Medicare for all, free college, I want it all.. but here is why we cannot be Sweden

[Peacetrain]

America's debt is the largest sovereign debt in the world for a single country. It runs neck and neck with that of the European Union, which is a unified trade body of 28 member countries.


That is it.. we have such an incredible debt load, that we cannot do what Sweden does.. tax our way through those programs.., because we have such an accumulated debt..

In 1980 we were the largest creditor nation in the world.. 8 years later of Republican malfeasance with our economy we were the largest debtor nation in the world.. and it has done nothing but grow since.

The republicans have this magical thinking every time they get in power that deficits no longer count.. (that is just the yearly budget) and they run up the credit card.. we get the government back and they go balls to wall crazy.. suddenly they are deficit hawks..

The reason I am bring another op on this up, is because we have so many balls in the air.. if we can get the ACA back up and running and medicaid for those who cannot get insurance that will be something... and if we can get our people into 2 year programs.. that will be wonderful..

There is no way we can do what Sweden does, because we are so bowed down by the debt the republicans have heaped upon us with those tax cuts since the 80's... they gave away the house..

Our candidates running with these programs need to explain to us how we do this all..

[DeeDeeNY]

1. Perhaps Sweden didn't give massive tax cuts to billionaires

[Peacetrain]

2. Most likely not

[procon]

30. Or fund the insanely bloated military that we "need"! nt

[Blue_true]

37. The average post college debt of Swedish students in just 20% lower than

for USA students. We actually have a far more distributed junior college network. What we need to do is expand junior colleges and rename them as first two year colleges. All state run universities will become finishing, graduate and professional universities that don't accept first year and second year undergrads. First and second college students should be encouraged to live with their parents for the first two years of college. If kids insist on going to private four year colleges, they and they parents should foot all bills.

[msongs]

3. we are so bogged down by the massive welfare military nt

[Peacetrain]

5. and that also... military items developed (planes) that the military did not even want

its mind boggling..

[msongs]

23. hmmm which candidate is a big supporter of MFA and the F 35 lol nt

[Blue_true]

38. When it comes to military jobs back home, the jobs always win. nt

[hay rick]

6. There is that.

[SouthernProgressive]

4. We can head in the direction of single payer.

There is no such thing as free college and never will be.

We currently have a bad egg in our midst doing a horrible job of selling. That doesn’t mean we stop or even slow down.

It will be a wonderful day when all democrats stop trying to sell single payer as a cost saver. It’s a life saver.

[Peacetrain]

8. We have to get this government back and re-instate some of the tax cuts we have given

to the wealthy.. and we can do things.. but we have got to roll back some of these give aways to the rich and corporations.. I do not think rich people are evil.. many also know they are not being taxed enough.. when our people talk about programs they are proposing.. they have to look at the big picture, and we will never be Sweden..

[SouthernProgressive]

26. I agree with what you have stated here.

[George II]

7. Sweden is not America. Denmark is not America. Even Canada is not America.

[Peacetrain]

9. Even Bush the elder came to realize we had to reinstate some of those taxes on the wealthy

and Bill Clinton's terms saw us almost getting to the point where we would be paying down our yearly deficits to zero.. (even though the debt itself would still be growing but at a much much slower rate..) and of course Bush the younger and Cheney blew that up by running a war on the credit card.. and President Obama had to invest to bring us out of the great recession.. but he did and the deficits were starting to go down again.. and then we get the current resident..and we are off to the races... a trillion dollars a year the last two years.. the next time we get the government back we need to hang on to it for at least 20 years and maybe we can become Sweden then

[Fiendish Thingy]

13. Are you saying Americans will just have to "settle"

For being second (or third, or tenth, or twentieth) best?

There are ways to accomplish the goals of universal health care, free college, etc., but it will take radical, paradigm shifting, even revolutionary, measures, not to mention a lot of guts and courage to reject the Status Quo for something better, something that is accepted and expected in all other modern democracies.

[Peacetrain]

16. How... tell me how..

where... revolutionary thinking is what got us in this mess.. the republicans trickle down economies.. give it to the wealthy and it will all trickle down.. and be a day trader in the stock market.. I am all ears

[Fiendish Thingy]

43. You think trickle down is revolutionary?

Somehow a bunch of Scandinavians and other social democracies found the courage and the money, and not that long ago for many of them.

