This article ( U.S. Military Proposal to Arm Rebels Includes No-Fly Zone in Syria - WSJ ) says that even a small 25 mile no fly zone in syria would cost us 50 million per DAY. How come they say we have to make all these cuts to social services and medicare but we can afford this. Where do we get the money?
People all around the world loan us the money by purchasing treasury bonds. That increases the national debt, but in the most simple and direct terms, people loan Uncle Sam money because the US Government is a very safe investment.
We still have to pay that money off don’t we? If we aren’t in debt we would have more money for things like medicare and retirement benefits.
Same place we get the money for everything else: We borrow it from China.
:rolleyes:
Way more money. But we are in debt, so we don’t have it.
taxes and Debt. The same way any government anywhere pays for anything.
[/sarcasm]
No, we don’t. Our kids will take care of it. Or their kids. Whatever.
All we need to pay is the interest.
Nahhh.., we’ll borrow to pay that too.
[/sarcasm]
:eek:
We continue to elect congressmen who say that defense is important but anything else that the federal government does is minor and thus can be cut if necessary. You want that to change? Then elect people to Congress who don’t say things like “I don’t believe in big government. We’ve got to cut taxes and shrink government. Oh, except for defense, of course. We’ve got to increase defense spending.”
A lot of people don’t think social services and/or Medicare are the proper province of government, and that foreign policy is. That’s the simple explanation.
We’ve been electing those people to Congress since the 1950s. There’s as much chance of changing that as of making us all skinny overnight.
But the OP forgets how huge the American economy is. 50 million a day is a trifle in an economy whose GDP is around 40,000 million a day. The 50 million isn’t a real number either, since we would have to pay a good fraction of that in any case even if the soldiers sat at base. (They don’t tell you that because smaller numbers don’t make as good a story or a political tantrum.)
Things like Social Security are much bigger. SS spending is already over 1,000,000 million a year and will go higher. The cuts proposed are not actual cuts, but measures to stop it from growing as fast as it now projected to grow. It would still increase greatly but would be even with projected revenues so that deficits would not bulge.
Here’s the real problem. Almost nobody understands numbers, and that includes the people voting on them.
The total US budget is pushing $4 trillion. At 50 million a day it would take about 220 years to spend that much. So basically, it’s peanuts. One decent sized bridge in the USA probably costs as much as several days of pestering Syria. A mile of subway or interstate probably costs close to a month of that.
And, as mentioned, some of that is costs to be paid anyway - sailors and airmens’ salaries, operating and maintenance costs on ships and aircraft, if they didn’t fly then there would be some practice flying…
The US government can borrow anything it wants, and interest rates today are ridiculously low. It’s considered the safest investment in the world, still very solvent, and it will be a decade or two before it reaches the status of Greece or Spain (not safe investments). Congress’ job is to stop things before it reaches that state… maybe they will in a decade or two.
It’s important to bear in mind that these figures generally include money that would have been spent anyway. When you have a squadron of F-15s (or F-22s or F/A-18s or whatever) you don’t leave them in a hangar just because there isn’t a war on. Pilots have to train continually to keep their skills sharp. Planes have to be maintained after training sorties just as they do after combat sorties. Personnel will be paid no matter what (though they’ll be paid a bit more while on deployment). In other words, we’d be spending most of that money not enforcing the no-fly zone.
Not necessarily. This isn’t totally political snark; it’s predictable fact.
When the Cold War ended once and for all in December 1981, everybody talked about the so-called “peace dividend” – that is, all the money we would have freed up for domestic programs once we weren’t in a hell-bent Cold War with the Evil Empire any more. (In fact, this idea had been kicking around for several years by that time, as there was a sort of now-you-see-it,now-you-don’t detente with the Soviet Union, and then as the USSR wound itself down over its last several years.)
Wrong.
Instead, as soon as all that money was freed up, there was suddenly much more political interest in cutting taxes that weren’t immediately needed for defense any more, and that’s mostly where it went.
This was a major thesis of mathematician John Allen Paulos in his book Innumeracy.
This should be required reading for ALL teachers and ALL math students.
And ALL politicians.
AND everybody else!
(or from other foreign investors.)
How much has this changed in the last 10 or 20 years, compared to previous times?
It’s been my impression (I’m not a student of these matters) that foreign investment in the United States has boomed, roughly, since the “awakening” of modern China in particular.
It has long been a staple of American economic theory that the U. S. nation debt is not a problem, because we just “owe it to ourselves” – that is, U. S. Government Bonds and any other such investments were bought mainly domestically. (Even so, there’s a serious problem with that, but that’s another debate.) Today, there seems to be massive foreign (including Chinese) investment in the United States, so our debt isn’t just owed to ourselves.
How majorly does this affect to total calculus of our nation debt and its ramifications? Seems like economists like to talk like it doesn’t matter. WTF?
Oops, meant December 1991.
The US raised taxes in 1990 and 1993.
In a sense, it’s better than domestically owned. As long as we keep making our payments, we have a measure of control over them; the last thing they want is to piss us off and have us repudiate that debt or appropriate those assets.
It’s kind of like having a very large and mean gangster who always makes his monthly payments in full and on time. You don’t really want to piss him off or you’ll never see your money back, and there’s not much you can do to collect it all at once either. So in a sense, he has the reins, not you, even though he’s the one who owes you.
Imo, the greatest con trick of all time is that the USA has been able to just print and print money without fear of inflation for decades; this is essentially free money the US Gov can spend as it wishes.
How is it free? A couple of reasons but it is laid out here - btw, by ‘international trade’ largey means trading in oil:
http://peak-oil.org/2013/01/commentary-why-peak-oil-threatens-the-international-monetary-system/