My god this is ignorant. you realise poor people do that because there poor. Imagine you had nothing and your government provided no help at all, your going to resort to crime, drugs etc. but if there is good government support. I mean ofcourse your always going to have unmotivated and "bad" people but thats a part of life not everyone wants to work. its proven the countries with the best government support are the happiest like eastern europe etc. inequality is a bad thing. 

if a rich person has to pay a bit more all they really lose is abit of temper and have a whinge if poor people lose support much worse.

Edit - I completely misread your comment as saying that poor people are useless and a burden on society so my bad but thats my opinion to people who think strongly like that

You get banned because you can't ever hold an intellegent conversation without resorting to flaming whenever you run into a fact you can't debate.

A lot like the above... but with more deragotory baseless insults.

How is it a Rush Limbaugh fact that Obama said during the first debt ceiling showdown that Social Security checks can't be guarnteed?

"Mr. Obama warned that if Congress doesn't raise the debt limit, Social Security checks and veterans' benefits could be delayed and government workers and vendors wouldn't get paid."

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324235104578241512112508322.html

If there was a social security trust fund... how could that be true?

As said by great republican theologist Al Gore.  There is no real social security trust fund.

What the social security trust fund holds is government bonds.  Which is why the debt ceiling will effect social security pensioners.  Because the government needs to borrow money to pay off it's social security government bonds.  Some more liberal economists will argue that constitutes real assets (but not money) because a government bond is just like a corporate bond.   Which would be true... if it weren't owned by the issueing company.

An easy way to illustate this is say, take Sony.  If Sony were to issue 1M in corporate bonds, bought 1M in coproate bonds from themselves, then releaed 1M More in coprorate bonds, bought them from themselves again.... would you say that Sony just trippled their balance sheet? 

The sad part here is that your letting partisianship get in the way or realizing that the way social security is set up now... people WILL be screwed.  I don't believe like Republicans that social security should be privatised, however that is a better option then the current one.  The BEST option is to work like such right wing strongholds as Denmark, Canada and pretty much the rest of the world.   

That is to hire someone to manage national pension funds via stocks and bonds NOT reliant on the government.  As it is, sooner of later people will be screwed out of their social security by a lowering of benefits, or a raising of retirement age.

Instead that money should be invested smartly in real assets.  (Preferably with some means testing on contributions after the legislation point.)

1) That's not how the system works, people actually pay in less in a month then they will get when retired.  This can be shown by the fact that Social Security is running a deficit and does rely on the social security trust fund currently.

http://www.ssa.gov/cgi-bin/ops_period.cgi

If you'll notice, Payroll tax contributions are lower then Benefit payments.  (Though the incoming total is higher then the outgoing total, because of interest payments on the governmennt IOUs to itself.)

Net cash flow has been negative since 2009.

Hence why checks will be delayed if we hit the debt ceiling.  They need to wait for the money to come in to pay off the bonds to pay retirees.

2) Germany was better off then other Europeon countries largely because of Austerity in the first place.  How in the world would the average person live off of what they pay in  week in social security taxes?

Additionally, you don't seem to know what a double dip recession is.   For there to be a double dip recession, there needs to be... well growth.  Outside Ireland I don't believe any of the austerity countries have had growth yet.  Which is as expected since you have to wind down all the bad debt and economic readjustmenet.

3)  No real economists support longterm deficits.   John Maynard Keynes is held up as the main left wing economist and he HATED deficits.   He thought all debt should be temporary, short term and self liquidating.   He just thought that letting bad debt and readjustment of markets was too painful in the short term, and therefore advocated a smalll short term deficit to spread out the pain. 

I'd agree with all of those.  Though i'd add... 

- Stop giving money to most friendly nations.   They don't really need it.  (Sorry Israel, Western Europe, Japan, South Korea.)

So what Austerity measures did Australia take?

- They provided stimulus packages for low and middle class

- They spent in infrastructure, such as the NBN (the largest project undertaken at $42bn) and looking for a very fast rail project, speculated to cost close to $100bn

If you ask the people around here, they'll say that the federal government's spending is "out of control", yet they handled the financial crisis just fine.

How is Australia doing Austerity again?

EDIT: Australia's safeguard against the GFC was government regulation, not Austerity. This has been imposed since the Keating government of the 1990s:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_pillars_policy

The fact that Australia never went crazy in the firstplace on deficits and ran their economy fairly smart.   Spending levels on what Australia is doing would be considered austerity in most places in the world.

I mean, complaints about austerity in a lot of countries are just silly.   For example, in the US if you let the republcians go hog wild and cut everything they wanted to cut... we'd still spend more in 2014 then 2013, which was more then 2012.

That makes absolutely no sense.

Austerity refers to a change, not a state. That's like say you're going fast because you're stationary and everyone else is driving in reverse. In fact, the only reaction to the GFC was stimulus (ie MORE spending), and measures to pressure banks to lower interest rates, which were far more effective than any proposed spending cut would have done.

Read up on the Four pillars policy imposed by the Keating government.

Also, the difference between Government and a Household is that government is soverign and therefore has more control over it's debts.

Which means that it's able to fuck over average people to pay off it's debts and people who own it's debt. Which often are average people.... (Union Pension funds, and well as mentioned everyone in social security.)

Unsecured spending now leads to the poor and middle class getting screwed down the line. All one needs to do is look at the history of things like social security... our benefits are worse now then they were before social security got "fixed" last time, and they'll be worse again.

You can't run a deficit forever and eventually it's the poor who are going to lose out in a BIG way.

He looks mildly retarded. His slack jaw betrays everything he is trying to hide with his suit.

I know what they were, though the truth was, Australia really wasn't facing any big issues due to the GFC in general.   Australia never had a reccession in the first place.  The GFC measures it took were pretty much just shadowboxing.

http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-505125_162-51352693/how-australia-ducked-the-crisis/

Responsible countries avoided the GFC, irresponsible ones got hit.

The arguement now is irresponsible countries should be more irresponsible to get out of it's problems.

Austerity is actually doing a fairly decent job in places like Ireland, it's just covered up because well... GDP includes government spending in GDP.  So of course GDP takes a hit when government spending is reduced.  Most of the other countries like Greece are so fucked up at a pure conceptual level it will take FOREVER to get anywhere with ANY system.