Scotty

Printing more money results in inflation. The more you print the more inflation. I don't think the US economy needs that on top of all its other problems. I don't think Americans want to have to roll a wheelbarrow full of cash down to the corner store to buy their milk.

Depends on how long it's deferred, and what state your finances are in. And anyway, deferring pay checks isn't going to cut it given nearly half your spending comes from borrowing.

In cases of emergencies the courts are normally willing to hear cases very quickly. And I put it to you that a woman who isn't getting her social security check can probably convince the courts it's an emergency. Furthermore the lawyers acting for the federal government work for the executive branch and are most unlikely to want to fight to delay things. On the contrary, they'd probably do their level best to speed things up. They'd be happy to get a finding from the courts ordering the government to raise taxes, after all.

I recognize that. However, even taking that into consideration, there are simply more dirt poor people in your country as a percentage of the population than anyone else in the west has. No one in the west has your slums, your underclass, your hordes of minorities living in miserable squalor. I'm surprised no one has raised the recently released data which shows that while whites in the US have a median family wealth of over $100,000 the median family wealth of Black is just $6,000 Wealth gap widens between whites and minorities No, I don't. I want to see which western nation has social spending programs that aren't as good as yours in reality, not as a percentage of GDP. Your % of GDP spent simply reflects the fact you have so much poverty. What we did included raising taxes. Further, our social programs were more generous than yours are now. Even after cutting them back, they were still more generous than yours.

Maybe, but that third branch of government no one has talked about is there to enforce laws, and will do so. If the federal government won't do as it's legally bound to do and pay who it's legally required to pay the courts will step in and order the government - and that includes the congressional branch, to do whatever is necessary to gather the money in order to meet its legal obligations.

You zealots just don't think things through. The United States government has many bills to pay every month. It has a hundred thousand businesses supplying it with goods and services it has to pay. And if it refuses to pay those business will sue, just like they do every other deadbeat, and the courts will order the US government to pay them. In addition, the US is required by law to pay people under mandated programs like medicade, social security, etc. If it refuses to pay for whatever reason, the courts will order it to pay. I'm not sure if the supreme court can order the US government to increase taxes in order to pay but I wouldn't be surprised if it could. I'm sure it would in Canada

Medicare is not a program for the poor, and neither is Social Security. Neither one of them is means tested. They're available to all Americans regardless of income. So as I said, you're wrong... again.

While that's bad enough it understates things quite a bit. Why? Because the United States has FAR, FAR more people living in poverty than any other western nation. So while it looks like you're at least better than a few countries in that you spend a certain % of GDP on social welfare programs, that figure is raised, in comparison to most other nations, by the level of poverty in your country. And yes, Canada is far from perfect in that we take after the U.S. far too much.

What prejudices? Statistics say the great majority of visible minorities are immigrants. Why would it be a prejudice for me to say I've never met a Black person without an accent?

I'm simply more aware of my prejudices than narrow minded little punks like you. I have a degree of empathy and imagination you clearly lack, since your debating technique seems to consist of insults and a self-important pretense that you're better than others.

I'm sorry. I was aiming my explanation at someone a little above the intellectual level of a braying ass. Clearly it went over your head.

As I've said earlier, the problems in the U.S. have nothing to do with its miserly entitlement programs and everything to do with an ignorant citizenry which persists in believing it's paying taxes which are far too high, even when it's paying the lowest taxes in the western world. Every other modern nation funds more generous social programs, but the Americans won't even pay for the chintzy ones they have. The average American can be pictured as huddled in his back yard with a gun in hand, crouched over his cash, staring around with fierce, paranoid eyes at the world he sees as trying to take what's his. The total tax burden on Americans, as a percentage of gross domestic product, stood at 24 per cent in 2009 – lower than it was in 1965 and still falling. That compares to 31.1 per cent in Canada, 34.3 per cent in Britain, 42 per cent in France, 37 per cent in Germany and 43.5 per cent in Italy. The Japanese, Australians and South Koreans all pay significantly more. The United States is the only major country without a national value-added tax and its sales taxes are lowest in the OECD. Likewise, U.S. fuel and sin taxes are at the bottom among rich countries. And generous tax breaks mean many businesses and individuals pay few taxes, placing a heavy burden on a relatively narrow tax base. U.S. in denial over taxes

When Pop's corner bank, in Podunk, Wyoming goes bankrupt, the effect on anyone outside the immediate neighborhood is negligible. When Lehman Brothers goes bankrupt, an institution which owes money in the tens of billions to banks all around the world goes under, the effects are massive. When Greece has trouble paying its bills due to government incompetence and the ignorance of its citizenry the effects can be ameliorated by other nations. When the United States has trouble paying its bills due to government incompetence and the ignorance of its citizenry the effects are massive because it's "too big to fail".

The US basically caused the present recession through massive corruption and government mismanagement. Now, as its easing, the US is threatening to send the world back into recession through more political incompetence and mismanagement. And you wonder why governments and business all over the world is looking on in contempt?

