Financial Problem?

[amdx]

In 2010 the US government spent
3.5 Trillion dollars.
2.2 Trillion dollars was collected in tax revenue.
1.3 Trillion was borrowed and will ultimately be paid by the children.

Here is the breakdown of the budget.

Defense..................................20% or $705 Billion.
(of this 4.8% or $170 Billion
went the Afganistan and Iraq wars)

Social Security..........................20% or $707 Billion
(54.1 Million receive checks)

Medicare, Medicaid and
Childrens Health Ins. Program.......... 21% or $732 Billion

Safety Net Programs......................14% or $496 Billion

Interest on the National Debt.............6% $196 Billion

Payments to Fed. Retires and Vet...........7% or $245 Billion

That's 88% of the budget.

So were do we cut?

Mikek

Data from http://www.cbpp.org/cms/index.cfm?fa=view&id=1258

 

[amdx]

That's sort of the wrong question. The real issue is, what is the best
public policy to create jobs and wealth?

John

I don't think it's the wrong question!
What you ask is a good question, just a different one.
We need to end the entitlement mentality, 54.2 million get a SS check,
then add Medicaid and Childrens Health Ins. Program, the Safety Net
programs,and Federal Retires and Vets and I'll bet you near 80 million
out of the 300 million people getting government checks.
Someone will say but the Federal retires earned it, they don't deserve
anymore than someone working in the private sector. Vets, I have some
sympathy there, but I know several that retired from the military
and then went back to the same job as a civilian. Somethings not right
with that.
Mikek

 

[amdx]

If we killed all Democrats we'd have a budget surplus ;-)

...Jim Thompson

Does that lead cup have any influence on the taste of your wine?
Mikek

 

[amdx]

I only drink from the finest crystal ;-) Do you disagree with my
premise? It certainly would do exactly as I say, would it not ?

...Jim Thompson

You lost the social graces that you had just a few years ago.
Mikek

 

[amdx]

When the private sector refuses to buy government debt the govt. will
either become totalitarian by increasing taxes to the breaking point
or they will figure out what to cut.

Some day the youngsters (under age 30) are going to figure out how
incredibly rigged the system is against them and tell all the older
people with the excessive benefits to go starve themselves.

I'm telling every youngster (even over 30 the government
is spending money for old people that they will have to take from
their families to pay back. How long can the government spend 37% more
than they take in tax revenue.
I heard a scary scenerio, if interest rates double, (which some are
predicting) 14% of every tax dollar collected will go to service
the debt.
Mikek

 

[PeterD]

If you stupidly look at those spending categories as indivisible
entities then of course there's nothing that can be done. Examine the
details and you'll find more than a trillion that can be eliminated.

Yep, and eliminate all foreign aid, subsidies to business (oil and
agriculture), programs that the military doesn't even want (but some in
congress do want as pork...) and you'll do a lot to balance things.

Then starting GE and other large corporations at a flat rate on all
earnings (US and overseas) and things start balancing better.

Finally, implement proper import duties to prevent predatory (and
subsidized) imports from damaging our economy, and guess what... Things
improve again.

BTW, Social Security was PRE-PAID by those who receive it, and cannot be
considered an expense. Just because we allowed congress and the
president to steal the money in the SS trust (TRUST!) funds doesn't make
it right.

 

[DonMack]

wrote in message

In 2010 the US government spent
3.5 Trillion dollars.
2.2 Trillion dollars was collected in tax revenue.
1.3 Trillion was borrowed and will ultimately be paid by the children.

Here is the breakdown of the budget.

Defense..................................20% or $705 Billion.
(of this 4.8% or $170 Billion
went the Afganistan and Iraq wars)

Social Security..........................20% or $707 Billion
(54.1 Million receive checks)

Medicare, Medicaid and
Childrens Health Ins. Program.......... 21% or $732 Billion

Safety Net Programs......................14% or $496 Billion

Interest on the National Debt.............6% $196 Billion

Payments to Fed. Retires and Vet...........7% or $245 Billion

That's 88% of the budget.

So were do we cut?

Mikek

Data fromhttp://www.cbpp.org/cms/index.cfm?fa=view&id=1258

Social Security and Medicare have their own revenue streams. They are
self supporting. Should the social security fall short, it holds
government bonds. Surely the US government will honor the bonds
purchased by social security. Or was Ronald Reagan a fucking lying
piece of fucking shit that sold this country a worthless IOU?

About all you can cut is the military. Everything else is essential.
-------

WTF? Everything else is essential but the military? Are you on crack? If we
eliminated the military would that solve our problem? I think the military
is much more essential than paying fat ass niggers to sit on their ass all
day smoking weed and pumping out babies that will grow up to be just like
them.

We could streamline the military a bit but only a kook would think that the
*our* welfare system is more important. 99% of the people on welfare have
the capability to be off. Most are single black women that seem to only be
good at getting pregnant... probably because their sugar daddy, uncle sam,
will take care of them.

BTW, we didn't have any problems 70 years ago when the military

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:PerCapitaInflationAdjustedDefenseSpending.PNG

It really hasn't changed that much.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Discretionary_Spending_by_Dpt_-_2010E.png

What are the top 4 which account for more than 50% of total? Stupid liberal
programs? Again, we had better education and health services 70% years
ago(adjusted for technological improvements).

You simply are against war and hence against the military. Maybe if you
would get over that little fact you could see that all the social programs
are just as inflated as the military. We need a cut across the board. We
need to reduce the military size(no more wars and no more foreign bases), no
more welfare(people survived just fine 100 years ago with SS, welfare, wic,
medicare, etc..), no more foreign aid, etc...

