Just joshing, a bit, I was in no way serious, but now that you mention it, yeah as a matter of fact, the euro is doing ok, Germany is still commited to it, and there is talk of removing Greece if they dont get thier collective shit together. The euro is not experiencing the devaluation that the dollar is dealing with.
Maybe Im just naive but I think the money is there without these measures. We just have to change our priorities as a country and cut back on wasteful spending. Simple right?
...it's a sad reality. If, let's say, the dollar does eventually collapse in our lifetime, then what's to replace it? The Amero?
I'm pretty sure most of the money goes to SS and Medicare. Maybe 1/3 goes to military and debt interest. "waste, fraud, and abuse" is a drop in the bucket.
Whats with all the fuss about overpaid teachers, unemployment freeloaders, foodstamps, wellfare queens, and bloated government pensions then? Since we pay more for our military than the rest of the world combined do we really need 1/3 of our budget going to this? A lot of drops in the bucket end up being a bucket. The other point I made was reorganizing our priorities as a nation. Somethings are in the grey area between priorities change and waste/fraud.
Putting aside the analysis of how big the military needs to be to keep the American lifestyle going... This isn't true, and hasn't been true for about 5 years. The only major players decreasing defense spending are US and Western Europe. China and Russia (among many others) have been having double-digit % increases in spending for almost a decade. And our (unsigned) budget for FY13 has DoD getting 673B (including Overseas Contingency Ops--read, War in Afghanistan) out of 3.8T spent. That's 17%, not 1/3.
I said military spending AND DEBT INTEREST. Your $673B + $454B Out of about $3.6T http://www.treasurydirect.gov/govt/reports/ir/ir_expense.htm
Donkiez didn't. And the FY13 "Spend Plan" requested says $3.803T, but whatever. SPD's graphs show that in just 2 years we went from 48% of the world's military expenditures to 42.8%. In 2011, it went down even further to 41%, as the US decreased military spending and the ROW increased to $1738B. And that interest payment on the debt is much more a share of the continued subsidization of the Medicare/Medicaid program that is overrun by almost $900B a year. To repeat...you could pay every dollar that you pay to the DoD to cover the overrun (debt accrued) on the Medicare/Medicaid program and you'd still be 250B in the hole.
I missread Denny's post. My point is still the same however, we spend way to much on "defense" and the numbers are still stagering. You can't convince me that that is fine because we spend way more on our deficit interest and we are ONLY at 41% of the world military spending rather than over 50%. Especially when that is over 30% more than the next countries military budget.
I'm not sure what you mean. Are you saying that our military budget should be higher and be based on what the average citizen expects our military to be able to do or are you talking about something else?
You (donkiez) were also the one who brought up the "we spend more than the rest of the world combined". Yes, but NK doesn't pay its troops much, so the fact that their normal, active standing army (not including reserves) is 2.5x ours---or that the Chinese Red Army is about 5x the size of ours--doesn't correlate. Our navy is charged with protecting US economic interests around the world...something that the Chinese and Russian ones, for example, aren't worried about. Our air force buys super-expensive precision bombs because we get our panties in a twist every time a dozen civilians are killed (and prohibit ourselves from using land or sea mines), while the Russians showed in Chechnya and Georgia that they share no such compunctions.
I'm saying that the level of military spending in the US (as a % of GDP) is the lowest since 1938. I'm saying that the expectations and missions placed upon the military (as promulgated in the National Security Strategy, National Defense Strategy and National Maritime Strategy/Naval Operations Concept, to name just 3 that I deal with) are still at a higher optempo than the US was for the 30 years 1973-2003 (outside of 6 months for Desert Storm). I'm saying that we are much more dependent on foreign trade (90% of which travels by water) than at any point since the Civil War, and that to protect the shipping lanes and trade requires forward-deployed forces, airplanes and ships. Mandates from the government (President, SecDef, SecNav) to do things like "go green" and use biofuels that need billions in seed money and end up costing 6-10x as much as regular fuel are also cutting into readiness at a time when budgets are going away. I'm not saying they are or aren't good programs, but the expectations from our civilian masters to "be green" while we fight is an additional one that we haven't had before, and causing the military to spend to play catch-up.
