No U.S. Government Shutdown This Week 385
A Reader writes "If you were hoping for a government shutdown today, you are going to be disappointed. In a last-hour cliffhanger, Democrats and Republicans managed to agree with each other enough to keep the government funded for the rest of the current fiscal year. Since the budget bill that finally passed was a compromise, no one is happy with it. So it goes. That's how things work in a representative government."
not sure who they represent (Score:5, Insightful)
anymore.
I seriously doubt any of us have much in common with any of them.
anymore
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anymore.
I seriously doubt any of us have much in common with any of them.
anymore
Well, given the way earmarks are entered into bills without the representative having to name himself, they certainly have a lot in common with anonymous cowards.
captcha: cocaine. how appropriate.
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Re:not sure who they represent (Score:4, Informative)
Just take a look at the list of 'riders' on the bill and it will become clear who they represent:
http://www.ombwatch.org/files/budget/OMB_Watch-HR1_Policy_Riders.pdf [ombwatch.org]
It's pretty clear they're not interested in balancing the budget. The republicans are only interested in gutting those agencies responsible for enforcing pesky regulations like wetland preservation, emissions/dumping of hazardous material, the clean water act, etc., defunding institutions like NOAA and anyone else doing any sort of climate studies and generally gutting a wide range of social services provided to low income and middle class Americans, while simultaneously providing criminally large tax breaks for corporations:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/25/business/economy/25tax.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1 [nytimes.com],
http://sanders.senate.gov/newsroom/news/?id=67562604-8280-4d56-8af4-a27f59d70de5 [senate.gov]
That isn't to say the democrats are much (if at all) better, but it should be absolutely clear exactly who the republicans represent.
Re:not sure who they represent (Score:5, Informative)
There you have it folks: in a budget that is designed to cut government spending, a person who is supposedly in favour of a smaller government inserts a rider that funds his pet projects with public money. This is at the same time as he's simultaneously removing funding from women's health projects, yet lacks the necessary reproductive organs that should really be a pre-requisite for anyone who should have an opinion about it.
Oh and by the way, just so we're clear that I'm not trying to simply take a dig at the GOP, I'm absolutely certain that if anyone wanted to dig through the bill they could certainly find many more examples of this sort of two-faced pork barrel politics from politicians on both sides of the fence. In fact, I hope people find lots and lots of such examples and then use them to get rid of these wastes of skin.
Re:not sure who they represent (Score:4, Insightful)
Oh and by the way, just so we're clear that I'm not trying to simply take a dig at the GOP, I'm absolutely certain that if anyone wanted to dig through the bill they could certainly find many more examples of this sort of two-faced pork barrel politics from politicians on both sides of the fence.
Until you realize that they're both on the same side of the fence, with you on the other side, there's little hope of changing this.
The parties' grandstanding against each other accounts for about 1% of the budget, that's how much they differ. The greens and the right wing liberalists? Bring it up to 3%. They're all so similar it's a parody.
'Tis of Thee will never see any major changes in my lifetime, because the voters really are fooled, because they really are that ignorant. And proud of it too.
What this country needs isn't another career politician bought and paid for by corporations. It needs sedition and revolution. Which won't happen when people are comfortable on their fat asses, watching WWE and Housewives of Fargo, while bickering about irrelevant changes and voting for the whitest teeth.
Well then that IS representative (Score:4, Insightful)
And revolutions tend to not promote the "best" people, but the most ruthless ones.
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So Obama both spent a billion dollars in 2008 (liar), and is a cheap whore? You're not just a liar [bloomberg.com], you're insane.
The kind of insane that thinks that any programme can run at all with no idea whether it will be funded next year. The kind of insane that thinks the government of a third of a billion people, plus its global effects over six billion people, can be audited and rebudgeted every year. The kind of insane that thinks that each budget can stand alone, rather than being packged for strategic effect wi
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Obama (and the Democrats) are right wing, so that doesn't really say much. The fact they're marginally less right wing than the Republicans doesn't make them left wing.
There's basically no left-wing politics in the US. There's probably a handful of people who really do want to implement progressive policies like a decent welfare system, publicly funded healthcare and high taxes for the super-rich, but they're basically impotent. Which is why when
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I found this line particularly representative:
There you have it folks: in a budget that is designed to cut government spending, a person who is supposedly in favour of a smaller government inserts a rider that funds his pet projects with public money. This is at the same time as he's simultaneously removing funding from women's health projects, yet lacks the necessary reproductive organs that should really be a pre-requisite for anyone who should have an opinion about it.
First of all, DC is under the control of congress. If congress wants to fund something in DC, that's just like a state deciding what goes on within its borders.
Also, the program you mentioned is also called the voucher program. It takes money from underperforming school districts and gives it low income students within those districts so they can attend private schools just like the rich kids, giving them equal opportunity. You seriously have a problem with that?
As for cutting "women's health"... when yo
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As for cutting "women's health"... when you say women's health, you mean abortion. I do not want my tax dollars going to fund abortions. And even if my tax dollars do not go DIRECTLY toward abortions, if they pay the light bill, they are helping to pay for abortions.
I'm pretty sure when he says "women's health", he does not mean abortion.
