You've established that we agree on the philosophy that citizens pay taxes for the government to provide certain services. We are just arguing about the details and where the line is.

I do not necessarily agree with all of the details of all the particular proposals on these lines, but I would like us to be able to have an honest discussion and crunch the numbers at the national level without old conservatives shouting "SOCIALISM!!!" like a slur and shutting down any good faith discussion. It comes back to my earlier point about how no one is trying to work across the aisle with different philosophies but the same goal of doing what's best for America and Americans. It's shot down for party political spectacle.

I don't recall who it was off the top of my head, but someone crunched numbers comparing the proposed Medicare-for-All I think it was and literally found we would pay less than with the current system. It's completely asinine to not as a nation collectively go whoa, wait a minute, let's take another look at the very least.

If it's not feasible, it's not feasible, but let's put in an actual honest effort and analysis and see. If we could actually provide medical care to all Americans and spend less in the process, why would we not even look into it?

If we don't do something and keep doing everything as we have been, I can tell you America will be left behind in the dirt by China and India and the rest of the world.

America being left in the dirt by China and India has almost nothing to do with our failure to embrace socialist policy. If anything, they’re just doing capitalism better than we are.

On the flip side, a lot of the people in the U.S. waxing poetic about Sweden or Denmark fail to mention that they are very capitalist countries with far fewer regulations on their markets. They don't have that much money to throw around toward social programs without cutting back somewhere. 

Or perhaps progressives recognize we are rapidly approaching the greatest wealth disparity since the gilded age, and all of the protections and advantages from the new deal and regulations that literally created a middle class are being stripped away over time, and while the extremely wealthy are profiting off the backs of poor workers who cannot afford childcare so they can work to buy food and live more than a subsistence life, the real wages for the rest of us have been stagnant for 40 years.  Maybe the recognize that as China and India develop, by sheer volume alone they are going pump out more educated folks than we will, and we will be left behind. Competition for jobs, placement as world and thought leaders, resources, is going to get worse not better as other nations develop and improve their qualities of life.  Maybe giving folks a leg up to get out of institutional, generational poverty and to meet a minimum amount of education will allow more Americans to have a better shot of succeeding in the world which actually helps America in the long run. 

I find it ludicrous that the "greatest nation in the world" cannot or will not figure any of this out or even run the numbers in good faith.  

And yes, capitalism with social policies like Sweden and Denmark are literally what the majority of progressives want. Not pure socialism. My philosophy is capitalism is great to a point, but you need enough regulation to keep people honest, or they WILL take advantage of others. Case in point, literally all of human history. 



Corporations are people, too, right? That was recently decided. Let's get them off the government tit, too, then. Let's tie off the loopholes and nuke the subsidies and make them pay market value and full taxes, too.  

Also, I think you are grossly overestimating how many people are happy to not be productive and squeak by on a barely-above-poverty existence with food stamps and such. I wonder how many poor people on food stamps are equivalent to the unfunded tax cut Trump just handed out?  (I know you are not a fan of Trump either, so that's not directed at you). 


EDIT

To be clear, I am not even saying "Just do it, and damn the numbers!" I'm saying let's actually put in good faith effort to figure it out and see what works and makes sense.

Thank you, Slam_Bradley.

Restoring faith in the human race and rational thinking 365 days a year.

Not entirely different at all. That is another way to go about it, and I for one would wholeheartedly support paying teachers a lot more. Not only do they deserve it and would it attract a higher pool of qualified people, that money would go right back into the economy as well. Cash in non-rich hands tends to get spent in the economy. Good stuff.


I agree they need to be careful in how they implement this and that the middle class should not foot the majority burden for this.


I believe that you work hard and put in a lot of hours, but so do a lot of other people, and their hours are worth just as much as ours.  They deserve to eat and retire or take a vacation at some point.  They didn't have the education you and I do.  Their loans were for tuition costs that are massively larger than yours and mine were decades ago.  Many today cannot not afford to even try to make the choices you and I did because their parents were barely making enough to scrape by and feed their kids and who could not afford help.

We aren't talking about you and me and working folks propping up deadbeats to live large on our cash, but we could look into improving the fortunes of a generation of Americans who have walked into a much crappier situation than we did and stop handing trillions of dollars in unfunded tax cuts back to Jeff Bezos and Warren Buffet.

Of course it's not as simple as just throw government money at it. There are huge issues with college tuition hikes and predatory loans and all that. The real solution would require a serious look at all facets in detail, but I think it's dumb to throw it all out before even having the real conversation. 

We can debate three ways till next Tuesday about how important a college education is, but we can't ignore that for better or worse, it is now a requirement for many employers.

I think you realize that the idea of "free college tuition" does not mean that everybody and his sister gets a full boat to Harvard, Stanford or MIT on yours and my dime.

We're talking tuition to state colleges and community colleges. Not room and board, activities fees, etc., etc. The cost of tuition is almost minuscule compared to all the rest of the costs of "going away" to college.That's why colleges toss around free-tuition grants and scholarships so "generously."

Guaranteed free tuition to state schools might mean a resurgence in the popularity of community colleges, which are falling by the wayside because they can't compete with the glamour of "going away" to a "good college" but can't cut their own costs enough to make themselves affordable for the low-income kids who desperately need them. and also for the middle-class kids who really don't know quite what they want to do, but get on the conveyor belt to keep up with the Joneses by incurring craploads of high-interest loans to go off to a four-year party with a hundred-grand cover charge. I think we can commit ourselves to a national self-improvement program that recognizes the fact that this ain't the 1950s anymore.

The right to a free public education entails more in the 21st century than it did even 20 years ago, and, as with the expansion of medical care to all, is an idea rooted in pragmatism as much as in idealism.

As for childcare, again, we're not talking nannies for every kid.

Even if one parent would like to be a stay-at-home parent, the American economy of the 21st century simply does not make that a choice for the vast majority of people.

You want a vibrant economy? You want a healthy populace? You want a truly educated populace? You want a change in the inequality of incomes? Then these are the kinds of steps we're going to have to take.

And those who feel like the put-upon worker bees, perhaps, will feel less so if they and their children will derive benefits from programs like these. Nobody likes to feel like the little red hen, I get it. We all do.

But frankly, many of the arguments raised in opposition to these kinds of proposals -- and not just the ravings of the "It's going to be just like Venezuela!" crowd -- sound as if they were first spoken by Ebenezer ("Are there no workhouses?") Scrooge and the social Darwinist robber barons.

Nobody's trying to print tickets for the gravy train but the Republicans.