Does not matter. Every damn week, they take about 7 percent out for Social Security. that only happens 52 weeks a year. year in, year out, money goes into Social; security. You would have to be super slanted to not understand that that pool is enormous and it gets added to every week. That is not how you go broke.
SS has a huge fund of bonds backing it. It is not broke.
Is it very true that I feel like the party in which I was a majority I am now a minority? Definitely. First we had the large infusion of ultra-religious, the infusion of the neo-conservatives, and now the Tea Party. As a normal old (not neo, not libertarian, not fundamentalist Christian, not populist) conservative I definitely feel I’m a small and shrinking minority not only in the GOP but in the country.
I’m still very pro-business. I think some environmental concerns are absolutely stupid. For example mercury in the atmosphere? That’s a bullshit environmental concern. Nuclear energy? Best shit ever, I wish we would take a much more proactive stance on it, both increasing research into better reactor designs and destroying the mountains of regulation that prevent nuclear plants from being created without costing $5bn or more here in the States. Coal? I’d love to see us stop burning it, but we need to recognize this can’t happen over night, let’s actually not shit on ideas like doing our best to minimize the impact of coal, with some environmentalists it’s like they don’t even want us to try and phase it out, they want us to turn it off overnight.
Law and order? I think rehabilitation is fine for minor offenders, I believe in treatment for drug addicts. I don’t believe rehabilitation should be an option for any seriously violent offender. I think rapists and murderers should be in prison forever, period. No rehabilitation, no chance at a second life, their crimes are too serious for that.
I won’t go into every position of mine in which I’m conservative and at odds with the Democrats.
What I will say is that I’ve always maintained I am not partisan to a fault, I do believe in voting for the “best man.” I have voted for many Democrats at the state level and at the congressional/senate level. I would vote for Mitt Romney, Jon Huntsman, and probably Newt Gingrich (I consider his candidacy a joke, though) but if the GOP nominates Rick Perry or Michele Bachmann they will not get my vote, even though I am deeply opposed to President Obama on many levels.
Social Security may not be “broke”, but to ignore the effect of the failure of the system to bring in as much in revenue as it will be paying out, absent a reform of the system, is to put one’s head in the sand. Obviously, we’re not going to default on the money the country owes to the Fund, but now that the country has to pay its IOUs to allow the Administration to keep putting out the required checks (or cheques), we have to factor in to the discussion of what to do about the budget this effect upon the budget.
As someone who has voted for federal, state and local officials in the past without much attention paid to what party affiliation they had, I must admit to some dismay at the fact that the Republican Party, both on a national and a local level, has become an instrument of people with viewpoints quite thoroughly out of step with my own. What I find most incomprehensible is the retreat of the Republican Party from stances it used to take as a matter of principle, for example, the shift from the concept that a “national ID card” was a fore-runner of Communism to the current mantra that everyone should have to prove their citizenship with what in essence is turning into a national ID card. Foremost among the idea shifts is this concept that there is no tax increase that is acceptable, and that, when possible, taxes should be decreased, or at least shifted onto the backs of people who are not the party’s faithful (example: the reduction in property tax here in South Carolina a few years back, which made the fixed-income geriatric community all ecstatic, replaced nominally by a 1% increase in the sales tax rate, thus taking the burden from said retirees and shifting it in part to the general population, including all the unemployed former mill workers).
To “fix” the situation with the deficits in the national budget, we must both cut expenditure and increase revenue. The more drastically we do each, the quicker we can eliminate deficit budgets. We’ve done it before, not 20 years ago, so we know it can be done. But doing it takes some willingness on the part of all members of the body politic to make hard choices, as the numbers served up in this thread show. In the process, we could also begin to address some serious issues with rampant over-federalization of our government (meaning, the tendency to shift responsibility for governmental services and programs to the federal government). For example, we could stop turning education of our children into a federal government issue; there is little or no evidence that most education issues cannot be solved at a state level.
Needless to say (but I’ll say it anyway), the Democratic Party adherents must also show some flexibility on things like entitlement programs, social welfare spending, etc. There are some who are members of that party who are quite inflexible on those issues. But since the Democrats have not had a specific party mantra or message for something like 45 years now, and can be described as simply the “anti-Republicans”, it’s unlikely that a reasonable solution will be blocked by party intransigence on the left. The Republicans, on the other hand, who have done an excellent job over the last 30 years of solidifying their image as the party of God, Family, and Security, plus Lower Taxes, will find it hard, I think, to get serious about compromise, unless they can see a political advantage to halting their lurching march in that direction, and feeling secure that their adherents won’t depart them if they suddenly break out in a case of the “reasonable compromises”. The 2010 election cycle certainly did nothing to help them reach such a sense of self-security.
Foreign Aid. Conservatives believe we throw massive amounts of money at nations that don’t deserve it. When the chips are down we need to take care of our own first.
I wonder how many know only 1.64% of our budget goes to Foreign Aid and the majority of that to Egypt and Israel and is spent on US weapons.
OH, and frivolous lawsuits on doctors. That’s why Health Insurance is so crazy.
Let’s make an politically unpopular cut.
Legalize pot and save:
a. the associated costs of arresting 40,000 people each year on marijuana charges
b. the associated costs of trying said 40,000 people in court
c. the associated costs of housing those convincted - up to 500,000 people at any given time for an average sentence of 5-10 years - in already over-crowded prisons
A few billion dollars, just a drop in the bucket you scoff. But if they taxed the hell out of it (say a 25% sales tax) and regulated it like alcohol, not only would it save a great deal of money, it’d also bring in a lot of tax revenue.