As you're probably aware, the Hyde Amendment [wikipedia.org] prohibits the government from paying for abortions with federal funds.
Considering that abortions are such a small part of what Planned Parenthood does and that part is not paid for by federal dollars (and I imagine they even account for a portion of the electric bill (and any other similar expenses, such as rent, payroll, etc.) when they make sure that government funds do not pay for aborti
Re:not sure who they represent (Score:4, Informative)
By this argument anything that pays for an externality somehow directly funds Planned Parenthood. Your tax or utility payments are paying for trash pickup at Planned Parenthood, as are the other tenants in the strip mall where an office is located. Shit you're paying for a Planned Parenthood abortion right this second because you've paid taxes that paid for the road leading to the strip mall where an office is located. In short you've got a bullshit argument.
Like many non-profit organizations Planned Parenthood maintains sectioned off budgets. The money raised for abortion services (counseling et al) is 100% separate from the rest of their funds. Government subsidies to the organization can never be put into the abortion services fund nor can money from that fund be used to pay their electric bill. If we defund the 97% of the organization that isn't involved with abortion services they can't just shift money from that fund to pay the utility bill, the bill will just go unpaid or the office will close.
It seems obvious that you don't care about poor women since you didn't bother really researching services PP provides. In your mind you've equated the whole organization with abortion and are willing to fuck over millions of women not getting abortions there because of it. Without free condoms from PP there will be more unwanted pregnancies and therebwill be no counsellors available to tell the girls there's options available besides abortions. It's not like back alley abortions won't still occur. Your short-sightedness is actually very dangerous.
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WTF? Comparing Planned Parenthood to Al Qaeda?
This is like a modern-day godwin's law situation, you've automatically lost the argument.
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No, they mean general health services for women like cancer screening, birth control and information on/treatment for STDs. Less than 3% of Planned Parenthood's budget goes to abortion services, which includes counseling sessions about abortion that involve laying out a woman's other choices like adoption. When you attack PP, 97% of your attack is against run-of-the-mill medical care being made available to women who have difficulty getting it otherwise.
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Planned Parenthood spends less than 10% of its budget on abortions. The bulk of their mission is providing cancer screenings for women, providing STD testing, as well as contraception, regular and emergency. The Republican proposal would have prevented PP from seeking Medicaid reimbursement for these non-abortion services under the rhetoric that some of that money would go towards overhead for abortions.
Well, then cutting that 10% shouldn't be that big of a deal. Since supposedly no federal money goes to that 10%, there is absolutely no reason that the aborting providing part of Planned Parenthood couldn't be spun off and relaunched as it's own independent division. I would have no problem funding Planned Parenthood at that point.
So tell me, why won't Planned Parenthood do this? They could guarantee their funding and their new abortion spinoff would still provide all the abortions that they always have.
Re:not sure who they represent (Score:5, Insightful)
Also, should PP simply spin off abortion services as a seperate legal entity, it would be very expensive - they couldn't share clinics, so it'd need more buildings, more staff. It wouldn't even solve the problem: It wouldn't be long before someone in government (State or federal) just gets a law passed saying that no government money may go to any organisation that provides any form of money to an organisation that provides abortion. Planned Parenthood subsidises abortion a bit, again out of princibels - the view that those women who can't afford abortion are those most desperatly in need. After all, if they can't afford a single medical payment, how can they afford the expense of raising a child?
Even PP doesn't actually support abortions for their own sake, though. That is why they put so much into distributing contraception. Abortion is something they regard as the option of last resort, but nonetheless an option that must remain available. Contraception and education are plan A - used properly. Plan B is plan B. Abortion? Plan C.
Taking this somewhere more abstract though, you have hit upon a problem in the structure of government. You don't want your money going to fund abortion, yes. But somewhere around half the population of the US doesn't want their money going to fund the continuing operations in Afganistan. There are people in the US who would not want any of their money to go on funding schooling, for they have ideological objections to the government getting involved in the education of children. There are many who would not want their money spent on subsidising corn, many who would not want their money spent on enforcing laws prohibiting pot. I doubt you could find a single piece of government spending that the entire tax base supports. So just because you object to how your money is spent doesn't mean you should have any control over it - if you did, it would be impossible for government to exist at all. They aren't your tax dollars, they are the collective tax dollars of the country - the only right you have to them is the right to vote for representatives who agree with you on how they should be spent.
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"Decentralization of the decision making process" is just like all the other right/left wing garbage. It's fine for some, not for others. It wouldn't magically solve all the problems we have.
Decentralized government allows the citizenry more access to government in theory, but it has its problems. It's horribly inefficient (all the duplicated labor and overhead), it's harder to police corruption (not only the back room deal type we get now, but the "Sheriff Bob runs this town, boy, and you better learn
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MAFIAA, defense industry, oil industry, ...
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I'm always surprised at the low percentage of people voting in the US.
Democracy is founded on the idea that people vote; if you do not, don't complain.
And I'm always surprised by these people who think your vote will fix everything.
Voting is only one way one can influence the political process -- and a single vote is a pretty ineffective thing. If you really want to make a difference, you need to do a whole lot more than simply vote. (For starters, you should try to change how a bunch of people vote, or perhaps change how a politician votes on your behalf.)
