Yes, definitely when your beloved government mama is blowing money left and right and someone points that out and tries to do something about it, the smart thing is to fire them.

You are the problem.

> The US can inflate itself out of debt.

Only if defaulting is okay. Paying a 10€ trillion debt with 1€ trillion worth of bills is defaulting.
You'd also need chronic long term inflation of at least 14% to get there. That would be a problem.

> There is no point at which a "death spiral" occurs.

Let's do some simple grade school math. The yield on government bonds, the cost of borrowing, has ranged from 2% to 15%.
To make the math easy while being generous to your claim, let's predict 5% as a long term average. Let's say the debt is 20X GDP.
5% of that is 1 X GDP - everything the country produces goes to pay interest on debt.

When the entire GDP is spent on interest payments, nothing is left for the people to eat, get shelter, education, etc.
Everybody's entire paycheck is sent to China and other creditors. That sounds like collapse to me.
So we've established via grade school math that collapse occurs by the time you reach 20 X GDP. If you can pass
4th grade math, you can see there IS a point where it collapses. The only debatable question is exactly where
that point is.

Those, like you, who advocate for big government spending say that the government needs to spend at least 10% - 30% of GDP
on services and entitlements. That leaves 70% for interest payments, so debt can't be more than 14 X GDP.
Hmm, people need to eat, and pay utilities, etc., so they'll need to keep half of their pay check. To leave people will
half of their paycheck, that's a max of 7 X GDP for government debt. This is still basic arithmetic and we've seen that
anything above 7 X GDP collapses. We could get a more specific number by doing advanced things like decimal division,
but I think the point is clear - there absolutely is a point of collapse, and with the debt doubling every 8 - 10 years, it
won't be long before we hit it.

> Post WW2, Britain had a 220% debt to GDP ratio. Post WW2, the US had a 121% debt to GDP ratio. Both countries were fine.

It's arguable whether the US is "fine", Obama says it's "definitely NOT fine", but you're confusing a one time event with a habit of chronic over spending. WWW2 was a one time event, like buying a house. What we have today is chronic, permanent overspending every single year - like a person
who makes $5,000 / month and spends $7,000 / month every single month.

> Maybe this is why the TEA party people think it wouldn't be so bad to "default." Maybe they imagine it simply means not making interest payments
> to China, the Social Security administration, and JP Morgan, and forget that it also means not paying for new Humvee tires or civil service salaries.

I think it's the opposite. Debt service on existing debt is mandatory spending - you pay your debts. That's very much part of the conservative ethic.
On the other hand, there's a lot of spending that is not justified, in their eyes. Some are downright stupid - bridges to nowhere. Some are nothing
but giveaways to donors - in just the last few months, THREE times executives have walked away from "green" companies financed by the
taxpayer. The latest (ECOtality) took $99.8 million of our money and walked away. Others are well intentioned programs being run so poorly that they need a complete overhaul. We're spending twice as much on food stamps as eight years ago, and 20% - 40% of that is fraud. Some recipients of
government aid claim they have a new baby every 2-3 months. How does that work?

From 1900 to 1940, government spending ranged between 6% - 20% of GDP, Today it's 39%.
Does the government really need to be almost half of the country?

By reducing fraud and utter waste by just 50%, we could pay off the debt, which would free up $415 BILLION dollars,
14% of the federal budget, for tax relief and worthwhile projects while at the same time eliminating the massive weight
we're saddling our children with.

* (Considering only _federal_ government spending, 1900-1940 it ranged 2% - 10% of GDP. Today it's 23%.)

> Except that it can be smart to borrow to pay off debt--if the rates on new new debt are lower than the rates of the old debt.

Yeah, "borrowing" to PAY OFF a higher interest debt isn't _really_ borrowing, it REDUCES your total liability.
That's not what the government is doing. The government is borrowing (increasing debt) to pay INTEREST on debt.
The more they borrow, the more interest there is. The more interest there is, the more they borrow to pay the interest.
That's a vicious cycle spiraling to collapse.

> but there is no mechanism to ensure that it DOES do things efficiently.

