He certainly hasn't helped the debt, however, were it not for his actions the economy would never have recovered and government revenue would be much lower than it will be, meaning we'd be in an even worse situation, because we'd still be in debt, but the government would be earning less money to pay it off with.

During times of economic recession, the government needs to run a deficit in order to stimulate the economy. This is all that Obama is doing. During times of economic expansion, the government should run a surplus and this is what Clinton did. Bush on the other hand is the person who you should put a lot of the blame for our current debt on. He ran a deficit while the government was expanding.

As soon as we are back to full output, and the unemployment rate is back to its natural rate then Obama will stop running a deficit and begin running a surplus and paying off our massive debt.

Well unless we're talking about the fact that he fixed the whole economy. That actually seemed to work out pretty well.

Joe I do seriously hope you were drunk when you created this (but it did make me smile).

Not really.

Communists have committed crimes, but other than that atheists actually have been pretty damn well behaved.

Social contracts are what we agree to in order for society to function. We give up a small amount of freedom to help everyone in society. We are fortunate to live in a society in which we can choose the extent to which we do this, and we are free to express our views on how this should be done.

Claiming that we put a gun to someone's head though is ridiculous. There are people who don't want to pay for public education, and probably people who don't want to pay for roads, but thankfully their not allowed to just opt out, otherwise our society would collapse.

There are better, very legitimate arguments for why we shouldn't have welfare (or at least reduce the amount provided) than just the whole "it's like stealing" thing.

Haha...sorry I'm not trying to let those people who have almost nothing to survive with die. I guess I'm just a bleeding heart.

I don't think your example is accurate. Allow me to give you a better one.

Let's say me and a group of 7 friends are walking and we see a little homeless girl on the street. 2 of the friends want to just leave but the other 6 decide that we should do something to help. So after a vote the group decides that we all need to help out. The two that didn't want to donate are a little bitter about it, however, but in the end we are able to help the girl with our combined efforts.

You see, the money that we are agreeing to donate isn't from other people, it is from us too. In addition your argument that only poor people vote for policies like this is BS.

You do realize that the economy has been improving for almost 6 months now, right?

Joe: love the comments but your debates are often retarded.

I know but some people choose not to (myself included) and this means less people participate.

Nothing would be wrong, I'm just saying that that's probably the reason. If you limit the people that can participate less will.

No one commented because you have to be part of your community to do so.