And even if you did vote, you still have to deal with what the politicians did, so go ahead and co
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Awww ... (Score:4, Insightful)
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Considering Belgium has been doing fine without a government for months [time.com], I'm not seeing a problem with a government shutdown. Probably it's the best thing that could happen. It's caused enough trouble already.
Not the same thing (Score:3)
Belgium has been without a NEW government following elections. Its old government is still in place even if reduced in this kind of decisions it can make. And its public services are completly uneffected. There is NO shutdown of the Belgium public service.
In contrast, the US has got a government AND has leaders in charge, who just aren't doing their job of running the fucking country and are threathing to break down basic services in order to get their pork projects signed off.
Big difference. The bullshit i
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Fucking hell is blogging the centre of your universe? It was all a blogger's conspiracy?
Get a grip son.
What?? Conspiracy? I think you're reading waaaay too much into what I said. The pending government shutdown was just the topic de jour and all the writers, big and small, try to flood the news feeds with their projections & proclamations about "how <insert topic here> will affect you" or "5 things you need to know about <insert topic here>", etc, etc.
I don't read blogs but I'm bombarded with their headlines and declarations that they know what's good for everyone. Just look at the news sit
Dang. (Score:3)
Re:Dang. (Score:5, Informative)
But its not going to get fixed without good people running for office, and a revolution in truth telling in the MSM so the sheeple are well enough informed that they will vote the good people into office. That's asking a lot, but its the only way it will get fixed without a lot of bloodshed.
Every time you catch the MSM in a lie, hold their supporting advertisers feet to the fire, it works, see the current Glenn Beck situation playing out as we watch.
Cheers, Almost-Retired out.
Re:Dang. (Score:5, Insightful)
Start with "Defense" spending....
"According to figures Wheeler compiled for The Pentagon Labyrinth, the military’s base budget of $549 billion in 2011 is just the starting point for calculating military dollars. Adding in war spending ($159 billion), homeland defense ($44 billion), Veterans Affairs ($122 billion), interest on defense-related debt ($48 billion) and other items pushes the total to more than $1 trillion a year. In constant dollars, adjusted for inflation, the regular military budget, not including the add-ons, has doubled from a low of about $360 billion in 1998 to more than $739 billion in 2011. It’s so much money that, as the Bipartisan Policy report points out, by 2009 US spending on military research and development alone, about $80 billion, surpassed China’s entire military budget by more than $10 billion. The budget for the US Special Forces alone is greater than the total military spending of nearly 100 countries; overall, the United States spends about as much on defense as the rest of the world combined."
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Just for the record, the entire U.S. budget for 2010 was: $3.55 trillion (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_United_States_federal_budget).
Discretionary: $1.368 trillion
Mandatory: $2.009 trillion
Not sure where the slop fits in, but the numbers are close enough.
Defense: $663.7 billion
So even accepting your $739 (for 2011), we see that the majority of the spending is on the Mandatory side.
The U.S. 2010 deficit: $1,294 billion
So entirely whacking Defense doesn't balance the budget. The social programs (the mand
Re:Dang. (Score:4, Interesting)
Your military spending numbers don't include all the wars, veterans benefits, military portion of debt interest, or the other expenses that cost over a $TRILLION in 2010. And then there's the "intelligence" expenses, which are secret but probably well over $100B.
Entirely whacking the military is not anyone's proposal. But cutting it to $300B and intel to $20B would save $780B+. Taxing banks and other corporations that don't pay taxes but consume lots of public expense would raise most of the remaining $520B. And taxing the of the richest people more of their excess income would pay the rest. While reducing much of what the government spends so much on managing with the legal system and various investigations, and too often bailing out.
The social programs are expensive, but they are mostly investments in a peaceful and productive society. The rest is mostly waste or worse.
Re:Dang. (Score:4, Insightful)
The US isn't in the world to "bring peace" or to "help someone". Look around the globe and realize just where the US invade and why. Hint: It's not for human rights. It's for mining rights. And to protect the USD's position as the world's leading currency. If the world switched lead currencies tomorrow, the US would go bankrupt near instantly.
That's the whole deal and that's also the reason why that army is necessary. You have to keep countries in reign that even as much as consider creating a oil exchange based on another currency (little secret: That's the reason behind the Iraq war, Hussein dared to think of a Euro based oil trade hub. Also the reason why the UK were so eager to join the US in that fight while the rest of the EU was quite reluctant, but I ramble). This way, the US can easily "tax" every country in the world. How? By doing what they're doing currently, running the printing press like mad. Everyone's owing them money, but they control the amount of that money in circulation. If I get to print as much money as I want to, it doesn't really matter whether I owe you a thousand or a million bucks, does it?
Quite the opposite. Since everyone traded in that currency, everyone also has quite a bit of interest in keeping it stable since their debtors, too, owe them USDs. It's the money you trade in. Now would you want that money to lose value if you're supposed to get some from someone?
And now let's imagine for a moment that some countries decide, which would be in their best interest btw, to forgo the USD and trade in something else. Euros are a nice idea, mostly because the economies backing it are so diverse and prone to infighting that a sudden change in policy is near impossible. How'd you want to keep them in line and trading in USD if you can't put some gentle pressure on them?