The Roman Empire did quite well for a time. Then it collapsed due to mismanagement and ennui. The problem with your system is it was deliberately set up to have no center of power, to have conflicting centers of power. That was okay, though complicated, in the past, when the difference between most Republicans and most Democrats was not all that great. But that distance has been growing and growing and is now so great that the two parties find it difficult to work together and compromise over anything at all. Californians have different wants and needs, different opinions on a wide variety of subjects than the people in Wyoming. The people in Wyoming have quite different opinions than the people in New York. New Yorkers are not nearly the same on many issues as the people of Utah, who differ markedly from the people of Nevada. You can't rule a country like that without compromise, but 'compromise' is now a dirty word to many Republicans. The nonsense in Congress is a perfect example of that. Democrat. Okay, tell you what, we'll compromise. We'll do 50/50 tax cuts and spending. Republican. No. I want all cuts. Democrat. Well, tell you what, how about we go 70/30? Republican. No. I want all cuts. Democrat. Well, okay, all cuts, but we need the rise to last through 2012 Republican. No, We want to be able to use it against you in the coming election. We'll do it for eight months only. Democrats. Come on, you gotta give me something. After all, you only control one house. We control the other and the government. Republican. Not only will I give you nothing but I'm tacking on a mandatory constitutional amendment. Eat that! And then Boner boy cries about how far he stuck his neck out to do a deal with the White House. Geeeeze.

You have this habit, AM, of getting into desperately nit-picking arguments over semantics. The meaning is clear. The congress approved a budget of X dollars for the current fiscal. It knew when it did so that it would run into the debt ceiling. Now, all of a sudden, it's refusing to raise the debt ceiling so the government can spend that money and pay its bills. All across America there are tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of businesses which have supplied services and goods to the United States government over the past few months who the congress is refusing, at this stage, to allow to be paid.

Do you have any clue how dumb that sounds to sane people?

The law in Canada is what this society has decided, over the years, should be banned. It doesn't matter if certain behaviour you dissaprove of does or doesn't harm society. If society allows it, then it's not criminal. And I might point out that while I detest Rogers and Telus and Bell, for example, as corporate entities, I'm not worried about one of them breaking into my house one dark and stormy night. There is a difference between their behaviour and the behaviour society has criminalized.

Most of them.

Everyone? I've had plenty of discussions with those who are on the left of center who hadn't the slightest interest in the well-being of our men and women in the Forces. In fact, you don't have to search far to find people of that side of the political fence who presume anyone in the military is an ignorant, socially backward illiterate with violent tendencies, and that we shouldn't be spending any money on the military at all. The "council of Canadians" is a group made up largely of that sort of people.

The vast majority of Black people in Canada are immigrants, or at best, the children of immigrants (who have their own problems in social adaptation). The vast majority of Black people in the US are extremely poor, and live in slums which help spark enormously higher rates of crime and violence. The perceptions arising out of these circumstances are based on cultural fears which have more than a small basis in fact. All this sputtering nonsense about genetics and skin pigmentation is pointless in that virtually none of the prejudice against Blacks has anything to do with either. I'm merely trying to point out to others that the real argument in such things is perceptions of behavioural issues, not quibbles about how people look, or what their genetics background is.

We're not talking about me and my hiring. The point I was making, although clearly it goes well over the head of some of the more ignorant here, is that nobody gives a shit about what the skin pigmentation is in a man's skin. If people don't like Black men it's not because of their looks but because of their cultural and behavioural baggage. Jessie Jackson once famously said, when he's walking down the street, he has more anxiety, more worry, when encountering a group of young Black men then young White men, because young Black men are more likely to be violent and attack him. Now if you must personalize things in that manner, then no, I would not feel any differently towards a black or brown man than I would towards a white man if his behaviour and comportment was not dissimilar. I'm willing to admit that I have some prejudice towards Black men. My prejudice is born of a life of seeing Black violence in the media, in statistics, and to a smaller degree, in person. It's born of a lifetime of encountering Black men who were foreign born, had thick accents, were uneducated, and behaved, or had political/social views, often enough, which I thought were backwards. I have never personally encountered a Canadian born Black person. I have never encountered a Black person who didn't speak with a thick accent. I'm aware that not every young Black man is a pimp, a mugger, a drug dealer, or a gang member, but those are the only ones I ever see in the media. So how could my views not be coloured (no pun intended) by that?

The US has a budget problem because it wants to have its cake and eat it too. It has some crappy social programs, a humongous military, and people who don't want to pay taxes. Your idiot Republicans reduced taxes year after year while not reducing spending. Sorry, I thought I made myself clear. I asked for the spending on entitlement programs. What the US spends on libraries is irrelevant. What the US spends, overall, on health care is irrelevant. I want to know what the United States government spends on health care as compared to what Germany or Sweden or Finland or those other modern countries spend on health care. I want to know about what the United States government spends per person on pensions for its seniors as compared to what modern nations spend for pensions for their seniors. I want to know what the United States government spends on behalf of its poor, it's disabled, etc. etc. Those are the entitlement programs I'm talking about. What most other nations call the social safety system. Even the spending on education is rather beside the point since the cite you used includes all spending, including that spent privately on private and religious schools, that spent by the states, cities, etc. What I said was that every western nation is more generous with its poor, its disabled and its elderly than America is. Then you said Greece can't afford theirs. Again, what exactly is the relevance of that? Because Greece is screwed up and can't afford its extremely generous social system means the United States can't afford its miserly system?

Got a cite for that, Mr. Scrooge? Is that how high you're setting the bar? Greece? Greece is in trouble in large part because so many of its citizens avoid paying taxes, btw.

No, in fact it's not.