Yea no kidding.  After Dr. Guy's mental breakdown in that other thread (and now this one), it's pretty clear he's just trolling now.  Same with psychoak.  Some people just like to rage.

SpardaSon21, unfortunately the size of the government has only been growing, regardless of which party controls the White House.  There are two major government expenses that will not be going away anytime soon: defense spending and Social Security.

In the Asian countries, taxation rates are low party because of their culture of interdependence versus our culture of individualism.  In Asia the family is responsible for taking care of the elderly, whereas in the U.S. it's the government's job.  Thus Asian countries do not have this huge tax burden that we have to bear with Social Security.  The sad thing is, however, that if we eliminated Social Security, there would be no corresponding shift of responsibility -- Americans just don't want their parents living with them under the same roof.  This is fundamentally a cultural issue, and cultural attitudes like this change only very slowly.

Our other big expense, defense spending, is also extremely bloated but you would never hear a politician clamor for cuts in defense spending -- it's not "patriotic".  Which is, of course, complete bull.

Low taxes are great (I paid a pittance while living and working abroad in Asia and I loved it) but until American cultural attitudes catch up with reality, we're gonna be living with high taxes.   Then again, who says you have to live here?  It's a big world we live in, there's so much to see

Ethnocentric eh?  It's funny how often I get accused of having an inflated opinion of my own country.  Aren't I ripping on you idiots enough already?

History not being your strong point, or a point at all, I'll edumacate you on our social progress.  A century back, the majority of black children weren't born to crack whores.  The death rate for inner city blacks in their teens and twenties resembled the average, instead of war zone casualties.  Someone that dropped out of school in the eighth grade would have tested higher than a high school graduate of today in every subject, post graduates of the particular fields would fail their history and english testing.  Invalids weren't kicked out onto the streets because it was illegal to institutionalize them just because they can't take care of themselves.  Bums weren't homeless because the flop houses they could afford to live in while remaining bums hadn't been outlawed by well meaning idiots that wanted them to have private bathrooms in every dorm.

I can go further, a black main was laid in state for four days before this country was even founded, just for being one of the first casualties of the war.  They sure don't mention that while telling you how the country was founded by a bunch of white slave owners in school.  They also don't mention that slaves purchased their freedom regularly because they worked for themselves outside of their mainly seasonal duties.  One of those self freed slaves stayed in Philly while it was being ravaged by disease and was a national hero at the time.  It was already law on the books that slavery would end in 1807 when we got the show started.  Womens Suffrage was real great, but the more you learn, the more it looks like even slavery started out better off than how we're doing things now.  We're fucked, and we didn't start out this way.  Europe did, so if anything they have an excuse for being retarded.  We left to get away from the race and religion charged hatred, we rebelled to get away from a statist mindset that played groups off each other to consolidate it's own power over the population.  We intentionally set up a government designed to be unable to take that path, and we've still managed to do it anyway.

Thanks for stating the obvious on education and infrastructure.  I'll now point out that we stopped being #1 in the world after the Federal government took most of the tax burden away from the states.  Something to chew on while you argue in favor of more.

http://www.visualeconomics.com/gdp-vs-national-debt-by-country/

I figured one with pretty pictures would be better, since you're too dumb to look things up for yourself and need to be spoon fed information you could find in ten seconds.  I'll be generous and go with twenty years.  When you find a country that's had government run health care for at least twenty years that isn't massively in debt, let me know!

Just so you know, I'm an equal opportunity asshole.  Medicare doesn't count as being a functional program either as it's currently funded in it's entirety by debt accumulation.

Why the hell not, I put effort into being a prick!  Well, no I don't.  It looks better if I pretend it takes effort instead of coming naturally though, so pretending I'm a troll would be complimenting me.

I've always disliked the terminology for discretionary and non-discretionary spending.  It's truly misleading.  The entitlement programs are entirely discretionary.  We chose to implement them, and they're not covered in the Constitution in the slightest.  Defense funding on the other hand is considered discretionary while being one of very few things the Constitution explicitly calls the Federal Government to do.  Discretionary versus non-discretionary simply refers to how the payment has been designed, and since none of the money you pay into the programs actually goes towards your own collections it's completely superfluous to boot.  With the ridiculous spending increases in the last two years, even the 20% it used to be is high.

I would definitely say that psychoak is trolling in the conventional sense.

And I find it somewhat telling that the conservatives in this thread are so fond of name-calling and personal attacks, yet the liberals can keep their cool and actually provide rational, mature debate. Hm...

Of the debt?  Not by even an inkling of imagination! 

But if you mean deficit - Funny way to put it, but you are close to being right.  it is about 20% of the total budget.  It is also the only constitutional required expense of the budget.  So the slight of hand with "discretionary" is not true.  Defense is not discretionary (the amount may be, but the expense is not).  All others are discretionary.  Which means the budget consists of 80% non-constitutionally mandated spending.  And people wonder why we have such large deficits.

The UK is beginning to wise up just as we're dumbing down.  Go figure.

