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Bofferbrauer2 said:
Snoopy said:

1. China eventually learned about capitalism. Glad you notice how capitalism is the way to go. However, the United States is still ahead and China is plateauing right now. Not to mention the capita per income in China is embarrassing.  Also, I forgot to say the United States has more GDP than the whole European union lol.

2. Even though we spend a lot of money on the military, it still won't cover the cost of social programs. Even if we drop the cost to $0. Not to mention military spending when done right does come up with useful inventions (Internet, GPS, microwaves, etc) and makes other countries think twice about starting wars with us. Which saves us a lot of money in the long run. The rich pay the majority of our taxes as it is. If we tax them to death, they will eventually leave and we get nothing. That includes jobs. We can drop financial aids and other countries will still do deals with us because we are leading in pretty much every relevant industry.

3. Except private banks won't be lending a lot of money compare to the federal government because private banks will be pickier. Therefore the price will go down because Universities will have no choice. Also, there are no guarantees, but there are statistics to see which loan is the best bet. Not to mention Universities can downsize on useless stuff and curriculums. Universities have a lot of ways to generate money. Just look at the sports program.

Youtube videos can teach you many things young padawan. I've made over $15,000 side money online last year thanks to some youtube videos. You can learn to program and build a portfolio, run a landlord business (which I am doing on the side now) and more. If you can prove to people you can do the job, they won't care if you have a degree unless the government forces it of course. I still remember my doctor using google/ a youtube video to help diagnose an issue I was having. What a time to live.

1. Yes Capitalism is the way to go - however not unrestricted, there need to be some rules and regulations in place to protect both people and small companies. @bolded: In nominal GDP, they do. Bring it up to purchase parity power and the US drops to the third spot, behind China and the EU. Main cause is the slow growth in Italy (1.2%), UK(1.4%), France (1.6%) and Germany (1.9%), which taken together form over 50% of the EU's economy. But the rest of Europe is growing much faster, and mostly faster than the US, too (eastern EU member states consistently grow by 4%+, as do Luxembourg, Malta and Ireland ) but they are yet too small to make a big impact in the total EU growth.

2. a. Yeah, but the US military is bloated to death. It could work just as efficiently with just a third of the expenses if they just limit the different equipments to one per kind instead of a dozen per kind. That alone would already help a lot.

b. They do, as it should be - but just barely. Also, if you look it from the income perspective, it's far from enough: while the total adjusted household income has been multiplied by 6 since 1980 (from 1.6 Trillions to 9.7 Trillions), the top 1% income rose from 138 Billions to 2 Trillions, so multiplied by 14.5 and thus much more than twice the mean value. In fact, it's them who push that value up to 6x in the first place, as the bottom 50% only rose by 3.8x, from 288B to 1.095T. In other words, they went from earning twice what the top 1% does to half of what the Top 1% gains. No wonder the Top 1% pays the most taxes if they earn much more money than half the population in the first place.

3. You missed the point. The Universities will continue jacking up the prices, as there will always be enough to pay for it, but never enough for their insatiable hunger for money, thus pricing higher and higher. you can see a similar thing happening in the Videogame industry already, with DLCs and Season passes that cost more than the base game itself.

4. I know Youtube videos and the like can teach you very much (i'm using Udemy btw, which works similarly). But again, you missed the point. The point was that you might learn everything there is to learn in a domain, but you get no diploma, no proof that at one point in your life you learnt all that stuff. If a company only looks at the diplomas and sees you appying for a job but miss the necessary diploma, chances are you get filtered out despite being the best for the job.

For example, my wife learnt everything there was for a Six Sigma Black Belt on Udemy. However, since you get no diploma or certification of any kind, her knowledge is useless unless her boss sponsors a black belt teaching session, which costs over 10000$, way too much for the company she's working for (that's more than her yearly income in the Philippines).

1. You're going to have to site CREDIBLE sources about "buying power". America dictates how the industry goes for the most part. Look at how AAA Video games are made to cater to western gamers for example. Also, most conservatives believe in some control regarding capitalism. Most of these "controlling factors" actually help businesses in the long run. 

2 A. Yes, there is unnecessary spending in every government agencies. My home city had a scandal where one of the education leaders was using tax money for a vacation. Pretty messed up. Glad he is going to jail. Which is why I prefer the private sector to take over most things.

2 B. It isn't "barely". The TOP 1 percent pays almost 40% of our taxes. Chances are our taxes won't pay for squat and we are not huge job creators.

3. DLC, Season pass are all optional. However, video games have actually gotten cheaper and have more value (IMO) than ever before. You can play games like Apex and Fortnite for free. Also, look at what Xbox game pass is doing. You are able to play relatively new/new games for 10 dollars a month. Recently I've played shadow of the tomb raider, Sea of thieves and crackdown 3 through game pass. Look at Netflix, for 5 dollars you can an insane amount of entertainment. That's what happens when the federal government gets their noses out of the industries.

4. You do have proof if you apply what you learn. Learning programming through youtube? Create a GitHub account and upload a portfolio. Learned how to cook food on youtube? Great! Cook the food and sell it (actually know someone doing this part-time). Curently, I am learning how to run a side landlord business and what homes are great investments.

 

Also, I did Udemy before. You do get a certification. Depending on the industry, it can be very useful.