In other words, Drum God nailed it. You know the fighters won’t be used how? Do you have credentials and experience in nuclear arms strategy that allow you to say for sure that that many warheads are wasteful? Perhaps they are useful as bargaining chips to get others to cut their arsenal also. Bases in Germany have been very useful in staging missions to the Middle East, and you might recall that badly injured servicepeople often go to Germany for treatment.
Of course there is waste - but there is waste in industry also. It is part of being human.
When you say “bases in Germany have been very useful in staging missions to the Middle East” are you implying that these missions are not wasteful? They are in fact counterproductive. They serve to enrich special interests at high cost to the taxpayer.
Additionally, the burden should be on proponents of spending to prove that government spending is not wasteful.
what is unreasonable is raising taxes during a recession. Maybe the real jobless rate is a joke to you or 17 trillion in debt is. Anybody can draw up a wish list of things to spend money on and then ask for more money. Congress has proven this skill-set time and again. They literally held a pork-fest rally under the guise of an economic stimulus plan and threw money at all manner of stupid. If my city and my state can’t afford the expenditures and all the other cities and states can’t pay for the booty they got who is paying for it?
Every time you raise the debt there is less money available than before because more money is needed to pay off past debt.
So is cutting spending, and for the same reasons.
Dude this thing just started. Did you think the lights would just be turned off in March or something? I can tell you that at Cape Canaveral we are eliminating massive amounts of maintenance activities on critical launch infrastructure that you won’t notice until a Delta IV blows up on the pad with a billion dollar satellite on board in a few years. It will be incredibly expensive to reverse these decisions later. And yes the layoffs have started and good people have been let go. Furlough s are coming soon too.
Realistically, the proven way to get out of a recession is to have paid down your previous debt when you were flush so you can afford to take out new debt to provide jobs doing things that need doing anyway. I agree the stimulus was a bit stupid, but only because we have literally millions of people who could be helping modernize our public infrastructure for a paycheck, something that’s sorely needed because things like road and bridge repair always seem to be the stuff that ACTUALLY gets cut, rather than yet another goddamn useless fighter aircraft.
sorry but that’s not logical. We don’t need bridges to nowhere, high speed rail or lots of other wasteful spending. My city got hybrid buses. Nice, except we already have an electric bus line. These buses were very expensive. We’re not paying for them. We put up large signs explaining the road work ahead was paid for by stimulus money. A $1 decal on any of the portable roadwork signs would have done nicely. There is literally no end to wasteful spending and it’s on every level of government. It has to stop. We’re BORROWING to pay for it. We’re still paying for all the stupid shit that happened years ago.
So yes, we need to cut spending and live within our means.
Yes, that would be a great thing to happen but it didn’t. We got a few road projects pushed up the timeline.
Look at this chart of US GDP. I think this gets left out of the conversation. GDP rises all the time. If government spending remains at some percentage of GDP, it will rise all the time too. I think the rhetoric attacking rising spending would have you not think about this.
But the real debate is what the spending is for. Less help for the general population here in the form of education, infrastructure, ‘general welfare’, more on useless military adventures and tax cuts for the wealthiest seems to be the plan. Congress seems to have lost its ability to apply judgement to the question, so we get dumb stuff like the sequester, which blindly cuts spending to defend tax cuts for the wealthiest. There is no discernible criteria for what gets cut, other than maybe “government = bad”.
I see no reason why we have to be the world’s policeman. Let China babysit the Persian gulf. I’d be drilling every oil and gas well I could in the US and using the tax wealth off that to spearhead green technology. Keep the money in this country instead of giving it to people who aren’t terribly fond of us. we’re the consumers of oil. We should be using our own assets. It’s like we’re hell bent on fucking ourselves in the ass.
It is entirely logical when you were talking about the impact of tax increases during a down economy. Spending cuts have exactly the same effect. You may have a political reason to oppose tax increases and support spending cuts, but both have the same short term effect on the economy. Spending cuts reduce jobs, depressing the economy. You may value the long term effect of reducing the debt over the short term pain of job loss and recession, but logic has nothing to do with it.
Tax cuts are not spending.
I read these comments about spending like Howard Hughes talking about germs: “It’s everywhere! I can’t get away from it! It’s going to kill us! Aaaaaagh!!!”
I mean seriously, drawing lessons between geopolitics and electric buses? Huh?
So, you define “waste” the same as ITR champion. If the spending is not important to you, then it is wasteful. I appreciate the consistency of this position. What do you mean be “We’re not paying for them [electric buses]”? Why do you say that high speed rail is wasteful? Is it because you, yourself, do not ride the trains?
Well, the Persian Gulf is a crucial national interest at this time. If we just abandoned it altogether I can believe there is at least a chance that all hell would break loose over there and cause problems that hurt us and other nations. But as ITR’s fine article pointed out, we have bases everywhere, and blow money on military matters that nobody can seem to defend from a practical standpoint. So I sorta agree with you.
As for oil, we may have as much as 2 Saudi Arabias worth of recoverable oil just in the Bakken Shale formation. We could be independent at some point. I’d like to see the resource developed responsibly, but honestly what are the chances?
