BREAKING NEWS: REPUBL- wait, seriously...? *sigh*... REPUBLICANS VOTE TO SUE OBAMA OVER OBAMACARE.

Regardless of our political climate and debt the US is still the most powerful nation on the planet by a good margin. And it will remain that way for the foreseeable future.

Of course the U.S. Is a global superpower, but what does this have to do with these problems? I don't think I'd care if my country were a military or economic superpower, if it spent a disproportionately large amount on its military to this end... I'd rather have a better quality of life. Which is why I don't really get what you're trying to validate here. Power =/= 'better', so I kinda feel like this point isn't relevant.

Er

The reason people in the geopolitical world do as we, the Americans, say is because of our military. It's not because we are right, or wrong, or what we say makes logical sense. Many of my fellow Americans do not understand this - they believe that people see as we do, by right and wrong moral choices. They forget that the world of geopolitics is not about who has the moral high ground, but who has the literal high ground. If we didn't spend half our cash on better tanks, or more satellites, or equipping our soldiers, Israel would eventually cease to exist, Russia would claim a bully pulpit, and China would start running amock in the Far East like they've wanted to do for so long.

The problems are stemming from the American citizens who think we are somehow evil, because otherwise the world wouldn't abhor us so much. It's funny - on the one hand, many countries speak bad of the USA, but when it comes time to renew their foreign aid, they get all cozy. It continues to amaze me how we could have all this power and influence - but not use it for solving at least one of the great problems in the world.

Also, aevs, as many, many people have pointed out time and time again, Freedom is NOT FREE. You cannot have any life whatsoever if your defense is not strong. Ours is rock solid, and I can tend to myself, thank you very much.

Power does not equal better. More liberty is better, except in extreme cases. A dollar spent on a tank is much better than a dollar spent on some guy who just lost his job and hasn't a clue where to turn next - because that tank will keep him alive long enough to find his backside and get on his feet.

You're only . . . proving my point. the USA is comparable to Canada and most of Europe, including developing nations like India/Pakistan.

Incidentally, the fact that Russia and China are doing pretty well should tell you something. The Middle East as well

EDIT@mered4 - ahahahaha did you say Israel would cease to exist ahahahahaha.

No.

Your entire premise is completely broken, and is atypical of the media-washed American's gun-toting AMERICAN FREEDOM viewpoint. Yes, tanks help better than monetary support to live. Of course. You certainly need tanks to defend your freedom in America, that dangerous country full of webels and bandits.

America isn't just a military power. We have the power to induce famine as well. The US is the largest food exporter in the world, and food is important.

We're one of the few first world nations that could, if we wanted to, pull off self-sufficiency. We have a boatload of oil we aren't using, we have more than enough food, and we have enough land that an invasion against us would be next to impossible.

Our power allows us to get what we want and from other countries and allows us to continue our security buffer by not draining our own resources.

It's not like the quality of life in the US is terrible or anything either. The debt effects large companies more than it does individual citizens. And federal policies continue to effect them less than local government policies.

As others have said, nation states don't survive on morality.

As to why humans fight so many wars......ironically M.A.D has actually decreased the number of major wars fought, but has bred a time of minor wars across the globe.

No rest for the wicked.

Honestly, the reason American Healthcare sucks has a lot less to do with the lack of Socialized Medicine (not that I would support such a thing) and a lot more to do with the way our tax laws incentivize people to use a health insurance company to do absolutely everything healthcare wise. Even routine visits are covered by insurance here, which is absolutely insane. This has to do with the way income taxes were structured during WW2, and also due to the fact that all American wages at the time were capped (Thats right, during the war there was a maximum wage. In fact, there was price controls on absolutely everything. And a 95% top income tax bracket. How's that for socialism?) by law, so employers had to figure out ways to compete for labor without raising labor rates. This led to a wages+benefits structure, which was then ossified into the tax structure after the war ended. Things got worse from there as the insurance industry started controlling every healthcare transaction in the nation. Government subsidized and protected monopolies rarely end well whether they are intentional or not.

Additionally, one of the primary reasons Europe can afford socialized medicine and we in the US cannot is because we underwrite most of the funding for NATO, greatly subsidizing every nation in western Europe significantly. This drains our treasury enough to make socialized medicine untenable in our current budget. So remember, us winding down NATO so we could adopt such a policy would most likely cause the various single payer systems in Europe to be significantly downsized to make room for larger military budgets over there to make up for the shortfall in standing army strength. Considering the combined actions of the USA and the nation of Israel have created the monster known as ISIS (mostly thanks to that **** for brains Dubya trying to finish his daddy's war), who has stated their intention to attack Europe (Rome in particular). It sounds like they are gonna need all the military strength they can get in the near future.

Additionally, if you don't live in the US, why do you care what sort of healthcare system we have? Is there not enough room in the world for more than one way of doing healthcare? Why must every European insist that we are bad people if we don't adopt their way of doing things? It also sounds a bit hypocritical considering how much they complain about American cultural imperialism displacing their own native cultures.

^ total lols.

