the leaves off the trees, would have devoured your cat.
And meanwhile, because life degrades to misery in a socialist country and people become desperate, the government finds the need,
inevitably, to have it's federal police and security forces become something along the same lines as the Gestapo, the Ton Ton Macoutre or the KGB's First Chief Directorate.
And things go downhill from there....
No matter what you are told, what you choose to believe or what you think is "very nice," these are the facts, and they've proven out every single time a country has gone socialist.
I understand that "progressives" have this naive streak in them that believes that if you keep doing the same things over and over, you'll eventually get a different result.
That's fine, but do those of us who are reasonably intelligent and love our country as it has, with great success, been run for the last 240+ years, a favor and
try your socialism someplace else.