[quote]pookie wrote:
Headhunter wrote:
Spending will rise even more (12 years of pent-up ideas), taxes will rise, stocks will begin to fall.
Your taxes will probably rise, to pay for Bush’s ridiculous spending spree and tax-cuts. Spending money you, your children and grand children don’t have can’t go on forever.
On the Canadian side, Harper has cut the national sales tax by 1% this year and plans to cut it another 1% next year. He’s giving us more generous family allocations per kids and wants to reduce our income tax too. Of course, the Canadian federal govt. has been amassing surpluses for years now.
Stocks will fall? Probably. And then they’ll rise again.
Being perceived as weak on defense,
Really? With a defense budget larger than the rest of the world put together you really think you’ll be perceived as weak on defense? Just because that idiot Rumsfeld mismanaged the greatest fighting force in the history of the planet into a draw fighting armed civilians in sandals, doesn’t make you “weak on defense.”
Stop electing corporate shills who only look after their own self-interest to the White House, and you might not get embarrassed so badly on the world stage.
You managed to defeat the Soviet Union in the cold war without eliminating all your civil liberties or even fighting a direct war with them. Don’t tell me you can’t take on religious nutcases with AK-47s.
But I digress.
international investments from all over will fall, leading to suffering in the 3rd world (its actually already started),
Nice of you to notice, since it’s been going on for, like, forever? Even when the French and British Empires were warring over the seas with each other, it wasn’t so hot for most of the modern third world. As far as predictions go, it’s pretty much moot.
spreading slowly upward. Unemployment will rise as demand falls and we’ll have more and more difficulty financing our lifestyles with debt.
I’ll give you this one. We live in with way to much debt and too little savings. While there might be some difficult years ahead, there’s a difference between a slowed economy, a few recessions and your vision of the apocalypse.
Eventually, the market will crash, the government will print money wildly to cover all the debts and obligations. Hyperinflation, followed by a militaristic/fascist dictatorship results.
This is the above-mentioned apocalypse I was referring too.
Although it does get you your utopian vision of how life should be, no?
If it comes to that, I’ll join the fascist army and seek you out, just so I can stomp your asthmatic non-recruitable chickenhawk face with my spit-shined boot. 
A nationalistic party will take the place of the corrupt and inefficient two now.
Will it be efficient and non-corrupt? You do realize that it would take a major revolution to put that in place? I’m not saying it’s completely impossible (I’m not making the mistakes some 1930s German did) but I’d rate it extremely unlikely.
China will be the new hegemon, in cooperation with the massive US military.
Once under Chinese command, do you expect them to be able to fight their way out of a wet paper bag? Or will they, again, be thwarted by patient civilians with primitive weapons and crap cars?
Yep, there’s your bright future.
Wanna bet?
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Our national debt grows at about $12,000 per second. As you say, that can’t continue to compound forever. Either the currency becomes worthless (hyperinflation) or the economy deflates through an unsupportable debt load.
Because of the tremendous obligations (financial) on the part of our Federal gov’t, I’m expecting hyperinflation. Any government that defaulted on its bonds, social security, and so forth, would be tossed out on its ear. The populace would vote in the spenders.
Expect a lot of refugees up there.
BTW: You are right about Bush. He and the Republicans had a chance to really turn this country around — slash spending, reform social security, cut the red tape, institute term limits, on and on. That’s why we voted the cocksuckers in in the first place. Turns out they’re all a bunch of goddamned cowards and tried to out-Democrat the Dems. Fucking traitors, all of 'em.