Ok, Broken, a little statistical inaccuracy there. The US contribution to the NATO budget? A shocking $711 million. Out of $650 billion dollars spent annually on defense. I don't think .1% of our defense budget is cause for much of anything in our country. The cost of NATO for all involved countries, except for maybe a few of the smallest, is so inconsequential as to be a huge red herring. Most fortune 500 companies make more money by orders of magnitude than the NATO budget.

Universal Health Care was calculated by the CBO to cost $1 trillion dollars. Over 10 years. And would reduce overall medical costs for the country by about $1.1 trillion in that same time. This is the CBO, mind you. A group that is probably one of the only remaining truly non-partisan organizations in our government. I.E. in the long run, it would likely reduce our spending, and would cost barely a 6th of our defense budget, still leaving $550 billion annually to dump into the pockets of companies like Boeing, Blackwater, and McDonnell Douglas.

Is that all there is to any of this? Of course not. It's a complex problems with a lot of causes, and trying to simplify causes leads to intellectual laziness. But if you're gonna argue on the internet, at least make sure your statistics and facts paint the picture you think they do.

Back to you discussion, but nothing irritates me more than using misleading or outright false data to say something is a cause when it's barely even a correlation. /sciencerageover

I'd be willing to bet a majority of the NATO budgets go into the management of the organization and not the military power backing it.

Article 5 says we have to consider an attack against other NATO nations as we would an attack on ourselves. That means our entire military gets involved, not just the NATO budget.

If we were to lessen our military budget regardless of the NATO portion, NATO's influence would shrink as a whole. He might be guilty of oversimplifying, but that doesn't make him entirely wrong either.

Fixed that for you.

Nah. It's still a pure science thing. If you're researching, research. Whether statistics or physics, the mental diligence and consistency is still part of scientific theory.

LOL Pretty much.

We complain because we care more than many over there in the US seem to about people being charged thousands of dollars for "getting sick". Being alive and healthy is not a "privilege" that people should have to pay for. It's also why I get pissed off that the NHS is always the FIRST thing our government cuts funding on every time it makes budget cuts.

Sir, its not about whether or not we consider it a "privilege" or a "right". The fact of the matter is, if you claim it as a right, then someone must deliver it. So you must either enslave doctors to provide it for you, or expropriate taxpayers to pay the doctors for it. Someone, somewhere will pay for it, whether or not it is a right that everyone deserves. Which puts you back to square one. Also, there is also the fact when you lower the apparent price of something to zero, the demand for that good becomes effectively infinite. Especially if that good does not have a natural point of satiation like food or drink does. This gets even worse when you invite anyone and everyone to your nations to partake. Look at Europe! You Europeans are basically paying for the medical care of every immigrant that comes across your borders! If you allow this to continue, you will soon find the rest of the world eating your lunch on your land, If you have not already. This is the reality of infinite demand and zero price. Even worse, eventually these immigrants, who have no respect for European concepts of human rights or freedom nor for European history, will eventually outnumber you. When they eventually do, they will put you to the sword make sure that the goodies keep on coming regardless of the cost to yourselves and your dignity. And it will be your own fault! After all, you are the ones who set up such an expectation in the first place, and it is you who advertised it throughout the world. The soft Socialism of Europe combined with open borders will end in the enslavement followed by the extermination of the native European peoples if things keep going the way they are going. You may believe that this is hyperbole, but we Americans have seen this story play out far too many times in our own history. Let me ask you this: what was the eventual fate of the Native Americans who showed mercy and kindness to the starving Jamestown colonists on the original Thanksgiving? They were destroyed by those very same people later on, which is the very reason I was able to inherit the country I live in. You say Socialized medicine means that you care for your own, but you are setting up your precious children for a hard fall. It is poison posing as medicine. I would recommend you look up the definition of the phrase "Pathological Altruism".

On the subject of the NATO budget, that only covers the cost of the administration of the alliance and the joint forces. It does not cover the cost of our American bases in Europe, which we pay for directly, and is not listed on that budget, but is still a huge part of what NATO is. And that doesn't even begin to cover the black budgets that support NATO as well. Edit: Arseface beat me to it.

Wow, dude.

Yeah, um, no.

Edit: That's like, the most xenophobic thing I have read all day, I am literally surprised to have actually skimmed through it.

Thanks @kvalheim, I appreciate the passionate level of frustration you have. It's a depressing topic for a lot of us.
It's a tricky subject, because as @Brokenshakles so ineloquently put it, someone has to pay for it and that's not an easy task to accomplish.

I'm not even gonna begin to answer @Brokenshakles on that, because I'm too tired and sick of my OWN politics (seriously, f*ck this whole Scottish Independence crap, I have more important things to stress about) to bother fighting americans. But that was a Xenophobic, almost blatantly racist, American Exceptionalist, paranoia post there and I'll leave it at that, no point arguing with someone who can't even remotely be swayed.

@mkrater , it's because I KNOW a lot of americans from my time online; not one of them thinks the current system of healthcare over there is remotely acceptable, and it's depressing listening to them deal with something that shouldn't even BE a problem.

90% of the Scottish independence thing boils down to the same problems that most people have with the conservative government.

Which is legitimate, unfortunately.

Hopefully the Scots say to help the rest of us change it to something more favourable.