“John Boehner’s too-honest preview of a Republican Congress” (Salon, Alex Pareene)
Well put. When conservatives try to evoke a lost America, ask them if they want back the racism or the New Deal.
I am again quite happy to have switched parties years ago. [del]Stupid stupid GOP creatures![/del]
Anyone here want to defend our Mr Boehner?
How long does Boehner intend to be in Afghanistan so that savings from changes to Social Security that kick in twenty years from now will be needed to help pay for it?
Cuts in SS will probably be needed at some point, but not so drastic as Boehner seems to want, and saying that they’re being made to help pay for a war the public is already lukewarm on seems like a really good way to a) Not pass cuts in SS, and b) Turn the public against the war.
It doesn’t matter: Vietnam. Iraq, Afghanistan – there’s always a country where America has “vital interests”, and needs to waste a few trillion dollars killing the natives to protect those interests.
Why is this in the election forum instead of the Pit? Is Boehner facing any serious challenger this year?
The articles hook is that its representative of what we’d get if there’s a GOP congress next year.
While I’m not totally against the concept of raising the full benefit retirement age (already raised to 66 1/2 for me) and it’s worth discussing and arguing about, another option for fixing the alleged Social Security crisis is to eliminate the withholding cap.
Oh, wait, this is about how to pay for wars, right? Wars aren’t paid for with Social Security money.
The Social Security surplus gets used to buy treasury bonds, so the more money that Social Security brings in and the less that gets spent, the more the government will have to fund whatever.
Bah! Like Barton he’s just a bad apple! You know, like that Barton guy who will certainly have to face consequences for the very public rimjob he performed for BP.
-Joe
Clearly the answer is to send retirees to Afghanistan. It’ll all balance out in the end.
I rather like the idea from an early Heinlein story – the U.S. doesn’t send armed forces to fight outside the national boundaries without a Congressional declaration of war. But the kicker is, if as a Congressman/Senator you vote “Yes” and it carries, your “Yes” vote was also volunteering to go fight. A war that’s really needed would pass anyway; the legislators would be willing to volunteer, as many of the younger ones did in some past wars. But it would give them cause to think twice.
You guys know that ‘the cost of the wars’ is a drop in the bucket compared to overall federal debt and liability, right?
The total cost of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq is around 1 trillion dollars over seven years. The current federal deficit is 1.6 trillion dollars for one year. The stimulus package last year cost about the same as the entire cost of both wars to date.
The total unfunded liability for Medicare and SS is around 100 trillion dollars. That’s just the federal liability. Most U.S. states are finding that their entitlement programs and other budgetary liabilities are exploding out of control as well. And last time I checked, the individual states weren’t fighting any wars.
This isn’t about funding wars. This is about a system of entitlements that is unsustainable, and about government spending growing much faster than the growth in the economy. If you eliminated the entire military budget, you couldn’t even cover half of the current deficit.
Everything you posted is accurate and you’re right to point it out…except the above quoted bit. Quoth Boehner (as in the OP):
I note that I’m not arguing about what Boehner meant, nor what the argument should be about. Perhaps those few sentences of Boehner’s are taken out of context and he didn’t actually elevate war-spending above entitlement-spending in importance.
But his exact words say that it’s specifically about “funding wars”.
The difference is that wars waste resources and create costs down the line, such as injuries endured by veterans that must be treated. Whereas domestic spending (at least in part), funds jobs and programs that are productive and necessary for the country to function.
Nope. Just the usual right-wing nonsense and fear-mongering:
I would just add that I am grateful to Boehner for framing the issue in just this way. It will make it that much easier for people to connect the dots and realize that the wars are just ways to funnel money taxpayer to corporations.
Quoth Polycarp:
I’ve thought something similar for a while, but I don’t recall ever seeing it in Heinlein. Do you remember what story it was?
Of course, the two big problems with the idea are that politicians at that level tend to be both old and very well-connected, which combined mean that the military would probably end up putting them in some safe, easy desk job far from the front.
Let’s note that both these numbers are wrong. The Trillion dollars for the Wars reflects just the supplemental appropriations to date. Not included are interest on this borrowed money, war-related spending (or lost opportunity) in the regular defense budget, unreplaced equipment and munitions, and future veterans’ medical care. Three trillion dollars is generally regarded as a more rational total estimate (assuming the war stops today), and that figure doesn’t include costs to U.S. in blood or goodwill, and certainly doesn’t include costs to Iraq and Afghanistan, nor oil price-rises and future wars that may arise due to these mistakes.
To understand the number, divide by America’s 120 million households to get $3500 per year per household wasted on Bush’s Wars. A fair amount of money, though not enough to pay the household’s health insurance premium, unfortunately.
And this lets us segue into pointing out Sam Stone’s other big mistakes. First, the “unfunded liability” he speaks of is almost entirely Medicare (SS itself is funded for another 30 years), and the big problem isn’t the lack of funding per se, but rather the expense and continuing cost growth of healthcare. And the 100 trillion dollar scare figure is calculated by discounting an infinite future projection! (If we asumed the neocon idiots would regain power we could project a huge cost for their future military adventures. :dubious: )
So when people like Sam Stone complain about the “100 trillion dollar” shortfall in providing medical care to retirees, let’s ask them what their solution is. Let the retirees get sick and die? 
Blame it on Democrats who keep wasting money on public schools etc.? Or failure to elect right-wingers? – remember it was the Republicans under Bush who converted Medicare into a Windfall for Drug Companies program. :smack:
More to the point, these lies are designed to privatize Medicare–in other words, *steal * from the public that which it paid for, under the auspices of fiscal restraint.
For Us The Living, if I remember correctly.
And yeah, that is a good point. Most Congressmen and Senators are too old to fight.
They don’t have to fight. They only need to drive the trucks delivering supplies between Kabul and Kandahar.
Oh, if you want to get picky, shall we recalculate the cost of the stimulus in the same way? How about the health care bill? Or any other government spending?
Accepted by who? Cites, please.
Oh, doing some spinning, are we? Shall we apply that same ‘analysis’ to the cost of the stimulus package? Or tarp? The unfunded liability for Medicare alone is a little under $100,000 per family, or about twice the net worth of all the citizens of the U.S.
It’s not a lack of funds! It’s an excess of expenses!
And I did say “Medicare and Social Security”, so I’m not sure where my ‘mistake’ is.
What, you mean according to generally accepted accounting principles? The horror! Why would we ever want to hold government to such a standard? You do know that the big number (which is actually higher than 100 trillion - I rounded down) came from the actuaries that prepared the trustees’ report to Congress?
Sure, you can make an argument that you should use a shorter time horizon because conditions might change, but that hardly makes the real number a ‘mistake’. But hey, let’s just go out 75 years then. Now the unfunded liability is only 55 trillion dollars - more than the entire net worth of everyone in the U.S. Does that make you feel better?
And we haven’t even mentioned the various unfunded liabilities from all the federal and state pension funds, which is over 1 trillion dollars (and which will be coming due much sooner).
Comments like this make it clear that you’re not even trying to debate the issue reasonably.
If you want to know what ‘people like Sam Stone’ think, why not just ask me directly? What’s with the third party nonsense?
What I think is that it’s ridiculous that Medicare is universal. If it were fully funded and an actuarially sound program that simply invested contributions and paid them back, it wouldn’t matter if it was universal or not. But since contributions don’t even come close to paying for promised benefits, it’s a welfare program. So make it one explictly, and stop paying for the health care of the rich. Means-test it like every social program should be means-tested.