Pragmatic incrementalism is for Status Quo suckers.

[Blue_true]

39. Oh my. The ponies in the sky and warm chocolate chip cookies waiting for us imagery.

Can you give some details on HOW we can do all they stuff you suggest in a nation as divided as we are?

What we need to do is focus on what is doable and relentlessly push that ball upward as our successes pile up.

[Autumn]

10. I doubt Sweden has the largest military in the world, I doubt Sweden gives billion and billions

of tax breaks to the wealthy and corporations. I doubt Sweden wages war of choice for decades without end. Our Pentagon loses trillion and can't find it and who cares?

But a lot of our politicians vote for all those things in the name of bipartisanship. You want them to explain to US why we the people can't have things that we need? Maybe our candidates need to explain to US how they have allowed that shit to happen. It's the same old shit. When Republicans are in office deficits don't matter. When Dems are in office it's all about fiscal responsibility

[Peacetrain]

11. It is a pile of crap.. and Democrats and the Democratic Party are always held to a higher

standard.. We have a sexual abuser in the highest office.. who has destroying our relationships with our allies and embracing dictators.. its all a pile of crap,

[Autumn]

17. Yes it is. But you know what? We have allowed it to continue. That pig in the White House

should be going crazy with fear of what is coming out about him in public hearings. Barr instead of having the ability to squash investigations should be fighting for his freedom under charges of bribery and corruption for buying his AG position from the Republican party. But it's not the right time to impeach... for some reason.

[Prosper]

12. We could have it all here and around the

world if money was removed from the lazy ass side lines and put back into the real economy making things for sale. Money can disappear from the working class and middle class just the same way unregulated fishing and hunting remove resources from this planet. Our system has to be regulated to prevent the big players from taking all the balls from the game when they win. Putting the country back to work would generate prosperity and huge tax revenues. The big winners are responsible for our job losses to cheap overseas labor. As the big winners kept stashing more money and demanding less taxes our middle working class was running out of money. They used to shop quality and then suffering stagnant wages they started shopping price instead of quality. So the diminished spending here switched to cheap overseas labor. There goes more money creating billionaires from dollar a day labor. Money has to circulate at higher velocities to provide prosperity and benefits. Hoarding money out of economies and stagnating it is not only selfish, it is inhumane. Money must go back to work.

[Hassin Bin Sober]

14. Nonsense. Stop thinking of our economy as if it's your household finances.

We need to spend money in the right places. Put money in the hands of people that will spend it.

Deficits really don’t matter. Cheney was right. As long as the debt is for things that truly stimulate the economy.

[yaesu]

15. Too much debt is a good GOP talking point but lets get real here, debt-to-GDP in 1946 was 113%

mostly do to WWII & the recovery after was YUGE!. Its 108% this year, mostly do to the lowest tax on the rich in history. Lets not spread republican lies, fear, they have MSM to do that.

[Peacetrain]

22. The debt will continue to grow.. there is no paying off the debt..you want to get real.. try this

What we need to do is get the taxes back that the republicans keep giving to the wealthy.. we have to roll those back.. we have to up social security taxes to at least the first 200,000 and then we can look at medicaid for those who do not have insurance.. or medicare buy in.. we have to stop this damn pie in the sky .. lets be sweden bullshit and get real with what we as Americans can do.. we are a totally different country..

[Blue_true]

41. The difference is the debt in the forties through to 1969 was

invested in ways that caused a multiplicative effect of economic growth and higher tax revenues. Today, debt is invested in the rich, big companies and the military, with the outcome being no multiplicative impact from spending that money.

[emmaverybo]

18. Thanks for the sanity. And we can not overlook the fact that Sweden is not a world power, has

been shaped by an entirely different history, tradition, and culture than America. We can change, but not overnight. Not in one election cycle.

[Peacetrain]

20. That is what drives me round the bend, when some start using the Sweden example..

we have to pull back the veil, and reinstate some of these taxes and back up the ACA ... conservation.. infra structure..I feel sorry for the next Democratic President.. what a mess they are going to have to plow through

[Igel]

46. One thing you notice when you go abroad

and just don't visit tourist spots is that living standards are different.

