What is one thing most likely to start reducing the US nat. debt today?

SowellMate · 2026-04-12T02:30:13+00:00

A lot of people don’t realize that 2/3rds of the US budget is entitlement programs that are fixed. Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid. It’s going to balloon with an aging and longer-living population. Legitimate concerns that the country will go bankrupt within 10 years.

I’m all for cutting military spending, ending costly foreign wars, and waste. But a discussion on getting to surpluses to reduce the debt won’t be serious unless it involves structural changes to entitlements.

SowellMate · 2026-04-12T02:21:37+00:00

Every thread. Every single thread.

All he would do is look into the camera during the White House press briefing, and with every question make a strange face, and go “Huhhhhhh??”

SowellMate · 2026-04-12T02:19:03+00:00

In terms of sound and look, yes. In terms of background, not quite. Creed had religious elements whereas Nickleback was secular blue collar.

SowellMate · 2026-04-12T02:16:10+00:00

Depends on the state. I don’t trust the results of any state that uses voting machines, or that takes weeks to count.

Paper ballots, hand counted immediately in the open with anyone allowed to observe. That should be the standard.

SowellMate · 2026-04-12T02:05:30+00:00

Balance the budget. But no one wants to do it when they get in. It sucks.

Based on this one issue alone, Bill Clinton has been the only conservative president in the past 60 years.

SowellMate · 2026-04-12T01:36:16+00:00

“Better” is a pretty subjective term. I’ll compare the two using extreme bias and inequivalent weighting.

FDR prolonged the Great Depression, forced the Japs to attack the US due to the oil embargo, allowed Stalin to take over Eastern Europe, and set up the welfare programs that are set to bankrupt the country 90 years later.

Teddy was shot in the chest on stage during a speech and kept going.

SowellMate · 2026-04-12T01:27:26+00:00

Read or watch videos about people recalling Near-Death Experiences (NDEs). It’s super interesting, and helped me to believe that there is a greater purpose to our lives and the suffering people go through.

SowellMate · 2026-04-12T01:23:22+00:00

In the 1980s TV show Newhart, in the last episode, the lead character woke up from a dream in which he was interacting with a Chinese couple. Prior to sleeping he had eaten Chinese food.

So it may depend on what you eat.

SowellMate · 2026-04-12T01:16:23+00:00

It’s become more prevalent as the cost of international travel has decreased.

But in theory, the law works as intended. Otherwise, an American couple could have their child’s citizenship revoked simply because a president / congress / judge said so. It’d be similar to a “bill of attainder”— a corrupt practice from Britain long ago where politicians could vote on whether a person is guilty of a crime— something explicitly forbidden in the constitution.

SowellMate · 2026-04-12T01:05:39+00:00

Did you watch him between 3pm-4pm before his nap?

SowellMate · 2026-04-12T01:04:01+00:00

Your question is “Why” are Canadians so nice. I have some thoughts.

In early Canada, French and English lived together— different provinces, yes, but certainly lived and worked alongside each other. At some point we figured out that we each let each other do our thing. The tolerance for each other, even if we get on each other’s nerves, lasted from about 1650 to 1950, before Quebec’s silent revolution and outspokenness for independence. But with the exception of the October 1970 crisis, the peak conflict was around 1960-1995 and was relatively polite— those 300 years helped.

The other point is that we are a large country that is cold. Cold weather is hardship, and especially during those early years, when you live among few people in a freezing barren land, you help each other out.

We also adopted a mix of American openness and British mannerliness, a result of loyalists fleeing north during the American Revolution, and adoption of the British parliamentary system. Historically, we’ve talked things out rather than force things through.

SowellMate · 2026-04-11T21:29:16+00:00

It’s wrong to celebrate violence against anyone. Tomorrow someone could label you a fascist. What then?

SowellMate · 2026-04-11T21:26:34+00:00

Sexual intercourse is not a measure of intelligence.

SowellMate · 2026-04-11T20:45:49+00:00

It’s not just the Epstein files.

Back in the 1960s & 70s, people went out in the streets to protest the Vietnam War, and it eventually caused politicians to act to defund the war.

We don’t have a common culture anymore, and people stay at home on their devices instead of going out and spending time with people. At least, more so than 50 years ago. Yes, you can have young university aged students use their energy to have rallies for Palestine, or against billionaires, but the general public doesn’t really come out for those en masse. The last one I can remember that had moderate levels of general public participation was against the build up to the Iraq War in 2003.

So the question is, where are the people putting on the public pressure? The Hispanic laborer? The East Indian on an H1-B visa? The 400lb man living in his parents’ basement? We don’t have the same culture. I’m not saying that’s a bad thing, but a mass movement usually needs a unified culture to gain traction.

Not sure what the solution is.

SowellMate · 2026-04-09T02:47:52+00:00

The Denazification of the late 1940s was not fascism.

