No they'll just print or borrow it. No need to directly go after tax payers for funding when a more stealthy approach is available. Then they can blame the "greedy" companies for the rise in prices.

That's right, if you fuck up, it affects only your household. If the government fucks up it affects us all.

The debt never went down under Clinton and his budget surplus was an illusion since he raided the SS trust fund to cover the gap. Clinton also presided over a bubble economy and the productivity gains were fake.

Obama may have inherited a bad situation but hasn't done much to right the ship and taxing more and spending more are not the answer. Bashing business isn't going to create jobs and despite the rhetoric of the Democrats, jobs are created either directly or indirectly by wealthy people, poor and middle class people do not create the majority of the jobs. I doubt anyone here would want a job from a poor person anyway.

  He also expanded the war in Afghanistan and there are still thousands of contractors in Iraq.

When the media actually wants Ron Paul for President let me know. So far all I've been seeing are articles drumming up the racist articles from 20 years ago that he didn't write and has disavowed.

Right so if Congress just deregulated everything this would totally happen again. You do know Congress was only able to enact child labor laws AFTER there was no longer a need for families to send their children to work.

The available technology back then is no where near what it is today, so processes were much more manual labor intensive then they are now. Unions routinely fight against technology even if it makes the workers more productive under the guise that there will be less jobs. This is ironic since the above market wages that unions demand lead to less people being hired as there is a finite amount of capital that companies can use to hire people.

They used to be when the loans were first offered, but then graduates were just declaring bankruptcy when they got out of school and if Congress were to allow them to be discharged again, the tax payer would just be forced to eat the costs and it would just be another bailout.

The US government doesn't need to tell colleges what majors to have, a market based solution would be much more efficient. Getting rid of student loans would not only would help stop people from majoring in useless degrees but it would lower the cost of tuition as students would no longer be easy sources of cash for the colleges, it would also stop the job requirement inflation. There's a lot of jobs that get posted with bachelor's required or at the very least bachelor's preferred, that do not need a bachelor's degree. It would probably take a number of years for the market to correct that, but eventually there would less people with bachelor degrees and companies would have to lower their requirements.

The way it is these days, the government does not care what major you are going into, or how you'll even pay you're loans back. They don't care either, as it's nearly impossible to discharge student loans, they can garnish your wages, and "private" lender Sallie Mae also owns the collection agency. Unless you are going to never work in the US again, they will get their money back one way or another. No other loans in the US have the kind of protections for the creditor that student loans have. As a result there's no risk assessment done, where their would be if private loans with only the typical protections for loans were the only loans available. The lender would tell the wanna be poetry major to pick a more useful major, or get lost and pay for college themselves.

You mean like Valve did with The Orange Box?

If the government wasn't siphoning so much money off the private economy (actually the economy, since the private economy is the only wealth generator), investors could fund energy research themselves and it would be more efficient as bad projects wouldn't get funded. The loan to Solyndra is a perfect example of why the government should be not involved. Ethanol subsidies is another example. No one in the private sector would fund these things, and if they did and got burned it affects only those investors, when the government does it, we all get burned.

States could retain control of federally run parks, as they already run state-owned parks.

The Federal Government according to the Constitution isn't suppose to be involved in education. Right now all they do is pass unfunded mandates on the states and if the states don't comply they have their aid taken away. What a great education system we have. The DC school system is the one system that Congress has control over and it's full of violence and under-performance, we'd be in a lot better shape if the Feds got out of the way.

There's no reason the States can not run their own low income housing program.

States own their own roads and bridges now, why would it be any different if the Feds no longer did? You could also privatize them. The argument about tolls is absurd, considering one already pays .50 or more cents to the government per gallon of gas and the money is spent far less wisely.

Ron Paul is the only one out of the GOP candidate and Obama who have seriously looked to reduce the size of government and get the deficit under control. While some may call his plan extreme, they should instead be realizing how big the government has gotten. Once this debt bubble blows, people are going to wish they had voted for Paul instead, because 2008 will look like great times.

Just this past week I bought 2 games off steam, ghostbusters for $5 and left for dead 2 for $11. Pretty good deals imo. I'll probably will stop buying newer games and just pick up the stuff off steam; far better entertainment per dollar ratio.