I was in what I thought of as a fairly average apt. in Prague, but knew to express surprise at its size. It was *huge*--okay, the size of the 50-year-old apt. I had in West Los Angeles as a grad student, two bedrooms/kitchen/public space/bathroom for two guys. But it was huge for the country, and the equivalent would have been either a 1500 sq ft apt. in a less-dense area or a 1000 sq ft apt. in a tony area of NYC. Of course, the US apt. would have a pool, weight room, etc., but this simply had a really scuzzy entrance area that used to be where carriages would be parked and the horses stabled. My host family there had a two-bedroom apt. for the mother and two kids, but the bedroom I stayed in was big enough for the twin bed, a dresser, and a few feet walking space. Maybe 9 feet by 7 feet, which made it larger than the kitchen.

In Lodz, our host's house was considered nicely upper-middle class, for a doctor and tenured university professor. My family's house in a working class neighborhood is twice as big, for two public school teachers.

Sweden's average living space per person is half of what it is in the US.

[marylandblue]

19. Most of the debt is held by US investors and the government itself.

Which means we can raise taxes enough to pay ourselves back and pay for some goodies too. I'm saying we actually SHOULD do that, or that most Americans would LIKE it, I'm just saying it's possible.

[Peacetrain]

21. We have to roll back those millionaire for life tax breaks just for a start..

[Hav]

24. I don't like these discussions where the positions go to extremes

I don't think anyone expects free college. But it should be affordable by pretty much everyone. Instead, it continues to get more expensive. For me, it's unreasonable to expect someone fresh out of school to pay that much. It makes more sense to pay it back indirectly with taxes with the job you got after you finished your education. It's paying back for the opportunities you got and it's an investment for the next generation.
On the other side, whenever someone points to how it's done in other countries, people make the obvious comment that the US isn't that country. No shit. That doesn't mean it's not possible if you would adjust your priorities.

[Blue_true]

42. We have to use our strengths.

Before Nixon, there was a plan being executed to build Community Colleges all over the country. The idea was that students could do their first two years of college while living at home then transfer to a University to finish. That plan slowed under Nixon and was virtually killed under Reagan.

In some cases, we should work to go back to 1969 and move forward. Buikding out the CC network and buttressing the curriculum so that students can transfer directly into their third year of college at ANY University would create a situation where kids can stay home for their first two years. The kids go to a University as more mature, focused students and go into their higher years of college with very little debt.

An alternative plan would be to build first and second year dorms and require first and second year students to live in a dorm and be in a University run, non profit meal plan.

[bahrbearian]

25. Voting for War sure doesn't help.

"Sorry America We spent all your Med4All and education money in Iraq and Afghanistan, Libya and Syria didn't help much either, Sorry"

[guillaumeb]

27. The war budget consumes over 1 trillion dollars a year.

Cutting the war budget by 50% would free up 500 billion.

Taxing the 1% at a higher rate could bring in billions.

What is lacking is not the how of paying for these things, but the political will to reject the bribes that the rich give to politicians and do what is needed.

[Hoyt]

28. I bet Swedes don't have big houses/apartments, cars, etc. They are more into

important aspects of life and society. They are happy to pay more in taxes. Not the case here, as long as white wingers dominate.

[airplaneman]

29. We need a system that benefits society as a whole and not just the rich.

You need to read about MMT and we could retire some of that debt.
We need fair and broad based taxes and progressive taxes on the rich.
You do know 1/3 of the debt is balanced with a surplus for social security and government pensions that were collected and then borrowed.
The problem is only as big as the republican propaganda machine.
-Airplane

[PatrickforO]

31. I'm going to have to differ with you on some of your post.

What you have said seems an apologetic for Biden, which is fine, since you're supporting him.

To my mind, the root cause of today’s debt crisis is the doctrine of shareholder primacy. Now bear with me - it is complex but understandable.

