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Originally Posted by tw2113
I consider myself socially liberal, fiscally conservative. I agree we need to have a lot of change happen, but I disagree with how we'd pay for it. I'd prefer we scaled back the foreign policy spending long before we should scale back the welfare spending. I wish we'd more effectively spend the taxes we already collect than just keep collecting more and waste it just as badly. I don't believe in "free college" or "free healthcare" and know that those get paid one way or another by taxpayers. We'd have a sticker shock at first, but over time, we'd grow used to paying for those types of things gradually and collectively.
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I know where you're coming from (nice handling of p-green by the way), and I think it's just a natural part of "growing up" to begin to take on a more fiscally conservative belief system. I mean, you get out of college and you no longer need "fee college," but you could definitely use a tax break unless you dropped right into the upper class. So I get it.
But if we look at other countries -- Symblls has mentioned Germany several times, but there's also France, Norway, Iceland, Poland -- there are a massive number of working models for government funded education in place that we could easily borrow from.
I think the real problem, even more than education, is health care. You don't physically need education to survive (yet), but you goddamn well need healthcare, and it could and should be socialized in the U.S. as it is virtually everywhere else. This is being done practically by nations all over the world who are maintaining a presence in the industrial world, and killing it with job creation. It's really not a pipe dream for the U.S.
Also, I really don't think Johnson exemplifies the libertarian platform very well. He's a libertarian because he needed to be to have any kind of shot at continued political relevance. But Jesus he's a stupid man. I'm sorry, no offense. A lot of the long-haul libertarians I know voted for him because of his affiliation, and were mortified by how he actually handled himself during all this.
I see a certain amount of promise in libertarianism, but the platform needs to evolve beyond benign a once every 4 years sleight of hand grab for votes and turn into a truly viable third option.