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A wealth tax would probably be better, IMO. You own x% of the nation's wealth, you pay x% of it in tax. That'd do for the 1% that owns IIRC 40% of the nation's wealth.
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Today's breathless response has been cut/pasted courtesy of the Tea Party.
Ad hominem: attacking the person instead of the argument. A form of this is reductio ad Hitlerum.
Now, why don't you try to argue some of his points.
Re:Dang. (Score:4, Insightful)
The only problem with your analysis is that it doesn't match the facts. Did inflation adjusted tax revenue go up or down during the Reagan and Bush years?
Since the answer is up, then how can you blame tax cuts for a larger deficit? Any chance the larger deficit was caused by Congress increasing spending ever more?
Your story leaves a LOT out....
Congress has been spending WAY too much for years. It gets worse when the Republicans control both houses. It gets even worse when Democrats control both houses.
When Republicans spend too much, their party members (not all, but a decent majority) make them lose primaries and general elections. When Democrats spend too much, they've just paid of their core constituency as expected.
Hence the cycle of Republicans always becoming the party of lower spending once they lose elections.
My deficit reduction plan (Score:3, Insightful)
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Um, won't all the stuff in the vending machines go bad if no one is there to buy them? Won't somebody thing of the vending machines!
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No need to go that far, Belgium [newsy.com] is closer. And the climate is more to my liking, too.
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Entertainment (Score:2)
I have absolutely no problems with govt shutdown (Score:3, Funny)
However, it will be very equally applied. Congress doesn't get paid either--especially being that they're not doing their jobs anyway.
And when we shut it down, it gets shut down. That means no more bombs dropping in countries that don't need to be receiving our expensive military tech. It means no more funding for anything people depend on.
You know why this is important? So people revolt and get rid of Obama, all of the Democrats, and all of the Republicans, and all of the rest of the people who sit in Washington and twiddle their thumbs arguing over absolutely ridiculous crap all day.
It's time for change and since one man, who promised to bring it, couldn't. It's time for 300+ million of us to.
Re:I have absolutely no problems with govt shutdow (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Amendment (Score:2)
That's awesome. They're crushing Amendments 1-10, but we have to believe in the sanctity of the 27th!
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That's awesome. They're crushing Amendments 1-10, but we have to believe in the sanctity of the 27th!
Let's see ... 1+2+3+4+5+6+7+8+9+10 = 55, and since 27 is less than 55, well, 27 wins. Amendment math is just like golf - the lower score wins.
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Interesting fact! The 27th Amendment was actually proposed along with the original Bill of Rights in 1789. It's just that it took 203 years to ratify it
And yet they STILL screwed it up. Somewhere in there, there's an argument for cutting government.
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No law, varying the compensation for the services of the Senators and Representatives...
Not paying the Legislature does not violate the law. By failing to pay, compensation is not being varied. But, like all other government workers during a government shutdown, compensation is not being delivered . Once a budget bill has been passed, all compensation will be delivered without variance .
I propose no person in the entire Legislative branch receive compensation after January 15th until a budget bill is passed....let everyone else in government get paid.
Unemployment (Score:5, Interesting)
I am employed by the Federal Gov't.
The last e-mail I got on Friday was explaining how and where to file for unemployment.
That is, the gov't was telling me how to get the gov't to pay me for NOT working because the gov't couldn't afford to pay me FOR working.
Is this a great country or what!
Government shutdown is not to save money! (Score:3)
You must realize that shutting down the government is not a money-saving act. It is actually much more expensive to shut down the government than to keep it running.
Re:Government shutdown is not to save money! (Score:4, Insightful)
That's sort of the point. From what was being said, it was primarily the GOP trying to abuse the budgeting process that was causing the trouble. Nearly all of the actual budget related negotiations had been completed, it was just ideological amendments which were holding it up. Things like preventing access to Planned Parenthood, cutting funds to regulate banks, cutting funds to enact the healthcare reform and reducing funds to NOAA and the EPA which were sticking points.
The actual amount of money there was paltry and the only reason why those things were being targeted was because they're politically unpopular with conservatives.
For all the obsession about balanced budgets you rarely, if ever, hear the GOP pushing plans which would actually do it. It's all about tax cuts for billionaires, increased government spending on programs they like, and cuts to programs that help low and middle class citizens survive.
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hey, we've all been paying unemployment insurance taxes. Upon becoming effectively unemployed, we're just calling in for the benefit we've payed into. just like car insurance, life insurance, or short term disability insurance. Sure, the money's from the state and not a private actuarially minded firm, but so it goes.
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What are you working for, Department of Corrections? What a disgusting place to work.
I am contracting for DHHS, and all we have got is excellent, albeit a little clueless, treatment.
Re:Unemployment (Score:5, Interesting)
Furloughed is a form of layoff, and that qualifies for unemployment. Just look at the history of manufacturing in the Midwest and all the layoffs at factories as examples.
One of the entertaining bits of trivia is most of the people who work in Washington, DC live in either Virginia or Maryland. However, you file for unemployment where you work, not where you live. It was the DC office that was going to get crushed with the load. (THEY posted a message saying they would be accepting applications ONLINE ONLY -- no walk-ins.)
