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Politics : Ask Michael Burke -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Knighty Tin who wrote (110913)	1/31/2008 10:42:26 AM
From: Freedom Fighter	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 132070

KT, The countries of Europe are not entirely socialist like the former Soviet Union, China etc... You may disagree with my definition, but that's not a problem. We can agree to disagree on that. Both Europe and the US retain a lot of free market activity. That's why they haven't collapsed yet. They are only at varying levels of stupidity. The key is that the greater percentage of GDP inside the government, the slower the growth rate will be because the level of savings and sound investment will be lower than it would be otherwise. It is entirely possible to avoid debt accumulation and collapse for a very extended period of time by either making cuts to programs when they eventually spiral out of control or get very inefficient. You can also raise taxes further to pay for them. If you take the latter route, you can postpone the problems and debt accumulation, but you are simply reducing savings and investment further and adding a greater percentage of economic activity to government. So it turns into a longer slower death. If you take the former route, the quality of the service won't keep up with the free market parts of the economy. You can't measure where these countries are based on a snapshot in time of their debt, the government benefits they offer, or by comparing them to each other. We all have the same disease. We don't actually have a free market country to compare them to (or I would be living there). ;-) Medicare and SS have done an enormous amount of good in this country so far, but they are still wildly unsound over the long haul and will cause massive economic or social problems in the end. That's the insidious aspect of socialism. It looks great until it doesn't.