The portion of the cuts which are to Defense are a ruse. They were already in process. 3 months ago, Obama publicly ordered the budgets he will send to Congress during his 2-6 remaining years (which affect later budgets, too) to have such cuts. So all that Republicans did in yesterday's big agreement was to agree not to fight what would have happened anyway. http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/08/02/us-usa-debt-defense-idUSTRE77100Y20110802
I caught that on my own, then 15 minutes later I found that one McClatchy writer is ahead of me. http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2011/08/01/119061/who-gains-from-debt-deal-the-pentagon.html Once again, Obama is a conservative in sheep's clothing.
Should be interesting to see what happens in December. My guess is that the committee of 12 will make a serious proposal which will necessarily gore enough oxen that it will be defeated by a large margin in Congress. Then there will be a few weeks of negotiations and partisan attacks like we've seen just now, and just before the deadline for the automatic cuts, a deal will be reached which kicks the can down the road for another six months. barfo
The KKK is the exact same size as the teabagger party, and the exact same size as the mormon church, but I'm sure it's just a coincidence.
This deal just continues to delay and increasing the problem while not altering the trajectory much. We'll see if the American people are serious about shrinking the size of government in November, 2012. If not, we'll see forced austerity when countries refuse to lend to us rather than controlling our own destiny.
Dead on. And that's what is so demoralizing about this deal. It really does very little to solve the underlying problems of our socialist state.
What exactly are the problems of our "Socialist state"? Are you saying that programs such as social security, medicare, and medicaid are "Socialist"? Are you saying that is good or bad? Are you saying you do not support this type of "socialism"? (I'm curious, not being a smart ass here) In my eyes, one of the main problems draining our countries finances is the military industrial complex. A great way to start fixing our real problem is to end all of the wars, bring home the troops and cut the defense budget by a nice amount.
The problems of our "Socialist State" are that we have entrenched social programs that were designed to have 30 people paying in for 1 recipient and decades later there are 2 people paying in for each recipient. And nobody has the guts to make the fiscally responsible changes to those programs so they can remain viable without squeezing the govt. for cash it needs to spend on other things. Like constitutionally mandated things like Defense.
There's a reason that there's a budget. It's because our government takes in a finite amount of cash every year, and can't buy everything it thinks it wants. (Personal opinion) Social security isn't "socialist", per se, in that (to my knowledge) it's funded by the people by a tax set up for it and paid out only (for the most part) to people who paid in to it. It's an "extra", but it's paid for. If Social Security only brought in $1T, for example, it should only be allowed to outlay $1T. Once it doles out more it becomes bad. If you want to call that "socialist", fine. Medicare/Caid aren't bad in principle, but in operation. I've already posted multiple times how the overruns from M/M could fund the entire Department of Defense, DHS and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. But, going back to a post today about "no one wants to talk about the hard decisions", I note that only 2 people responded to the poll I posted where I laid out the M/M problem and potential solutions. If you think the people want a M/M program, then they should pay for it. Or the program should be stripped down to what it CAN pay for. Maybe you're of the opinion that we should fully fund whatever it takes for the existing SS/M/M (and whatever other programs you'd like), and just raise taxes to do so. I'm by no means an expert, but almost all of the reading I've done on it has shown that at a certain level stagnation occurs when taxes are above a certain point, and that other economic problems are caused by it. One thing I'm not seeing a lot of....advocation that families making less than 45k (the cutoff point for where you don't pay a dime in income tax because of exemptions, credits, etc.) start paying for some of these programs. Even when you include payroll taxes, 23% of workers don't pay a penny in any tax, whatsoever. A family making 45k is considered "rich" to a large portion of the world. To summarize, I think our government should do the things laid out in the Constitution (defense being one of the primary things). Social Security wasn't set up to subsidize the (on average) last 12-14 years of someone's life. Medicare/Medicaid (and the debt service involved with paying for them) weren't planned for properly, and are no longer something our government's finite cash intake can support. If you think they should be, then pitch to get taxes on everyone raised to do so. If not, then cut the program back to levels it can afford.
