Daily Show lays it out in full here:

http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/thu-october-11-2012/our-new-election-economy

Yes, to get the U.S economy, we need more elections that can be bought, not less!

I suppose, at least in terms of getting private citizens to pump money into the local/state/national economy that they might not otherwise. In terms of businesses spending that money, though, it's just a waste (that could be better spent on building actual business)

Well I'm not really surprised to tell you the truth.

You can't build buisness without real demand for buisnesss.

It's silly to ask GM to build more plants when it's already meeting supply.

We're in a slump because of lack of demand.

Partially because a good portion of our demand was created by debt and leveraging levels that aren't legal anyore.

The Leveraging demand won't ever be back...

and the debt demand wont be back until people get their debt paid off.

Hence why it would of just been better to let the big banks fail.   They fail... everyone who owes them money?   Gets off scott free.

Government pumps money into smaller banks to loan to people.

Couldn't hurt anyway.  You can't get a loan now uness your credit is perfect anyway.

The economy is an organic ecosystem of sorts, embedded with number of artificial things, seen as necessary in society, in order to preserve it.  Problems with just letting everything slide, can be that you permanently can end up destroying the ecosystem, and it never recover.  You can also end up artificially propping up things that aren't sustainable also.  

Perhaps what is needed is implementing of broadscale year of jubilee where debts are reset and society can reevaluate everything.  The debt is dragging everything way down now.

Aw man, i can't even watch the video! But, if this is true. They should hold regular referendums alongside the elections

We were very close to this when Greece had their election. They got scared and narrowly chose pro-bailout. If they'd gone anti-bailout I think it would have triggered a cascading default of this kind. Don't think the economy could be worse off than now if that happened, but I believe it would have helped confidence lots to have the debt gone.

Given the nature of fiat money, i'm wondering if, as far as sovereign debt goes, that might not be the worst idea. It would then allow countries to focus on something more important than interest payments.

It would pose more problems if jubilee was run on a domestic level, because it would essentially kill all long-term investments since it would discourage reckless lending and provide no guarantee of return in anything but the short term.

Yeah, absolutely it would have to be national debt.

And this debt is mostly owed to i) banks, whose finances are terrible anyway, ii) other countries, not a problem, and iii) pension schemes, which can be saved by a specific government guarantee or something. All in all the effect of the debt will still exist but in a more manageable form than an immovable lead weight.

I'd agree if we were talking government mandated debt forgivness that it could cause things to mess up.

If the people you owe money to just go out of buisness however?

Why would you owe them money then?