We Are So Screwed
- Thread starter AAAintheBeltway
- Start date
This is the same premise Obama is using for healthcare. You have set a base platform to begin looking for a solution. Yet the base you set is false....ie..."So what exactly is the solution to this problem since we clearly know that Republicans are not interested to solve this especially since they created all the mess"
Just like Obama sitting with the Republicans to find a solution but only willing to work from his flawed bill. Unwilling to start from zero.
Why would he start from zero when the Republicans in the beginning said that they agreed with 80% of the bill? The Republicans do not object to Health care because of its costs but because its there to be opposed, anybody who believes that they are worried about costs is being naive.
Again, what exactly is the solution? When Ron Paul won the straw poll at CPAC convention, he actually got booed and thats the only guy who has actually made any vocal points for fiscal conservatism.
http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-m...man-schultz-says-republicans-regularly-say-t/
we might start here. why do we still need 3 seperate ways to destroy russia? wouldnt 2 be enough?
lead story in Saturday's Washington Post, about the nuclear weapons decisions facing President Obama, runs longer than 1,300 words, but five a reader won't find are "cost," "dollars," "money," "debt," or "deficit." A reader would also search in vain for any talk of a "fiscal crisis" or a need to balance nuclear weapons priorities with available revenues.
That same reader, of course, rarely has to venture past the first sentence of a health care reform story to find that the subject is a "trillion dollar overhaul." Occasionally, it's noted that the trillion dollars is spread over ten years.
One particular decision that Obama faces is whether to continue what's known as the "triad" - three independent ways the United States developed to annihilate the Soviet Union. Warheads can be delivered with bombers, from submarines or with intercontinental ballistic missiles.
The military developed ICBMs in the '50s and '60s, recognizing that bombers would soon be obsolete and too easy to defend against. But the bomber squadrons have their own internal and industry defenders and have never been phased out. Each leg of the triad costs tens of billions of dollars per year to maintain.
House Financial Services Committee Chairman Barney Frank (D-Mass.) has proposed what he refers to as a "radical" notion. "My point is that now that there is no longer a Soviet Union, and there is instead a country called Russia, which is much smaller and in fact much weaker militarily, it is clear that we do not need to maintain all three weapons systems for dropping thermo-nuclear weapons on this now nonexistent empire," Frank told HuffPost. "My radical proposal is that we say to the Pentagon that they can pick two of the three, and let us abolish one."
The Post reports that Obama's aides will recommend to him that all three ways to destroy the old Soviet Union be kept in place. The amount that could be saved by cutting any of the three is likely much higher than the two largest ways Obama has identified to pay for health care reform: an excise tax on high-cost premiums that unions and the middle class loathes and cuts to Medicare Advantage, which have seniors frightened.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/03/06/unlike-health-care-when-i_n_488740.html
lead story in Saturday's Washington Post, about the nuclear weapons decisions facing President Obama, runs longer than 1,300 words, but five a reader won't find are "cost," "dollars," "money," "debt," or "deficit." A reader would also search in vain for any talk of a "fiscal crisis" or a need to balance nuclear weapons priorities with available revenues.
That same reader, of course, rarely has to venture past the first sentence of a health care reform story to find that the subject is a "trillion dollar overhaul." Occasionally, it's noted that the trillion dollars is spread over ten years.
One particular decision that Obama faces is whether to continue what's known as the "triad" - three independent ways the United States developed to annihilate the Soviet Union. Warheads can be delivered with bombers, from submarines or with intercontinental ballistic missiles.
The military developed ICBMs in the '50s and '60s, recognizing that bombers would soon be obsolete and too easy to defend against. But the bomber squadrons have their own internal and industry defenders and have never been phased out. Each leg of the triad costs tens of billions of dollars per year to maintain.
House Financial Services Committee Chairman Barney Frank (D-Mass.) has proposed what he refers to as a "radical" notion. "My point is that now that there is no longer a Soviet Union, and there is instead a country called Russia, which is much smaller and in fact much weaker militarily, it is clear that we do not need to maintain all three weapons systems for dropping thermo-nuclear weapons on this now nonexistent empire," Frank told HuffPost. "My radical proposal is that we say to the Pentagon that they can pick two of the three, and let us abolish one."