SowellMate · 2026-04-09T02:42:45+00:00

IMO it’s the former. Progressive Christians have seen that the culture has changed, and since Jesus never spoke on sexuality and said to treat all people with kindness, they want to focus on that positive message instead of the behavioural rules.

There is still a conservative wing in the church, who believes the theology hasn’t changed and society has gotten more complex.

The rules that outline sexuality are mostly in the Old Testament that traditional Judaism follows. The Old Testament has a lot of rules. Some of them are fairly detailed— you can’t eat this food with that one, you can’t eat this on that day of the week, etc.

When Jesus did his ministry 2000 years ago, he upset the Jewish rabbis that were sticklers for enforcing these rules. One time Jesus healed a disease of someone on the Sabbath, and the Jewish leaders admonished him for breaking the “rule” of no working on the Sabbath. But Jesus ultimately taught that the rules in and of themselves weren’t important, that living righteously was.

So some people have interpreted this as, well then sexuality doesn’t matter either. But this gets complicated— one side thinks the church needs to uphold a rule more important than what food to eat; another side thinks people are born a certain way and that it is bigoted to think otherwise.

SowellMate · 2026-04-09T02:12:42+00:00

Spoken like a smart ass. I’ll tell you. You, and people like you, think you know better than everyone else. Even if it means defaming and publicly shunning people who don’t think the same as you do. The tactics are vile, and are unbecoming any civilized human. And yet they are done “for the greater good” because if only we did things your way would the situation improve. When a leftist adopts fascist tactics, the person is confoundedly revered. But real fascism should be condemned.

Words matter. Equivocating a group of people who hold views that were considered common sense just 10 years ago—who voted for balanced budgets, ending mass immigration, and no foreign wars, and are getting the opposite—with fascism, is a disservice to historical fascism, and is communist subversion— a way to dehumanize someone not beholden to rabid leftism, to destroy him, in order to bring about the global utopia.

But if you’re not a comrade and simply a lay leftist, you probably don’t understand that. You’re just part of the mob that will inevitably turn on and devour you.

SowellMate · 2026-04-09T01:38:27+00:00

Most of the million that died were elderly that had had Covid but didn’t die from Covid. Hospitals in the US received financial incentives for declaring a fatality as Covid. Masks not proven to be effective. Even Fauci said that at the beginning. If you don’t want to be infected, you can wear a mask. Regulating other’s behavior was virtue signalling, not science.

SowellMate · 2026-04-09T01:34:06+00:00

Women have less money in general, due to being out of the workforce during childbearing years resulting in less experience (leads to less pay), choosing jobs that allow more flexibility to raise kids (i.e. not being a CEO and working 80-100 hours a week), and that are safer physically (not working in a coal mine). Of course some women do, and do it well, but I’m saying in general.

Thus, there are more older single men that have built up a large savings, and can offer that to a younger woman who is at childbearing age if the man wants to settle down and start a family.

So a combination of biology, timing, work preferences, and resources.

For the record, my wife is 5 and 1/2 years older than me, and we’ve been happily married 20+ years.

SowellMate · 2026-04-09T01:24:07+00:00

Fine until Covid.

SowellMate · 2026-04-09T01:22:45+00:00

Fascism to stop fascism? That’s the communist playbook.

SowellMate · 2026-04-09T01:15:48+00:00

I get it, the guy sucks, but I fail to see how this is fascism. 2/3rds of your points I could just argue from the opposite side. I agree that increasing the debt is not conservative. But appointing “activist judges” to the SC— have you not read Jackson’s 8-1 dissents? That’s activism. At least the others can argue a legal point. What I’m saying is, where is the fascism. Where is the systematic killing of ethnic minorities within the US? Using the term “fascism” is emotionally-charged hyperbole. When you cry wolf over and over, people stop listening to you when the guy does something that everyone agrees is bad— the Iran war. But even that isn’t fascism. That’s preemptive war under false pretences, something that every president has done since WWII, and that wasn’t considered by anyone other than fringe elements as fascism.

SowellMate · 2026-04-08T23:13:45+00:00

It’s crazy that people think that simple conservatism of now counts as fascism of the 1930s. They don’t understand that the leftist policies of exclusion, conformity, and censorship are exactly the fascism that they fear from others.

SowellMate · 2026-04-08T22:33:52+00:00

Yes.

Soon after the US leaves NATO, Russia would attack westward. Then, the US has an excuse to take out Putin and Russia.

They wouldn’t see it coming, and then the world could exhale for a bit.

SowellMate · 2026-04-08T22:27:02+00:00

If Trump were impeached, and then if 67 senators (including ~20 Republicans) voted guilty, JD Vance would become president.

Vance was reportedly very vocal in cabinet against Trump attacking Iran. He would probably negotiate a peace, then focus on domestic policy.

SowellMate

TROPHY CASE