• Shareholder primacy was born in 1919 with a MI Supreme Court ruling. When Henry Ford set up his famed auto assembly line, he raised the wages of his factory workers so they could afford to purchase the automobiles they built. The Dodge brothers, who owned shares in Ford, didn’t like this and sued Ford on the basis that excessively high wages interfered with their legal right to the highest possible shareholder earnings. The MI Court ruled in their favor.
• When the New Deal passed, many of the old Robber Barons of the 1920s were filled with anger over ‘socialism.’ They resolved to overturn it by taking it apart one little piece at a time.
• We had three decades of unprecedented prosperity brought about by New Deal policies being in place.
• But the actual unraveling of the New Deal came about after the assassination of John F. Kennedy, who was killed late in 1963. Then, like clockwork, in August 1964, we had a contrived incident in which a US ship was attacked in the Gulf of Tonkin, and for which the government in North Vietnam was blamed. By 1968 we had half a million troops in Vietnam.
• The war in Vietnam served to stimulate defense spending in the billions, which generated profits for many defense companies and their shareholders.
• The war caused massive social unrest, and protests of it, segregation and women’s inequality resulted in a whole generation rising up against the ‘establishment.’ Some changes were made. Enough to make the protests go away, but not enough to actually solve the problems.
• In 1971, future Supreme Court justice Lewis Powell wrote a memo to the US Chamber of Commerce, which detailed a multi-faceted strategy for fighting the New Deal philosophy of caring for each other and systematically replacing it with a more corporate-oriented philosophy.
• In 1981 Ronald Reagan slithered into the White House, and by 1987 had pocket vetoed the Fairness Doctrine, which opened the way for the growth of the Fox ‘news’ machine, and right-wing AM talk radio.

OK that’s a very brief, historical background.

Now, let’s look at economic ideas:
There are two competing views. The first is a basically Keynesian view that the government must be the spender of last resort. That is how the New Deal began – we increased the money supply and the government directly hired people.

Contrast this with ARRA – the Stimulus of 2009. It was $813 billion, on top of a massive $750 billion transfer of taxpayer money to Wall Street to cover their gambling losses that was called TARP. Then, the Fed put quantitative easing into effect, increasing the money supply by loosening credit.

Of these ARRA and QE served to help keep demand for goods and services up. TARP was simply a shifting of risk onto taxpayers and off of Wall Street speculators.

The competing economic idea is called ‘neoliberalism’ and promotes three basic ideas:
1. All government programs except defense should be gutted and the responsibility for safety net services such as unemployment, welfare, Social Security, Medicare, education funds – basically the whole non-military discretionary set of services – should be devolved to states and local governments.
2. All regulations are unnecessary because the market will self-police. It is all seeing and all knowing, and must be allowed to run without government interference.
3. Every possible government service that can be privatized should be, again because the market should remain unfettered from earning the highest return possible for shareholders.

So those are the two competing sets of ideas.

Now, to your point.

You write, “In 1980 we were the largest creditor nation in the world.. 8 years later of Republican malfeasance with our economy we were the largest debtor nation in the world.. and it has done nothing but grow since.”

In terms of a national economy, there are two things which must be considered by those governing. First is monetary policy – how much money do we allow to circulate, and who acts as a central bank. Second, is fiscal policy. In a Keynes-type economy, when the economy is in recession, the government spends in the red to keep demand for goods and services up. When the economy is doing well, the government keeps taxes and revenue high and pays down the debt it ran up during recession.

Now, we are ready to talk. The 2017 tax cuts were done on purpose by people who knew full well it would balloon the national debt. Remember Grover Norquist? The ‘starve government until it is small enough to drown in a bathtub’ guy? This tax cut was meant to do that.

When Trump was elected and the Republicans controlled both houses of Congress and the White House, the first things they did were massive deregulation, privatization of much of the government (notice the private for profit concentration camps – they are only the tip of this iceberg), and massive across the board spending cuts coupled with the largest ever increase to ‘defense,’ funded this year at a treasury-breaking $733 billion.

See, Republicans, when in power, have NO interest in paying down the debt or reducing the deficit. They want to starve the federal government.

So there you have it. We are teetering on the edge of a recession I believe will be as bad or worse than the one in 2008-2009. Unfortunately, we are going in with an unsustainable debt load. This is problematic, because the American middle class has shrunk, and an unsustainable level of wealth has been transferred by policy to the top ½ of 1% of the population. The top 3 American billionaires own more wealth than the bottom HALF. That is about 175 million people.

All of these things have happened because of the doctrine of shareholder primacy. If you are the CEO of a publicly held company, your only duty is increasing earnings for shareholders. So, you will bust unions, cut corners on package sizing and product quality, and foul the environment whenever you can get away with it. And, you will work really, really hard (Citizens United, lobbies) to bribe, buy or otherwise pressure politicians into allowing you to act sociopathically against workers, consumers and the environment so you can do your real job, which is enriching your shareholders.