The Post reports that Obama's aides will recommend to him that all three ways to destroy the old Soviet Union be kept in place. The amount that could be saved by cutting any of the three is likely much higher than the two largest ways Obama has identified to pay for health care reform: an excise tax on high-cost premiums that unions and the middle class loathes and cuts to Medicare Advantage, which have seniors frightened.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/03/06/unlike-health-care-when-i_n_488740.html
Military spending is always complicated.
In the first case it is one of the few direct responsibilities of the Federal Government, "to protect the people from foreign invasions".
The first dollar of spending should go to the national defense.
As for education , health care, housing...those are very indirect responsibility, but direct responsibility of the States.
Yeah, nothing "elistist" there, eh? And what of the hard working people, men or women, who either do not own, or choose not to own, property? Are they just to be herded by the male property owners? You know, AAA, if you really don't like it in the US today there are many Third World countries for you to choose from where "property owners" share your views.
the fact remains. we spend many billions to support 3 separate ways to destroy a country that does not exist anymore.
Times are different today, and women are clearly part of the economy. I do believe that voting should be limited to those who have a stake in the system, either as property owners or taxpayers. I 'd make an exception for SS recipients because they paid taxes at some point.
Would it make sense to run a business by letting the employees, managers and owners vote on salaries, with each vote counted equally? Should lifetime welfare recipients get a vote? People who are too uneducated to pass a simple written test? Ex-cons?
Quote from hermit:
So what exactly is the solution to this problem since we clearly know that Republicans are not interested to solve this especially since they created all the mess?
If you're in a hole, the first rule is don't dig any deeper. Yet that is exactly what we are doing.
We can take a page from the Clinton adminsitration, which ran a surplus, hard as that is to comprehend. The solution there was that Clinton faced a republican congress that would not pass his spending bills and forced him to accept welfare reform. A booming dotcom economy and absence of wars didn't hurt either.
I think we have to approach the problem on both the revenue and expense sides. The problem the democrats have on revenues is that they can only think "raise taxes." That is counterproductive unless the economy is booming. We have to face the fact that we ran a budget premised on a juiced-up bubble economy that is unlikely to return.
We can do plenty of things to get our economy going though. One of the easiest would be to rethink our renergy strategy. By exploiting domestic energy, we would increase employment and provide cheaper energy to industry. of course, democrats will wail that we are destroying the planet. We can make it easier to build coal-fired generating plants (why should the chinese burn all our coal?), we can make it easier to build nuke plants ( which the french of all people find perfectly acceptable), we can mandate conversion of trucking and bus fleets to clean-burning natural gas, of which we have a 100 year supply.
We need to rethink free trade to stop the off-shoring of good middle class jobs. Labor has to accept that unskilled factory workers will not make $75k a year for work that asians will do better for $5 a day.
On the expense side, we have to forget any more spending programs. Nada. No matter how popular. We can quickly save a ton of money by getting out of Iraq and Afghanistan. We are not the world's policeman any more. We can't afford it. Since we will be energy independent of the middle east, we don't care what happens there anyway. Can anyone explain to me why, over 60 years after WW II ended, we have bases all over europe, japan, korea and pacific islands? Not only do we spend a fortune on these bases, they create bad relations with the host countries. Let them defend themselves.
There are half a dozen or so federal departments that serve no obvious utility except as a reward to interest groups, eg Education, HUD, Commerce, Energy, EPA, HHS, Labor. The beached whale that is Homeland Security already needs drastic surgery, as do the redundant, overlapping and incredibly expensive intelligence agencies. Even the constitutionally justified departments are bloated with do nothing staff, all of whom make big salaries with benefits private sector workers can only dream of. They could be cut by 20 or 30% by eliminating the fluff, eg the affirmative action offices, the bloated training staffs, the redundant SWAT teams that they all have, basically anything not essential. Private business has to cut back, taxpayers have to cut back, why not government?
Medicare and SS will have to be reformed. They are the bulk of the fiscal meteor hurtling toward us. One obvious reform would be to means-test medicare for everyone younger than me. SS may have to be frozen, eg no cost of living adjustments, and benefits reduced for younger workers who have not paid into the system for a lifetime.
None of this will happen, absent some sort of crisis too dire to imagine, but that doesn't mean it couldn't be done.