And maybe we should consider not spending 2 billion dollars a day in Libya, considering we’re “not” at war there.
That’s not even close to what the article says (or at the very least, it’s covered by all the other “Cut defense spending” items).
To get the $2B/day figure, they apparently just took the current DOD allocation and divided by 365. Pretty sure that’s now how accounting works.
Can we still ban smoking the stuff? Do that and throw the book at anyone who acts negligently as a consequence of drug use, and I wouldn’t have much of a problem with it.
The US is not spending two billion dollars a day in Libya. They’re spending two billion dollars a day on a military that is capable of being in Libya. So unless your plan for national defense is “one time Joe spent the weekend down at the rifle range” you’re not going to save two billion dollars a day.
I agree wholeheartedly with your sentiments … but not your numbers. Your own link shows that the top two recipients of aid at the present, by far, are Afghanistan and Iraq. Given the reason they need the aid, it would sure be hypocritical to cut them off. The next three largest recipients of aid, I think, are Israel, Egypt and Pakistan – in each case due to U.S. geopolitical concerns, not humanitarianism.
Even the humanitarian aid to Africa is alleged to be very badly directed. Rather than subsidizing African’s own agriculture, aid takes the form of exporting American crops – good for American farmers but disastrous for Africa’s own development.
(I might offer my own comments about spending cuts in another thread, since I don’t self-identify as GOP. 
)
Sam, good list…
Instead of cutting the Dept of Education by 50%, I’d eliminate is all together.
The Dept of Energy could go as well.
Two Jimmy Carter creations that have little to show in relation to the billions that have been spent.
Throw in the Department of Labor, and you have a right wing bumper sticker.
If they continue to be nothing more than a mouthpiece for Unions, sounds good to me as long as you find a way to keep OSHA alive.
What? And leave all those evil regulations that are holding back job creators?
What is your solution?
You’re right, nonmilitary aid is around 19 billion and compared with our Gross National Income we give proportionately less than 20 other wealthy nations.
The bad news: kids are now being born with three arms.
The good news: kids can no longer count to three!
The GOP is not ignoring it at all, in fact they’re trumpeting to the heavens that the system is going broke. What they’re refusing to state publicly at all, though, is their preference for it simply disappearing rather than taking the small steps needed to maintain it, as part of their current guiding philosophy of “drowning government in the bathtub”. They are attempting to destroy Americans’ confidence in the system to make that goal easier to achieve. Another part of that campaign are the regularly-repeated lies that SS is a Ponzi scheme, doomed to failure by its very nature, and that it is a savings plan rather than a transfer-payment system. That fundamental dishonesty is the basic problem, not projected cash-flow imbalances.
Didn’t you hear? 9/11 changed everything. Why do you want us to be vulnerable to the terr’ists?
You’re going to have to explain how that’s a problem, not a trend that permits more economies of scale and more national-scale social justice. South Carolina, since you bring it up, has a history that pretty much demands its control over governmental functions needs to be loosened, wouldn’t you say?
False Equivalence Alert! :klaxon sound:
Please. Universal health care - surely you’ve heard of it. Balance budgets - surely you’ve heard of that, too. Social justice, in many forms - you could look it up. But if your point is really that progressivism takes many forms, and is not as easily reduced to bumper stickers as “No”, then you’re absolutely right - but whose fault is that?
The blowback from their recent exercise in hostage-taking does seem to have had that effect, though. But it may take losing the House again next year to consolidate it. The problem they face now is that they lack a sufficiently-large cohort of responsible adult leaders, both internally and in the media-mouthpiece role that is so influential to people looking for what they call “moral clarity” to fix that problem, absent some shock treatment.
This issue has been discussed in several recent threads and no one wants to regurgitate it here, but I do have a sincere question.
There is a “lock-box stuffed” with T-bonds, rather than greenbacks. I can understand someone preferring the lock-box to be stuffed with gold or collectible Beanie Babies, but can you link me to a website that explains why greenbacks would have value in a way that the T-bonds do not?
You do understand that FRB can, without Congressional approval, order greenbacks printed and exchange them for T-bonds, right?
The Paul Ryan plan would cut the income tax and corporate tax. Tim Pawlentey was running on cutting the corporate tax rate (something Romney and several other were in favor of).
http://www.americablog.com/2011/04/krugman-paul-ryan-29-trillion-tax-cut.html
http://www.politicususa.com/en/republicans-tax-cuts
The biggest thing we can do to address long term (75 year) deficits is reduce the rate of medical inflation. Obama tried to do that with the affordable care act. We need more work, but if medical inflation can be brought down that will save trillions.
I’ve seen stats showing 75% of the deficit is from the recession. But looking into it I also find stats showing only 25-40% is due to the recession with the rest due to policy. So who knows the exact number. But the deficit was only a few hundred billion in the years before the global recession, then it jumped dramatically.
You aren’t seriously asking that, are you?
I propose the following: you trade in all your cash and cash equivalents for T-bonds.
Or to put it another way: which would YOU rather have, cold hard cash, or the promise of cold hard cash?
And from the standpoint of the issue for this thread, if the lockbox DID have the cash in it, then there wouldn’t BE an issue regarding the significant impact of underfunded benefits on the yearly budget, unless and until the lockbox got drained of the cold hard cash.