Sure there is. Inefficient companies lose in the market to more efficient competitors.
Unless of course the more inefficient company is much better in some other respect.

Strange, isn't it. So many people act (and vote) as if their kumbiya fantasy were reality. People act in their self interest, they buy stuff they want and do things they want to do. Ergo, government control of what people buy can never work. Yet, they keep trying. Today, they think the government can force you to buy overpriced health insurance instead of spending your money on what your family really needs, and that's going to work. Good luck with that. 50 years ago, they figured they could order you not to take a job, to let your house be foreclosed rather than work for less than $ridiculous_union_package. It keeps not working, because people take care of themselves and their families, but they keep trying it again, failing every time.

To err is human. To screw up 100,000 things per second requires root.

Two things. First, the free market does things efficiently, including dumb things. Microsoft built the Surface efficiently - $390 per tablet. Government spent over $1,000 each buying them.

Secondly, there's dumb, and there's government dumb.
A dumb corporation requires three people to do a job that one person could do. A government gets the same job done by creating a new agency which contracts with three companies at $320 million each, requires that it be done in Pascal, and prohibits any testing until the project is "complete", at which time it's six years after tube event that the project was created to handle.

I just saw one of our most efficient government agencies, one that wins efficiency awards, spend over $19,000 on a project I could do in two days. Funny thing is, I WORK for that agency, so it would have cost them almost nothing to have me do it.

$400 billion per year in interest payments is "essentially zero"? That number is actually almost manageable, the BIG problem is that it's snowballing.

You'll recall Obama has been saying that if he wasn't allowed to borrow more, the government would default - wouldn't be able to pay the interest due. We're borrowing to the interest on our borrowing. That's when you know you're fucked, when you're maxing out one credit card to pay the minimum payment on another card. That's essentially what the US government is doing. We're in a trap the we're borrowing more and more in order to make the payments on existing debt, so the debt and the interest just keeps getting bigger and bigger until 100% of our tax money goes to pppay interest, leaving no money for essential government services.

Looking at what has happened in other countries, the "you're fucked" point, the point at which you can't escape the death spiral, is about 100% of GDP - when a country owes as much as it generates. Eight years ago, our debt to GDP ratio was about 35%. In 2014, it should hit 70%. That tells us we are about six to eight years from becoming Greece.
    The difference between Greece and though, is that Greece is small enough to be bailed out. Nobody has $5 trillion to bail the US out.

It seems to me that Wikipedia is more like a commune than a free market. Market based companies don't let competitors edit their "product" with no oversight.

Like all communes, they are victims of the delusion that all people will always work for the common good.

Free market capitalist systems recognize the fact that people want "stuff", and will act in their own interest, and arranges things such that acting in your own self-interest IS acting for the greater good. At the most basic level, the free market says:
To get stuff, get money.
To get money, build or do stuff for other people to buy.

Putting the two together:
To get what you want, take care of other people's needs.
That's the free market. "Everyone get together and work on a shared thing" is the commie way. It works only if a) there are no more than three people involved or b) the project is controlled at the top by a free market organization responsible to their customers (Red Hat) or a harsh dictator (Linus). If you exclude the free market it either fails (Soviet Union) or has a heartless dictator (Castro) or both (Cuba sucks, even with a dictator).

Agreed. I tend conservative myself, as in "don't tthrow the baby out with the bathwater", and I think this particular law needs to be reviewed. I would want to hear arguments pro and con before saying it should definitely be repealed , but it looks suspiciously like a bad law.

Ps - look up Draco, who Draconian refers to.
That's a lot like calling Obama "Hitler".
Obama is more like Elmo than he is Hitler, and that law, while it may be bad, is in no way Draconian.

It occurs to me that Pelosi has the skills and equipment to be a crack whore.

The automobile franchise laws are from from the 1930s, when the Democrats ran Texas.
It's an anti-General Motors, anti-Ford, anti-big business law, not an anti-Tesla law.

> Can I buy one just to drive it through the doors of their capitol and park it on top of the assholes who passed all these laws

These laws were passed in the 1930s, so no. Those assholes are dead.