That is quite an image 
Literally, ok, no. But in the context of people who want to cut ‘government spending’, don’t ask what they are cutting and never see enough cuts, it kind of is. Take the example of the kids who will not get to go to pre-school because of the sequester. Why not? Because we ‘spent’ the money for it on a tax rebate for the wealthy instead. And that is exactly and only what the sequester is.
You asked me to define waste; I did so, and the definition I gave is not what you’re trying to pin on me here. If you’re going to ask me a question and I give you an answer, could you be so kind as to read and absorb my answer rather than giving blatant untruths about what I said?
I read reliable sources, compare arguments from both sides, etc… In other words, I form opinions on these issues the same way I do on any issues. You seem to imply that since I don’t have credentials and experience in nuclear arms strategy, I shouldn’t have an opinion on the matter, but should instead unquestioningly trust that the military is making smart spending decisions on nuclear warheads and everything else. Obviously if everyone took that approach it would be quite beneficial for the politicians and others who are squandering our money. It wouldn’t be so beneficial for us taxpayers, though.
An unwanted, $80 million ice-breaking ferry owned by an Alaska borough has only one bid to buy it, and it’s for $751,000.
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The vessel was completed in 2011 and born out of a partnership between the borough, which wanted a ferry, and the Navy, which wanted a fast military landing craft.
Named the Susitna, the ferry was built as a Navy prototype that would be owned and operated by the borough. The project was funded mainly with Department of Defense earmarks
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The borough has no suitable docks or a workable business plan to operate the vessel as a ferry between Anchorage and Port MacKenzie in the Mat-Su.
With monthly costs to the borough averaging $75,000 for insurance, maintenance, fuel, docking fees and other expenses, the Borough Assembly has directed employees to find the most economical way to shed it.
I guess I shouldn’t have an opinion about whether or not this was wasteful spending. After all, I don’t have credentials or experience in Alaskan ice-breaking.
Who determines what government ‘should’ be involved in? Who determines the line of acceptable accomplishment for a given program? Who determines at what price something can be done? You? Are you going to do the comparison shopping? This is what they mean. Your definition of waste is pretty much entirely subjective, so it is essentially defined as ‘what you don’t like’, right? Otherwise who are you suggesting make these determinations?
If you think that my definition is too subjective, what objective definition of “waste” do you propose that I use instead?
Do you believe that cutting government waste is a desirable goal that we should strive for, or not?
Boehner has been pushing a $2-billion loan guarantee for a southwestern Ohio uranium enrichment plant
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nuclear energy, which would not exist if it were not for federal subsidies. A February 2011 Union of Concerned Scientists report, “Nuclear Power: Still Not Viable Without Subsidies,” found that subsidies have supported every stage of the nuclear fuel cycle, from uranium mining to long-term waste storage, since the beginning of commercial nuclear power in the 1950s. Added together, these subsidies have often exceeded the average market price of the power produced. In other words, if the government had purchased power on the open market and given it away free, it would have been less costly than subsidizing nuclear power plant construction and operation.
Which brings us to the point Boehner made in his September 19 interview with Fox Business about picking winners and losers. A week or so after that interview, he chastised the Department of Energy (DOE) for moving too slowly to provide a $2-billion loan guarantee to the U.S. Enrichment Corporation’s (USEC) Piketon, Ohio, American Centrifuge Plant, under construction just east of his district.
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The USEC project has been in trouble for some time. In fact, the DOE asked the company to withdraw its loan guarantee application back in July 2009 because of its precarious financial situation and its inability to get its uranium-enriching centrifuges to work properly. After howls from the company and vigorous pushback by Ohio officials, however, the agency postponed its final application review to allow USEC more time to fix what the company euphemistically called “teething problems.”
But even if the company works out its technological “teething problems,” the bigger question is: Is this plant necessary?
Besides the fact that uranium prices are dropping, the demand USEC originally projected for enriched fuel is not going to materialize. Instead of 10 new U.S. reactors over the next decade, there will likely be only four or five built. Moreover, some nuclear plant owners may close existing reactors rather than invest in new safety systems required by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission after it completes its post-Fukushima review.
So, is Boehner’s two billion for an enrichment plant that the U.S. nuclear industry doesn’t need wasteful spending that should be cut, or is my desire to see it cut merely me being selfish because it has nothing to do with me?
Afghanistan no, in principle. Iraq, yes, but once we went in we still need support,
In any case we do have significant strategic interests there. When the bases were set up, there were lots of good reasons - trigger against a Russian invasion, to assist in the occupation of Germany, and later to help protect a Germany we wanted more or less disarmed. Anyhow, given that we have troops, it is unclear that it is much more expensive to park them in Germany than it is to park them in Alaska.
As for demonstrating that spending is not wasteful, for research I have - it gets doled out using peer review, with only very few applicants getting money. The political process guarantees that there will be some waste from the point of view of those not benefiting from spending, but I invite you to suggest any system that will eliminate all waste. Like I said, there is waste in business also.