Woo progress, not! (Score:5, Informative)
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You could eliminate the military and raise income taxes to 100% and still not balance the budget.
The 800lb gorilla of spending in the room is entitlements: social security, medicare and medicaid. If these programs aren't fixed and soon it will be too late.
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The 800lb gorilla of spending in the room is entitlements: social security, medicare and medicaid. If these programs aren't fixed and soon it will be too late.
Entitlements aren't the problem in 2011. Social Security is even in /surplus/ which means it's taking in more money from its dedicated taxes than it's paying out.
Entitlements -- specifically Medicare -- /will/ be the problem in a decade or two. If you make assumptions about this (costs keep going up by 10% forever, nobody ever votes to cut spending
CBO (Score:2)
PS: Link to the CBO numbers I mentioned:
http://theincidentaleconomist.com/wordpress/did-we-ask/ [theinciden...nomist.com]
Re:Woo progress, not! (Score:5, Informative)
No, it's Defense. As I pointed out above....
"According to figures Wheeler compiled for The Pentagon Labyrinth, the military’s base budget of $549 billion in 2011 is just the starting point for calculating military dollars. Adding in war spending ($159 billion), homeland defense ($44 billion), Veterans Affairs ($122 billion), interest on defense-related debt ($48 billion) and other items pushes the total to more than $1 trillion a year."
One trillion dollars, 2/3's of the entire deficit in one great big pile. That's more than the 2010 numbers for Medicare AND Medicade combined. That's more than Social Security AND the interest on the federal budget. Add it all up, and the US spends about as much on defense as the rest of the world combined.
We overpay for super-high-tech planes and ships that are so expensive, they can't even be sent into combat (B2, Virginia, littoral combat vessels). We can not afford this. Defense spending as a percentage of the GNP broke the USSR. It can break us.
But you got to love it when, instead, people latch onto "entitlements". SS needs work, but is it an "entitlement" to expect to collect some form of social security insurance after you've paid into the program for you entire life? Is it an entitlement to care for our sick and elderly, whom our health insurance compaines refuse to insure because doing so is too expensive? Or is it our responsibility?
Re:Woo progress, not! (Score:5, Informative)
Sorry to have to fix your math, but the deficit is 14 trillion dollars.
Uh, no it's not. The debt is 14 trillion. That is how much we owe.
The deficit is how much we spend each year over revenue. It's currently about $2 trillion, despite the few idiotic cuts the Republicans are pretending is the end of the world if we don't pass.
Interestingly, you're also wrong. 2010 numbers aren't out yet, but 2009's figures say that Defense was 20% of the budget, whereas Medicare, Medicaid, and all other entitlements except Social Security came to 33%. (Social Security came to an additional 21%.) ALL interest (remember, the government doesn't break out interest by what the loan was for) comes to 8%.
And here is THE LIE. Repeat it enough, and everyone believes it.
Hey, idjit. Those programs are self funded. You can't cut Social Security and magically have more money, because that program collects taxes to fund itself. Cut the program, the taxes are cut.
Same with Medicare. Medicare is insurance...people pay into it, independent of income tax, and then they get money out. People are hardly going to keep buying fucking Medicare is if it doesn't provide benefits.
Both those programs take in more money than they spend, or at least, they take in more money on average. (Right now, they're both struggling, but luckily they have money saved up.) Are you suggesting that we should continue to operate the tax collecting part of social security and medicare without actually providing the service? No? Then what the fuck are you suggesting, then, when you claim they're a bigger dent on the budget than the military?
The only part of the budget that can be 'cut' is the part that takes general tax revenue and spends it on things, and the biggest part of that the military, by like 70%. You can't cut things that collect their own money and somehow end up with more money.
dd in multi-year costs of Medicare and Medicaid (like interest on THAT money.)
Christ, you're stupid. Medicare, like Social Security, has collected more money than it spend, so it has a negative impact on interest, because the Federal government uses money from it, at no interest, instead of borrowing from banks.
Medicaid, OTOH, while not self-funded, costs $208 billion a year. Which is probably about ten times the yearly operating costs of the 20 B-2 Bombers. (Which are, of course, a very small amount of the armed forced.) Considering that US is paying $5 trillion in interest a year on $14 trillion, interest on $208 billion would be something like, oh, $70 billion.
Re:Woo progress, not! (Score:4, Informative)
You're right. The deficit is $2 trillion, and the debt is $14 trillion.
Mathematical mistakes are not important. What is important is not actually talking about adding bananas to fix our damn apple shortage.
I buy all kinds of things from the government that don't provide benefits to me, but that's not the point.
So, essentially, what you want to do is repeal social security, but then pass a law adding back the social security taxes that people pay.
So, to put it another way, you want to raise taxes on the lowest income brackets under the guise of 'cutting entitlements'. That is either your plan, or you haven't thought this through at all, haven't actually sat down and thought about the actual words you are saying.
Aside from your misunderstanding about how insurance works, the deficit is a problem in the FUTURE when there's more old people taking out of Medicare and Social Security than young people paying in. At that point, it stops being self funding. The Social Security Administration puts that date at 2014.
