Romney vs. Obama Debate - Part II on Tuesday - let's score it!

[VictorCharlie]

There has been a reduction in federal money to universities since the 80s but it was in research not the general funds that run the university. And yeah us Libertarians like to tell our children how price will outpace inflation for highly subsidized goods as a boogie man bedtime story. I got to say I'm a little disappointed in your retorts lack of graphs. Come on Kirk you know I'm a simple Soldier. You got to give to me barney style.

I think you under estimate the American voter. Sure both the current candidates are too cowardly to mention significant reform to entitlement spending b/c no one wants to be the first to tell our seniors that the party is over. I'm not interested in another discussion with you about the sustainability of SS and Medicaire but if you believe that they are a major contributor to our debt/deficit and more importantly unfunded future liabilities then you have to agree something needs to be done to either better fund them, reform them or replace them. I think a candidate that was able to articulate the problem, a solution and then point out how complicit the major parties have been in kicking the can down the road would do quite well.

There's been massive underfunding and cutting of funding for state universities at federal and state level since the 1980s. For some reason the funding cuts co-incided with the increase in tuition costs. The words that do come out of your virtual mouth happen to co-incide the things the think tanks and individuals funded by corporations and billonaires have been propagating for the last few decades.

Social security and medicare are the third rail of American politics. Massive majorities of the public don't want to see cuts in these programmes. Any politician advocating scrapping them is dead in the water.

Social security doesn't really need to be reformed anytime soon. Solving Medicare cost growth problems would solve the long term federal deficit overnight and I already explained to you how easy it would be to do.

Also, too. Ron Paul and his ilk want to "reform" medicare and ss by scrapping them and leaving over 65s at the mercy of the private sector. This is, nationally speaking, a 48 state election-losing position to take.

Show me a source documenting the decrease in federal money allocated to state universities general fund since 1980. Not research money or grants but money that goes towards paying for teachers salaries and keeping the lights on directly from the Feds to the school.

I know how you like graphs. Here is one from the guys at Freakanomics