Topic: US Reaches Debt Ceiling, China Bond Auctions Fail (Read 4222 times)

If the US stopped using the "defense" money to conquer everyone else, I think lots of money would be freed to pay the debt.

I would personally appreciate it, you know, I know many people that miss people that got snagged by the CIA during the cold war (and I am not kidding, this is VERY literal... And I know a person that got returned because the colonel at the police station knew her and accepted her explanation that her russian language studies was only for anthropology purposes, considering she was a anthropologist...)

Or the blackwater incident (some Brazillian soldiers found some Blackwater soldiers in the middle of Amazon Rainforest... sadly, our stupid laws favored Blackwater, our soldiers had to retreat and ask judicial permission to cross that place O.o   I wonder what stupid lawmaker make the country own army have to ask permission to a judge to cross its own territory when in presence of a potential enemy...)

But, since the rich don't care about benefits and the poor don't pay taxes anyways, what happens instead is the middle class gets taxed to pay the rich to provide "services" to the poor that end up making them worse off.

You mean like Obama?

I approve. Of course the rich will keep their tax cuts and poor will continue to get squeezed in this plutocracy masked in democratic facade. Too bad there isn't a Clinton Jr. that can come back in office to undo what Bush Jr. did. 

Hey, I said reasonable (in the sense that it would have the most benefit and least detriment), not likely to happen!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uad0gZN8KXs

 

Here's my position, which I find to be the most reasonable of the methods by which to cut government spending:

Start cutting benefits for the rich, and taxes for the poor, and work your way to the middle.

And this is the reason why things will never change.
US = Oil supply decreasing, demand increasing
Brown people half way round the world seem to have some of it.
Come on now - join the dots

Then why was Clinton the only one to bring the deficit to nearly zero?

Our debt is largely because of
1) Reagan
2) Bush Sr.
3) Bush Jr.

In terms of what he is actually, personally responsible for (ie not for the commitments the prior ones made) Obama has not made significant spending increases.


We only walked over the Western Hemisphere (to the Phillipines anyway) before World War II. It wasn't until after WWII that we got into this military industrial complex nonsense.


Name one.

Most of them require that you make, at the very least, small copays.


For crying out loud, getting that money actually requires you or your family to have paid into social security in the first place. Is that money not yours, suddenly?


Healthcare for non-payers (which is mostly legal Americans who had insurance but went bankrupt when the insurers decided not to pay) is only 5% of a hospital's costs. Compared to Medicare underpayment and excessive insurance overhead, it's merely a tangential issue.


The financial aid program actually makes money (default repayment rates of 1.2! Jesus tapdancing Christ!)


This would save you nothing in comparison to stopping all energy subsidies.


Why just Medicaid? Why not Tricare and Medicare as well? And all of national defense? National defense is nothing more than an insurance program anyway, and you are far mroe affected by your neighbor's health than some insurgent in Iraq.


Government spending, as a fraction of GDP, has not significantly increased over the past forty years. What has gone down are tax receipts - particularly corporate and high-income taxes. While low income-earners (those making less than three hundred thousand per year) have been paying a larger share of taxes to compensate.

There are five things wrong with this post. That's pretty impressive, given that it only contains six independent clauses.

That is just ridiculous. Since the end of WWI, the United States has walked all over the rest of the world. This is the fundamental cause of our "terrorist" problem.


Military spending necessitates the use of the military (war), and war necessitates additional military spending. Positive feedback loop.

You know what, you're totally right.  We should just let the rest of the world walk all over us.   

Military spending doesn't purposefully kill innocent people.  War accidentally kills innocent people.  And terrorists don't negotiate, or I'm sure we would have avoided the whole situation to begin with.

Although I don't tend to agree with leftists, they are right when they say US military spendings are much more outrageous than welfare.

Welfare uses unethical means for helping people who frequently don't deserve it, causing bad consequences for the economy.
Military spending uses unethical means for killing and controlling innocent people, causing bad consequences for the economy.

Bitcoin will rescue the US economy!

Case by case basis, really.  I don't necessarily agree with the wars we are involved in, but then again, we'd all be kicking ourselves if we let another 9/11 happen.

What are your thoughts on military spending?

I never said anything about tax cuts.  I said reduce spending.

As in, let's stop all the silly welfare programs we have that let people sit on their lazy rear ends all day and collect government money for doing so.  Let's stop paying people for being "disabled" because they are overweight (a choice they had).  Let's stop paying for healthcare of illegal immigrants.  Let's stop letting people live off of financial aid from schools when they have no income, and staying in the school system for decades.  Let's stop handing out money to people who buy "green" energy stuff.  Let's stop medicaid.

Seriously, we just need to stop some of these things.  They're leeches on the government, they help encourage unproductivity, and they are only helping to push us further and further into national debt.

Yeah, because wars all over the world and tax cuts really do help reducing the deficit... the only difference between both "sides" is that conservatives like to spend it on the rich and the democrats on the poor.

http://www.cbpp.org/cms/?fa=view&id=3036

Honestly, I doubt it.  But at least that's what they're "supposed" to stand for.  Dems are always for more spending, more give-aways to lazy people, more share the wealth, etc etc.

Tell me you don't think the republicans will reduce spending...