No, the Social Security administration says they will have more expenses than income at that point, and start using the money they've saved over the last half dozen decades. Social security actually will run out of money in about 2030.
And that has absolutely no bearing on anything, at all. The fact an self-funded program might run out of money means we need to fix it at some time, or do something about it, or even end it, but it UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES means we can somehow 'save money' by reducing it. That money, and actual government spending money that we can spend to pay down the debt, are not the same money.
You are attempting to save money by bitching about how much the neighbor's spend. The neighbors who are living within their means, and will be for several more decades, and oh, by the way, you're borrowing money, interest free, from to kept your incredibly unbalanced house in order.
Everyone who even mentions social security in the same breath as getting the budget under control should be utterly ignored in any discussion at all, because social security is not part of the fucking budget. This is constant FUCKING INSANE LIE that the media refuse to call people on.
It is utterly insane. It is not something that can be debated, it is not something that there are valid points of view on. We collect social security taxes independent of the budget, and spend social security money independent of the budget. Nothing it does can impact the budget, but the right wing and morons who believe them have conflated the hypothetical future social security budget problem with our actual real general budget problem, and managed to utterly dupe people like you into thinking those issues are related.
Actually, maintenance on ALL military equipment combined cost $283 billion for FY2010. There's no way you can credibly say that 1/10 of that goes to B-2 bombers. I made an honest mistake with the debt/deficit numbers. Where did you get the estimate that it takes $21 billion per year to fund the B-2 program?
Maintenance costs don't include operating costs or any development costs, so that's not very relevant. Nor does it include training or manpower or the actual nuclear support system required to keep the bombers armed.
However, you are correct, I was thinking total operating costs (the aircraft development alone was $60 billion.) over the last decade, but put yearly because I halfway changed the comparison. We spend about $2 billion a year on those stupid things that we can't use.
$203 billion is closer to the amount that we spend each year on our wars.
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Citation necessary.
Bullshit (Score:4, Insightful)
You wouldn't need taxes anywhere near 100% to fully fund all those programs and have plenty left over to pay down the debt. Currently the US pays around 25% of GDP to taxes (of all kinds). So, raise that to 50% and you double the total tax taken, at all levels. Well, last year federal tax income was about $2.16 trillion, and expenditures were about $3.46 trillion. Double $2.16 trillion and you get $4.32 trillion. That means you can fund everything and have $860 billion left over to pay down the debt.
In actuality, it could even be more because we are talking about doubling total tax liability, which includes non-federal taxes. So less federal funding would need to be given to states since they'd be taking in more.
This is not impossible, by the way, Sweden pays about 50% in GDP in taxes.
For that matter, you wouldn't even need to go that far. In 2010 SS and Medicare taxes amounted to about $860 billion. The two programs cost about $1.5 trillion. So, double the SS and Medicare tax and you have $1.7 trillion in income, enough to fund it and extra, you don't even need to mess with income tax or anything else.
Not saying that this is what should be done, that the programs should be reexamined and modified, but this bullshit of "Oh we can't fund them no matter how much we tax!" is just that: bullshit. It is completely false. It is true they are quite underfunded, but they could be fixed by raising taxes. Right now the combined tax rate is 7.65% to you and to your employer so 15.3% total. Increase that to 15.3% each, 30.6% and both programs are fully funded with money to spare at current levels.
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No I'm not insane. For one I'm not advocating that, I'm simple saying that it is a possibility. Also I am not insane because this is ACTUAL REALITY in other countries. Like I said, Sweden has 50% of GDP in taxes. Really. Look it up. Norway and Finland are about 45%. You'll notice I'm not picking 3rd world shitholes here, I'm picking countries that have extremely high standards of living in all terms.
It can be done, it is workable. I don't think it is the best solution but pretending like it can't is just fa
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No, it has a filing cabinet with 2.6 trillion dollars of IOUs that can't be sold on the open market. It's also cash-flow negative as of last year.
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Medicare could easily be fixed by going to a sane public health system like every other developed country (the US pays twice as much per capita for medical care than any other developed country).
So if we have the government pay for MORE people's healthcare, it will cost the government LESS money? That's not what the CBO [spectator.org] says.
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BUT BUT BUT WE'RE IN A RECESSION &&& HAVE TO DEFICIT SPEND!!!
cutting deficiet should be simple (Score:4, Informative)
Medicate Part D was never funded. That is $64B and growing, or probably close to a trillion dollars of deficiet spending over the next 10 years. Repeal it or fund it. Could save $30B in the current budget process.
The department of education has grown widely since 2000. End NCLB and other unfunded mandates that infringe on the states right to educate it's population. DOE in an advisory roll is fine and history tells us it can be funded without deficit spending. So cut it's budget, maybe $10b in the current budget process.
Department of homeland security has also always been funded by deficiet spending. Cut it. Return the decision making to the civil servants that actually work. The last thing we need is another administrative layer. If the Tea Party wants small governement, this is the place to start. If we want screeners and the like, put it under the other agencies and shift administrators from other less important projects. Saving in the current budget cycle may $10B.
