Combat Ranting (formerly known as Famicom Mini)

[A Black Falcon]

You're right about one thing: Europe is heading for a big problem. Their population is aging rapidly and they are losing population, meaning more and more burden is falling on a shrinking tax base, supporting a huge elderly population expecting everything nearly free for life. They can do it now but we'll see how it will work in a couple of decades... the US also has a major problem with Medicare going bankrupt, even with our dramatically lower levels of funding, but at least we have a growing tax base because of immigration and could afford to bring the taxes to a level where we might be able to stabilize things. Europe can't keep adding taxes because their tax burden is already very high... it'll be interesting to see what happens.

But still, even limited free coverage is far better than none at all...

Conservatives just do not care about people. Sick and dying old people not getting the care they need? Oh well, they should have saved more money. Poor people starving because working three jobs can't feed their family? Oh well, they should have had three jobs and gone to college too because anyone who can't move up the ladder (ie 99.99% of poor people) is a lazy bum and deserves what they get. Medicare? Evil program wasting government money to help people who are sick...

Oh yeah, and cheap goods are best, no matter where they come from. Now that position is also held by many moderate Democrats, like centrist Clinton... he supported NAFTA and free trade, big time... but that is just not the right way to do it. Oh, we should have free trade, but we must link it to wage, freedoms, and rights minimums. It is cruel to say that we don't care that Indonesian workers are in sweatshops just so we can have shoes and t-shirts a few bucks cheaper. And I know that Americans love how we get all our cheap stuff from China but because people cannot be expected to know which Chinese stuff is normal and which is slave or prison or sweatshop labor, the government needs to do it... confronting China is by far the biggest problem. We have such a massive trade deficit with them that we can't, even though they're one of the world's worst on worker's rights, accident rates, prison labor, labor laws, safety, etc, etc... but I don't know what we can do. Do we even have any leverage? At this point we can't credibly say we'll raise tarriffs on their goods, because we're so reliant on them...

I know that part of Wal-Mart's price advantage is the company's massive size... but I also know that part of it in some areas is deliberate underpricing, below their costs, just to destroy the competition so that when the little guys close they can then raise them... that's very common practice for chain stores.