Bush was conservative?  You must have missed something, like maybe his attempt at amnesty, or his expansion of medicare.  The creation of an entirely new government entity wasn't bad either.  The only thing conservative about him is that he's a right to lifer, you can't pass muster by being socially conservative if you're a big government progressive.

I'd say I'll wait to see if you still think Obama is awesome a few years from now, but there are still retarded fucks that think earning 12% on their CD's was awesome back in the 70's so...

I'll post this before the thread is closed:

Better question: What right do you have to decide someone else is obligated to provide their resources to others?

Health care has cost because other people have to provide it.  It's not the place of government to infringe on someones liberty and tell them they must take care of someone else, regardless of how unfortunate they may be.

Why would the worth of your life entitle you to someone elses?

If I work 18 hour days for a decade, why should someone else be entitled to my compensation just because I wont be at the poverty level after they take it?  Shit happens, when it does you don't screw someone else just because you've suffered misfortune.  Charity has always been better at seeing need than a law is anyway.

We're already at the point where the service side of the health care industry isn't making enough money, it's why we're losing doctors and hospitals left and right.  This is a product of well meaning idiots increasing costs while trying to make things fair.  Well meaning idiots are supporting the Medicare system, which pays out two thirds of what insurance does.  The liberals are always claiming that's a sign that Medicare is superior, but you can find out how wrong they are just by walking into an office.  Doctors taking Medicare see far more patients than they actually have time for because they can't afford to see a reasonable number.  In places like where I'm at, where the average population age is crypt keeper old, medical services are absolutely lousy.  The two nearest hospitals are death traps that make unnecessary treatments, order tons of pointless tests, and have lethal weapons instead of real doctors working at them because only a complete fuckup would ever work for the peanuts they're getting paid.  Their kill rate for open heart surgery around here is somewhere near 100%.  It's like what they have in the UK, really substandard service.

Once you put everyone on the welfare state, everyone is fucked, not just the aging farming communities.  We can't rack up a massive debt over the next thirty years like Europe has done, we're already there just from taking up half the cost.

Fortunately, ignorance can be cured, if with great difficulty in most cases due to a refusal to be educated...

To become a wealthy doctor is a long and arduous task.  First you do a 90-120 credit hour stint in 3-4 years to get through premed.  Following this, you go to medical school, another 3-4 years of training, generally while working full time hours as an intern in the teaching hospital you're probably attending.  After the 6-8 years of schooling you've just gone through while working your ass off, you start your residency to finish up your training.  The typical residency is a year long stint of 80+ hour work weeks filled with frequent shifts in excess of 24 hours.  If you haven't burned out by now and left for a more rewarding career at this point, like flipping burgers, you're now a licensed general practitioner!  Want to be a specialist and make the big bucks?  More years of study while working as a peon under other doctors.

So now you're a doctor.  You work twice as much as most people, and get paid lots of money.  What good is your money though?  You spend all your time working, it's not like you get off an eight hour shift and have eight hours to burn outside of sleep each day.  You're working 12-18 hour days and you don't even get the bleeding weekends off all the time.  Then some asshole decides you're being paid too much for your services, so they cut the reimbursement rates on Medicare and now you're not even getting rich.  No more retiring early to make up for all the time you've lost working twice as hard as everyone else.

So, still want that six figure salary?  I hear a whole bunch of them are giving up the ghost in the next few years, so there's lots of positions you can fill.

Also, costs don't go down when you mandate a service, they go up.  See automobile liability insurance.  Not that I'm implying you're actually getting health insurance.  Insurance is something you get for a disaster, what you're actually buying is prepaid medical.  You pay the "insurance" company, they take a cut and pay the bill.  It's somewhere between hilariously stupid and "OMFG everyone should die" stupid.  Naturally, it's standard practice and I'll soon be required by law to partake in the idiocy, or, as I'll actually be doing, pay a piddly little fine that will cost me less.

Yeah...  Sorry, no.  That would fit the bill, but the context is all wrong.

Uncle Sam pays just under 50% of every dollar spent on health care in the US.  Australia's pays less than 25% of theirs.  Australia would be an argument in favor of less government run health care, not more.  You guys went the insurance subsidy route and gave incentives to get off the dole and into the public but primarily privately funded Medibank or alternative insurers before people get old.

We're doing the reverse here, participation in our Medicare is mandatory and there is no relevant private funding towards it, the majority of health care costs being caused by old people, we're boned.  Even if we all get subsidized insurance till we hit 65, Uncle Fuck me in the Ass is just going to be picking up more of the tab.

You were close, really close.  I'd even consider it a better solution than what we're doing now considering you have half the level of stupid we do, but if you leave the big cities you'll find the same nightmares we have here, except worse.  Australia's remote rural treatment situation is horrific by any standard.  I'd love to see a cost analysis that compares what it would take to bring up the outlying areas, but I expect once such a move is taken you'll be in the same boat we're in.  You just can't run a decent hospital at a reasonable cost in an area with a population density of 20 per square mile.

Again I post before the thread closes and this time I will say....

http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3302467&userid=0&perpage=40&pagenumber=1