That is our $50 in deficit spending. We could do $100B but that would require a cut to the military, which they have already said they can do because they admit they waste massive amounts of money, and a tax increase to cover war operations around the world. Ultimately Obama is going to have to do what Bush I did with Reagan tax cuts, which is to end the Bush II tax cuts. Can't do it untile 2012 budget cycle, but much of the projected deficit comes from them.
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Not sure about your other points, but the point about eliminating the Bush tax cuts is on the money:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/ezra-klein/post/how-to-halve-the-deficit-by-doing-nothing/2011/03/25/AFXb0RoB_blog.html [washingtonpost.com]
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At least until then a lot of the money saved on taxes will go where it's needed, Switzerland, Cayman Islands, ...
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So, these rich people you hate, when they get a tax cut, have more money, which they buy bonds with. Since there's more money available, more bonds get written, more money gets borrowed, and companies hire more people
Except that the rich don't necessarily buy bonds in companies that have any operations where you live. Why invest in America when investing in China and India gets better returns?
Re:tax cuts (Score:3, Insightful)
(Rhetorical)
Nah, keep the tax cuts. Just pulverize the military. Do the whole Cardassians Left Bajor thing and we can use the pantheon of DS9 to guide us through the mess. (/Rhetorical)
No? See, that's the deadliest political trap of all, the one the Republicans built their party on - "We'll have fun giving people tax cuts and we'll make the Democrats clean up the mess!" Then the Masses don't understand why things are so tough, and they elect in more Republicans who "ease the burdens of sacrifice" with more
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And here I thought we should be discussing the Democrats' favorite game: adding new things the government does FOR you without raising taxes to pay for them (or cooking the bo
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You do realize that the GOP's budget strategy of cutting taxes on the rich and spending huge sums of money to make corporations happy left the President in a huge budget hole, even before he took office, right? Clinton was in a relatively similar situation when he took office as well, large GOP driven deficit spending.
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Re:cutting deficiet should be simple (Score:5, Interesting)
I still don't understand why we need two departments for Defense and Homeland Security. Isn't that redundant? I mean except for the fact that our Defense is actually Offense. Maybe if we renamed the Department of Defense back to the Department of War and renamed the Department of Homeland Security to the Department of Defense we would have an accurate picture.
TERM LIMITS. (Score:5, Interesting)
If this isn't a strong case for term-limits, I don't know what is. The FY2011 budget took SO LONG to pass because IT WAS AN ELECTION YEAR and Americans were starting to worry about defaulting on their national debt. Are we really so stupid to believe that in a nation of 300 million people, it takes the same small group of elite warmongers to pass our laws year after year? Many congressmen have been there so long, they are rolling in their own shit. With term limits at least, there is the fresh flow of ideas every election cycle. There is also incentive to do well...with a 6x2 cycle for representatives (6 2-year terms, max) and a 2x6 cycle for senators with the requirement that they first served in the House, there is more incentive for aspiring first-time Representatives to appease their constituents (geographic, not party) so that they can "upgrade" to a Senate seat (and later, the presidency).
It's okay though. Looks like we are going to default on our debt sometime within my lifetime. There's no way out at this point. In the meantime, continue to spend, spend, spend. Let's get that new infrastructure (new bridges, roads, high-speed internet) built for the NEXT government. Maybe then we'll get it right with Term Limits.
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The issue there is that the process of amending the constitution makes that all but impossible. Doing it on a state by state basis just leaves the last few states without term limits with a ridiculous amount of power.
Model of Bipartisan cooperation? (Score:2, Insightful)
[Obama] praised the [budget] deal as a model of bipartisan cooperation.
http://www.cnn.com/2011/POLITICS/04/09/congress.budget/index.html?iref=NS1 [cnn.com]
If this whole budget fiasco, in which hundreds of thousands of Americans were put in jeopardy over something that should have been taken care of weeks if not months ago instead literally at the very last minute is a model of how our government wants issues taken care of, then we have a big problem. This is basically confirming that Washington prefers politics to people. Our country can not afford to have our elected representativ
Parties are for colleges (Score:5, Insightful)
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Sept. 10, 2001 Donal Rumsfeld announced 2.3 trillion dollars of pentagon spending was unaccounted for. A very clear act of taxation without representation.
Representation does not mean having some fool liar claiming they represent you nor does it say you agree with what ever they do once they are in office.
Representation means accountability to those paying for the public service of the elected.
The real scope is not the Tea Party political group joke, but the historical event of the conception of this countr
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"Right now most of a politician's time is spent trying to thwart the efforts of half the government."
Exactly, in fact the current crop of idiot Republicans have made things even worse. (I'm bipartisan, Democrats are idiots too.)
Where was I? Oh, yeah. It's bad enough when they spend their time hacking at each other when trying to solve problems, but now the Rebuplicans are spending half their time trying to figure out how to "undo" everything done during the previous session when the Dem's had control.
Which
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Re:Parties are for colleges (Score:4, Interesting)
If you really think 535 individual representatives would be anything other than a complete chaos, you haven't tried it. You would have hundreds of people who'd be voted in on local special interest issues and creating a functional government would be hell. There's a reason most European parliaments have a lower limit of 4-5%, it is because we painfully learned it in the 19th century. Besides, even if you banned formal parties informal cliques of representatives would form anyway.
