At the end of January 2009, when the arrogant, ignorant. sophomoric communist now occupying the White House took office, the unemployment rate was 7.8%. Our new president told us the unemployment rate would exceed 8% if we didn't adopt his stimulus package. We adopted it. How'd it do? The unemployment rate went above 8% in February 2009. It has not come below 8% in a single month since then. Wow! More than 8% unemployment every single month the guy's been in office. That worked out well, didn't it? And this narcissistic economic moron, who never had a real job in his life, has the nerve to criticize Romney's job-creation record. Throw the bum out!

A horrible account, but what is the US supposed to do about it? Invade? Does that also go for Zimbabwe? Syria? Iran? Venezuela? Cuba? Afghanistan? Oh, wait. We did invade that one, and it doesn't seem to be working out. Well, how about Iraq? Oh, yeah. We did that one. Another not-so-good outcome. Libya? There we went again. My reluctant conclusion from the historical evidence is that the US can't do much if anything about places like North Korea. There are a lot of ugly governments in the world. We can stop subsidizing them, but we can't stop them from doing what they are doing.

Come on. Let's call a spade a spade. There is a large amount of evidence of a large amount of voter fraud in districts that yield lots of Democrat votes. Holder is protecting that fraud because it benefits his party. The man is a criminal.

Taxes. It's just that the taxpayer pays the same tax whether the internal borrowing occurs or not. The difference is in how the tax money is spent in any given year. Suppose you and your wife are at the mall. Suppose: (A) you spend $3 from your wallet to buy a latte at Starbucks, and she spends $2 to buy a magazine, or instead (B) you borrow $3 from your wife to buy the latte because you left your wallet at home and she spends $2 on her magazine, and you repay your internal family debt when you get home. Total expenditure is the same. In the same way, internal federal debt has no implication for total tax collection.

I said nothing about constitutionality or comfort, just bookkeeping.

Put your doubts to rest. It is easy to explain. Suppose Social Security collects $1billion more in taxes than it needs this year for retirement benefits. Suppose it lends that money to the Defense Dept for one year. Next year, Defense and Social Security both get their usual tax allocation. Instead of spending all its money on fighter jets, Defense uses $1billion to repay Social Security, which spends it on retirement benefits. The taxypayer has paid exactly the same as if the original internal loan had not happened. The difference is in how the money has been spent. It's very simple bookkeeping, nothing more.

Speech is not the same as collusive action in the market. If all unions want to do is talk and lobby Congress, I have no objection to their existence. When they call on their members to go on strike all at the same time in order to force concessions from their employer, then they are acting as cartels, and their actions should be illegal for the same reason that collusion among companies is illegal.

No, I don't. As wulf73 wrote, you confuse associations with organizations that act in collusion *in the market* to influence the price of the good they sell. Unions do that. So does OPEC. NAM, the Chamber of Commerce, and so on do not. If you think unions are OK, you also should approve of OPEC, the old railroad trusts, and so on. If you don't like those, you also should not like unions for the same reason. My argument here does assume that you do feel bound by logical consistency.

"It turns out that our national debt, which was 35 percent of GDP during the 1970s, is now 106 percent of GDP,..." It's actually not quite that bad - yet. The 106% figure includes internal debt, which is debt one federal agency bought from another. That debt implies *no* taxes for the citizens because one agency's debt is another's credit. It cancels out. All that matters for taxpayers is the "debt in the hands of the public." Right now, that is "only" about 67% of GDP. With deficits of more than $1 trillion a year, however, we will reach and surpass 106% quite soon.

"Employers are more sophisticated about job negotiations than individual employees, so why shouldn't workers be able to join together to bargain? They should be." No, they shouldn't. That kind of activity is called "forming a cartel," which is all that a labor union is. Cartels of labor are socially harmful for exactly the same reasons that cartels of any other product sellers are harmful: they restrict supply to force up the price for what they sell. OPEC is a cartel. Are you happy with the artificially high prices OPEC creates? Labor unions are a cartel. You pay higher prices and get less product because of them.