I disagree. You, in fact, are the one who have embraced the talking points. You also conveniently ignored the obvious evidence and fall back on ad hominem attacks. Your vocabulary is more sophisticated than others with your viewpoint and you are clearly more educated, but you are regurgitating the same demonstrable falsehoods. To wit:
1. The boom years are gone
2. We need to raise taxes to balance the budget
3. We need to cut entitlements to balance he budget
4. People work harder when they have more incentive to do so
5. Canada and the US have roughly the same debt to GDP ratio
1. This is patently false, at least globally. Like every other boom, some new technology or industry will be milked by the banking industry for another bubble and bust cycle. This is the same sort of shit we avoided for four decades under the combined wisdom of FDR (arguably the most liberal and most socialist president in US history) and Eisenhower (the last true conservative president), while taxes were at an all time high and funding alll sorts of things like entitlements and the Marshal Plan. This massively long period of prosperity ended when Reagan began dismantling the financial industry regulations, but it really went downhill when Clinton let the betting parlor re-open on the commodities market again. Without these two key events and the Bubbles that accompanied them, GW Bush would not have been able to do nearly the carnage to our fiscal power that he did.
2. Obviously this is the case, but I noticed you omitted who should have the increased tax burden. Is it really that hard to acknowledge that the country would be better off if we taxed the uber wealthy to a larger degree like we did during the highly posperous 1950s? They are the primary benneficiaries of all the reckless fiscal choices we have made in this country, yet they pay less than anyone else (or in some cases
we pay them, like GE and fucking Exxon Mobile), despite having some of the most dramatic increases of personal fortune in the history of the planet.
3. Again, patently false, as the policies of FDR and Ike proved for half a century. This is simply a target of revenue for the financial industry who want to privatize these things to create another boom and bust cycle that they can milk. If the Tea Baggers ever catch on to this, the GOP will be over and done. Fortunately, they are even more ignorant than the holy rollers that the far right milked for votes during the Reagan years, so this is not likely.
4. Your idea of incentive is "work or you will be homeless and I will find someone more desperate to takethe job" and amounts to blackmail. My idea of incentive is that instead of these MBA fuckups who run companies into the ground to pump short term stock options making 100s of times what the average empoyee rakes in, while getting bonuses for tanking the companies they work for, the grunts should make a comfortable wage with a safe pension. This gives them more discretionary money to spend on goods and services, which in turn fuels the entire economy. This system worked for half a century, before some really greedy people got their way.
5. Yet Canada manages to provide better health care and a higher standard of living than the US.
I don't have to be a commie leftist socialist atheist to know that the country was a lot more prosperous when the wealthy paid more taxes and financial regulation kept the bubble bust cycle from happening (not to mention the commodities markets and short selling wrecking businesses and entire national economies), I just have to have a knowledge of history prior to the propaganda rewrites of the late 70s and early 80s. We went from kicking everyone's ass, socially, economically, militarily, intellectually, and scientifically to a culture where we revere ignorance and worship greed and selfishness. The causes of this are debatable, whether it was orchestrated by some rich people still bitter about FDR's policies or simple social enui left over from the massive cluster fucks of the Korean and Viet Nam. But the fact is that we were much better off when capitalism was regulated and we had a progressive tax code in place. Hell, the T-Baggers would LOVE a return to the 1950s in this country, at least if they could keep the darkies down again.
The reality here is that YOU have coopted your party line here. You have bought into this lie that anyone can be like the richest 1% if they work hard enough and don't tax them because I might be one of those guys some day! Those guys are up there because they had enough money in their families to rig the system in their favor and now they are on a mission to dismantle anything that might be able to interfere with that domination again. This means that a well off and well educated middle class has to go, because that is the greatest obstacle to tyranical behavior and unchecked greed in any society. When you look at all of the self destructive policy choices made by the right wingers (and right leaning Dems) in the last couple decades, through this prism, they make a great deal more sense. Education is the worst its ever been, pensions were replaced with unsafe 401ks that have been plundered in various ways, and social programs designed to prevent/help people out of poverty are under relentless attack. Meanwhile, we fund several wars that are privatized enough for various entities to get obscenely wealthy off of and we actually pay tax incentives to these bloodsucking parasites for milking us dry while doing it.
One last thing:
Regulations allowed them to get it in the first place - without regulations, they would have been renting the whole time.
I could not agree more. The people who got those obviously doomed loans never should have been allowed to get them and should be lifetime renters. The average person is a complete idiot (and getting worse, thanks to the assault on education standards in this country) and cannot be trusted to avoid predatory lending on this level of sophistication. If the
original lending regulations would have remained in place and/or the banking industry and the agencies that are supposed to regulate them did not have such an incestuous relationship, then this bullshit would have never occured. What you are arguing is that the drug addict is totally at fault here and the drug dealer is blameless, which is in keeping with a philosophy of unfettered capitalism. Unfortunately, the housing market bubble was (like the tech bubble before it) a clinical study in what happens with unfettered capitalism on a large scale. When someone gets enough influence to rig the field (aka too big to fail or Goldman Sachs having half the treasury on their fucking payroll), disaster occurs. This is the same shit that happened before the Great Depression, its just now the economy is global and reacts more rapidly/wildly due to the modern information age, so the consequences are much more drastic.
I am not advocating wholesale socialism, but look at actual examples for a moment, instead of think tank hypotheticals though up to match a desired policy. A strong, well educated, well fed, and well paid middle class is content and productive. It spends money which, in turn, makes money for the economy as goods and services are in constant circulation. This is especially true when the same society is involved in vast public works efforts, like improving the infastructure or massive projects like the Hoover Dam. The nations that have stuck to this overall philosophy have some of the highest standards of living and the rich are doing just fine there, too. Our country cannot continue, if the shuffling around of debt is its largest industry, instead of actual manufacturing and services. The poor have no fucking clue about this, because they have been conditioned to embrace ignorance. The middle class is slowly being eroded away, as a matter of policy. The pseudo rich don't want to rock the status quo, because they think they are next in line for the gravy train. The Ultra Rich don't give a shit, because they will take all of their money and move on to another country once they are done picking the carcasse of this one dry.