Quote from scriabinop23:
First of all, minus the social security and medicare debt (which are offset by our cash reserves), its about $5 Trillion. Our GDP is $13T or so. Check that ratio compared to other modern countries. Its not great to have debt, but its manageable.
Look at how GDP has changed over the years. You'll quickly realize a $20T GDP in 2020 is not undoable. If we merely keep our debt under control and reign in entitlements, that is easily handleable and even reduceable in our system.
Other points:
1) We spend $650B on military in '08. Imagine if we cut that down to $200B. Then redirect a few hundred billion annually to moving to electric vehicles ... etc..
2) Imagine if we lowered entitlement benefits -- less medicare and social security, to a balanced level. No system drain. It will happen - it just may take a few years for it to go into mainstream politics.
3) Fiscal conservative republicans??? Give me evidence of that. They've been fiscally disastrous.
4) One of the present consequences of our trade imbalances is this exporting dollars for taking in crude oil; well it just happens to play out that most of those dollars are finding their way back to the US. Thats a normal consequence of trade. Both sides tend to balance out. Not sustainable if the Bush way of life continues, but its clear that way of life will be over soon.
Energy policy is really the crux of it all. We need to stop the war spending and redirect it to getting off crude. When that happens, the whole game changes.
Hey buddy! military spending going down in USA in the next decade????????......I don't know how you can think about it...
Irak, afghanistan, Iran......open your eyes! Military expenses gonna go higher for the next few years, let say 5 more years to fix the Irak problem. Then, if you are very optimist you can expect military expenses to stabilise. Somebody have a military expenses chart of US government for the last 50 years?
