You believe in fiscal discipline and do not want to leave your children and grandchildren with debt but yet you refuse to cut the biggest generator of debt this country has?
What about Defense spending ..... do you refuse to cut that too?
If so WTF is left?
That is why I call you Hillbilly Tea Cups hypocrites.
To recap...your cry about debt. You cry about leaving your children with debt. I point out that you can cut the biggest form of long term debt by cutting Medicare benefits and you then cry bloody murder.
What a fucking loon....
I do not want to smell your baited breath.
I have been the one pointing out that all debt is not bad....if you have now changed your mind about that ignorant assertion, good for you.
Originally Posted by WTF
I believe (keywords here) that we could reduce our military spending to a quarter of what we now spend without compromising our security in the world. Of course, other countries would have to get the message that they are on their own when the shit hits the fan in their respective countries, but I like that idea too.
Now, I'm not saying that we could slash defense spending overnight, to do so would send our economy into a tailspin. But speaking strictly in terms of our security yes, we could be just as safe with a much smaller, more efficient military.
I realize that your memory is as piss poor as your reading comprehension though, so I will simply gently remind you that a couple of pages ago I said quite clearly that I support cutting defense spending. I'm going a little farther in this post by saying that we could safely do much more than just reduce spending; we could slash our military and still be just as secure as we are right now.
By the way, before you say it, the idea that we will slash our military spending as much as we realistically can is a pipe dream. Even the most hawkish deficit hawk goes into full on attack mode when it is a base in his district that is about to be closed, or some piece of military equipment in his district that is about to be discontinued.
Meanwhile, there is certainly a great deal that can also be done to reduce Medicare spending as well. Going after waste, fraud, and abuse should be a much higher priority. We don't even know for certain how much money is lost every year to fraud. Even the GAO can't say for certain.
Eric Holder is on record estimating that losses every year may be as high as $60-90 billion (yes, that was a B, not a typo). We are currently running at about a $400 billion deficit, so if Holder's estimate is in the ball park, cutting out the fraud could take one hell of a bite out of our deficit without having to cut so much as a penny in benefits.
By the here is the short list of circumstances when deficit spending is acceptable:
1. Crisis - think Katrina
2. Investment in major infrastructure improvements - such as when we built our interstate system, or when we built the transcontinental railroad, or made major purchases like the Louisiana Purchase and Seward's Folly
3. War - this one is pretty obvious
4. Recession - temporary shortfalls in tax revenues from GDP contraction are understandable and an immediate move to cut spending in response to a drop in tax revenue generation would be more likely to exacerbate the recession.
As I said earlier, there is no excuse for passing a budget that is not in balance. When we have made payment on our debts only 13% of the time over the last century, there is absolutely no way anyone can claim that all that spending was a response to events such as a national disaster or war. We do love to fight wars, but we haven't spent 83 out of the last hundred years at war, nor have we had a constant string of crises to justify the spending either.
When our politicians run up debts simply because they lack the moral fortitude to trim back spending to be in line with tax revenues, it is fair to say that they have neither the intention to repay what they have borrowed, nor the intellect to figure out how to balance the nation's checkbook.
PS. Forgot to mention: I am a smoker, I am diabetic, I spent most of my younger years severely obese and am now grimly hang onto the status of "healthy weight" by my fingertips. I say this because I consider it extremely unlikely that I will see the age of 75. Or at least, God I hope I don't. If I hurt this much getting out of bed at age 40, I shudder to think what 75 is going to be like. So actually, there is a pretty decent chance that I will not live long enough to collect more than I paid into Medicare. Since I don't have a crystal ball though, who knows?