Pretty much all political systems have a left-right axis, it's just not the only axis. The problem in the US is that because everyone is either democrat or republican so it gets one-dimensional, it's very hard to have dissent across the isle. To take a recent example from Norway, the EU Data Retention Directive was up for voting. Minor parties from the left, center and right voted against it, the major left and right parties got it through. In the US, this would have been one bipartisan bill passed with little effort. Here in Norway it was a 89-80 vote, with parties from the "Socialist Left" (far left) to "The Progress Party" (far right) voting against it. These are people with radically different political views, yet in this case they were on the same side.
Try imagine that the Democrats were split in Liberals, Greens and Democrats, the Republicans split in Tea Party, Libertarians and Republicans with proportional representation. Don't you think US politics would be a lot more interesting as people flowed between them in the polls? That it's not just one left-right battle line, but if they act like asses people go to the liberal party or the tea party? Of course you do get coalition governments and all that follow from that, but it seems there's plenty tension and negotiation going on anyway. It doesn't go away just because you call them all democrats and republicans.
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Creating a functional government is not what the founders had in mind. The American government is SUPPOSED TO BE BROKEN. It's supposed to have to fight against itself so that it never turns it's guns on the people. That's why we've got checks and balances, seperations of powers. . . I.E. branches of government, so that the government can't work like a well oiled machine. The problems in our country is that it has gotten too efficient, pulling out those roadblocks one by one so that it can work as one organi
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Such leadership! (Score:3)
Such leadership! Even if they had agreed to slash the budget by 50%, it would only take us back to the level of spending of the Clinton administration [ucsb.edu]. But no, they only managed to agree to $38 billion in spending reductions - about 1% of total outlays.
With leaders like this, we just as well jump off the cliff ourselves.
Re:Such leadership! (Score:4, Insightful)
The issue is that we'd have to slash the defense budget by about $300bn in order to get anywhere near there. And we'd have to raise taxes on the rich as well. There's a lot of fixation on the spending, but the problem hasn't been relegated to just spending, there's also been dumb tax cuts to leeches which have further skewed the figures.
The GOP is responsible for at least $200bn of debt that they won't cut and won't allow to be taken from the rich to pay for. And that doesn't include the money that's been lost due to tax cuts either.
There is one happy party in this... (Score:5, Interesting)
The military industrial complex. As they are still way over funded.
US spends 47% of all world defense spending. Over 60% if you include allies spending, leaving less than 40% divided among many small and or poor countries. So what do we really need this abusive defense spending really for? Defense against what and who?
Are the personal domestic economies really such a national threat?
Or are they just a threat to the military delusions of power elitism?
Government (Score:2, Insightful)
The US government is based on one idea nowadays:
Government of the people by the government, for the government.
They do what they do to stay in power.
While it is true that ultimately the people DO have the ability to replace the government, in practice this would be hard to achieve- everything is set up to maintain the status quo.
And most of the Money in the US likes the status quo: they get still more money.
The largest cooperative groups in the US are the "scary people"- the religious conservatives and corp
Comment removed (Score:3)
So it goes (Score:5, Insightful)
As a Kurt Vonnegut fan, my first question was "Who died?"
Then I saw what programs were getting cut drastically, and the answer is abundantly clear: poor people and old people.
Awww (Score:2)
And yet no-one is willing to touch the big stuff (Score:4, Insightful)
For all this talk of "budget savings" no politician has the guts to tackle REAL savings by cutting the stuff that will actually make a difference in the long run.
How about stopping payments to farmers to grow crops on land that is otherwise un-viable to grow those crops on?
How about spending less money on buying fancy new scanners for airports that do nothing to make airplanes safer from bad guys?
How about giving less money to the coal industry?
How about removing tax cuts and subsidies for the big end of town and making them pay their fair share?
How about spending less money on IP enforcement on behalf of the big content companies?
Oh wait, this is America where big corporations and special interests rule the day and where saying bad things about corn can get you sued for everything you own and then some.
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A smokescreen. Planned Parenthood was already prohitbited from spending federal money on abortion.
Besides, cutting birth control options for low-income groups just means more mouths to feed later on... stupid.
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If you have a problem with Planned Parenthood, perhaps you should step in and build a nationwide network of clinics in poor areas providing reproductive health services to women who otherwise have no access to them.
No?
Well, perhaps we could have the government do that? It would only cost, oh, several billion dollars to build such places, and of course, cost more to run them because Planned Parenthood had a lot of donors covering costs.
No?
Oh, oh, I know. We could just stop funding them and let women die.
Re:WoW $38 billion in cuts (Score:5, Insightful)
With over a $1.5 trillion deficit, congrats, you've just reduced the deficit by .025%. The coming forced austerity is going to be a lot worse than if Congress got it's head out of its ass and worked to cut the deficit.
Fixing our budget problems is easy.
1) Take a sheet of paper and divide it into two columns. Title the sheet "Budget"
2) Under the left column list all absolutely necessary for government as spelled out by the Constitution (see 10th Amendment)
3) STOP
#3 is the most important part.
You forget part #4 (Score:5, Insightful)
You forget part #4: "Defending against roving bands of marauders"
And part #5: "Disposal of bodies of dead seniors"
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