So, you are saying that we ‘cannot afford’ Medicare for all because of the debt.

OK. But there are some remedies. When we get power back, we must IMMEDIATELY repeal the giant 2017 tax cut for billionaire donors and corporations, and adjust tax brackets back to where they were in the 1970s and 1980s. We can also gradually cut ‘defense’ so we don’t lose too many jobs at one time. Ultimately, we could bring that back to perhaps 1990 levels. We spend more on defense than the six next countries combined.

In the meantime, we should be educating Americans about monetary and fiscal policy and how it affects them. Because the media doesn’t report on it – they think we are too stupid to understand complex issues.

Ah, but we can’t tax our way out of the debt.

Nope. We can’t.

There is a solution for that and it is constitutional, simple and yet quite sweeping. But that’s a different post.

[airplaneman]

32. You have some good points

Contrast this with ARRA – the Stimulus of 2009. It was $813 billion, on top of a massive $750 billion transfer of taxpayer money to Wall Street to cover their gambling losses that was called TARP. Then, the Fed put quantitative easing into effect, increasing the money supply by loosening credit.

The fed lent out at least 16 trillion if not much more than that at zero interest to banks to help them make tons of money to get out of trouble. The Fed bought up 4.7 Trillion which is being rolled off the books (retired) There is probably more than 6 Trillion more yet to be dealt with.

My point in addition to your neoliberalism points we need to have public instead of private banks.

-Airplane

[PatrickforO]

34. That's my second post, my friend! You bet.

Article I, section 8, clause 5 of the Constitution says, "Congress shall coin money."

There are a bunch of good books out on the merits of governments acting as their own central banks rather than bankers. I started with Ellen Brown's "Web of Debt."

I have asked this question many times:

If our national debt is money we owe ourselves, then why are we paying it back to bankers with interest?

[airplaneman]

45. I am impressed.

I have followed Ellen Brown for many years and have her book Natures Pharmacy. A brilliant and compassionate human being. Between her and the MMT crowd we can make it work for us.


-Airplane

[Mr.Bill]

33. If a recession means no second term for Trump,

I'm up for it.

[PatrickforO]

35. Yes, but it is pretty scary though.

When you consider that nearly 2 in 8 Americans can't deal with a $400 unplanned expenditure, and then contemplate unemployment in excess of 10% with inadequate safety nets, then you're looking at a really, really dire situation.

But you might be right - it could take the whole Republican party and send it down the drain into the sewer of history - right along with Trump.

[Mr.Bill]

36. We can take care of safety nets

if we get rid of Trump and take back the Senate.

[Prosper]

48. Share holder primacy

is the most destructive to an position to an economy as there is. It holds the position of labor as expendable using labor to generate profits to do away with labor. Extreme is robotics replacing all human labor with profits hoarded into trusts and now perpetual trusts that were illegal and profits going into more cheaper, faster and easier ways to generate profits. Derivatives. All the while less money going into the hands of people that will spend it. Money is a resource upon which economies are dependent. Hoarding money instead of spending it is death to an economy. High taxes insure the existence of an economy. Huge fortunes concentrated in a few individuals will serve the whims of a few individuals. Taxed money by nature is money collected to spend. That is an economy. Those few that have collected the most have demonized the life of the economy with “tax and spend Democrats”. Done so successfully that working class wages have been stagnant for 60years. The defense is anybody that isn’t rich has made poor choices.

[Buzz cook]

40. If we had kept the Clinton/Gore budget in place...need I say more?

Even a modest increase in taxes on the top earners caused the deficit to shrink. The same was true with Obama. The deficit goes down with simple center left policies.
To worry about the debt when a democrat is in office is waste of breath, because its already being taken care of.

[still_one]

44. For one thing it is a very difficult language to learn

[myohmy2]

47. here...

...we go again...

...why is 'debt' or 'deficit' always a problem when it comes to spending on Progressive Social Programs but never a problem when we piss away money on tax breaks for rich, military shit or a multitude of other useless ring-wing crap?

...there's plenty of money out there, we're just not looking for it in all the right places...


...sorry, I don't buy it...

...