But as long as partisans like yourself run things we will never do what it
takes.

The only thing the government should be involved in is basic infrastructure,
defense, and national disasters. Everything else should be left up to the
local and state governments.

If people like you wouldn't tie our military's balls in a knot we wouldn't
require such a large military... Probably just a few hundred or whatever was
required to maintain and deploy nukes.

Of course there are some who would like the USA not to have any military...
obviously because they want it defenseless. Some people are just jealous...

 

[Les Cargill]

It's really pretty simple.

1) The gov't is in debt. It doesn't have a giant mattress full of
money it saved for you. Not for SS, not for anything else.
2) OTOH, it is not obliged to pay anyone any particular sum of SS or
Medicare, etc. Benefits are arbitrary, decided by the government each
year. There is no guarantee.

Perhaps not:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/06/30/tim-geithner-14th-amendment_n_887925.html

Money shot ( Geithner reading the 14th amendment ):
"The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by
law, including debts incurred for the payments of pension and bounties
for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion' -- this is the
important thing -- 'shall not be questioned," Geithner read.

3) Future payments will come directly from future revenue (taxes),
just as today.

Not necessarily. *Present* payments do not all come from present
revenue - that's what's bothering people.

4) Future benefits will be whatever the taxpayers can provide, plus
what the politicians can borrow.

That's simply not been shown.

5) If there's less money (or less available to borrow), benefits will
be decreased.

The real problem here is that people appear to be *imagining* scenarios
in which the ability to borrow is constrained.

 

[Rich Grise]

Defense..................................20% or $705 Billion.
(of this 4.8% or $170 Billion
went the Afganistan and Iraq wars)

How are they rationalize calling the attacks on the Middle East "defense?"

Am I really safer while the administration does its damnedest to piss off
the whole rest of the world?

Thanks,
Rich

 

[Charlie E.]

It's also not true that the Treasury must default on its debt
payments. They've got $2.2T in revenue pouring in, more than 5x what
they need to make the payments on our debt and prevent default
indefinitely. Geithner knows that.

(for example, 3% of 14.4T is $400B)

<snip>

The real problem is not that they would default on their payments, it
is that they would default on their PAYCHECKS! They basically have a
budget that says that they will spend half again as much as their
income, and if they can't continuously borrow money, they can't spend
that much. If they can't spend that much, SOMEONE will have to not
get their paychecks. They can't cut out the paychecks to themselves,
of course, so they have to decide whom to stiff. It makes better
political theatre to cut something important, like interest payments
on the debt, SS, or the military, instead of cutting unnecessary
beauracracies that no one has ever heard of, so that is where they
will cut. Same as the states always cut police and teachers (not
administrators!) as no one would complain otherwise...

Charlie

 

[Don Klipstein]

What resources are gone? Even gold mining is coming back.

We have a lot of oil and huge amounts of coal and natural gas. Lots of
water, too.

But the trump card is that we have, and can make a lot more, food.

There is the matter that USA greatly decreased its exports of grains,
especially corn, due to a major Federal subsidy program for biofuel made
specifically from home-grown corn.

As I hear it, switchgrass gets greatly better numbers than corn gets,
needs less irrigation than corn needs, and grows in areas where corn
does not. And, people don't eat switchgrass, and some livestock don't
eat switchgrass.

The way it appears to me, USA has a problematic corn lobby and lack
of a significant switchgrass lobby.

 

[Don Klipstein]

Didn't Congress recently end the ethanol subsidy?

I put half a minute into Google, and I see that on June 14th the Senate
voted 59-40 against repeal of the ethanol subsidy.

Awfully heavily along party lines, with Republicans voting 90% against
the repeal, Democrats voting 72% in favor of repeal.

http://projects.washingtonpost.com/congress/112/senate/1/votes/89/

Lots of corn-growing states have low representation in the House of
Representatives, but as much representation each in the Senate as TX, CA
and NY.

And if the repeal did pass both houses of Congress, it gets sent to
the White House. The relevant official there is from a state appearing
to me to be a corn-growing one.

No matter: the price of corn keeps going up, so it will be more
valuable to sell as food.

http://www.tradingeconomics.com/commodity/corn

It appears to me the price of corn keeps going up due to artificial
demand from the ethanol subsidy. The effort at repealing that recently
failed.

 

[Don Klipstein]

According to Wired magazine, the part of the corn crop used for
ethanol is not used for food.

http://www.wired.com/autopia/2011/06/five-ethanol-myths-busted-2/
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.10/myths.html

"Myth No. 2: Ethanol production reduces our food supply.

False. Only 1 percent of all corn grown in this country is eaten by
humans. The rest is No. 2 yellow field corn, which is indigestible to
humans and used in animal feed, food supplements and ethanol.

<SNIP specifics of how that is used for biofuels and animal feed>

And grain farmers love the somewhat-popularized diet attitude that
"grains are what food eats" - but that's another point.

If not for the ethanol subsidy, USA's corn farming industry would grow
a higher percentage of its corn as human-edible corn and return USA to
its past position as a global superpower corn exporter. And some of the
non-human-food-intended corn farming operations would return to their
former wheat farming operations and return USA to its past position as a
superpower wheat exporter.

Additionally, the food-versus-fuel debate has spurred significant
research and development of second-generation biofuels like cellulosic
ethanol that do not use food crops. Cellulosic ethanol is made from
the woody structural material in plants that is unusable by humans.
Unlike food crops, ethanol crops and cellulosic ethanol crops can grow
in any soil that will sustain grass.

And unlike corn, these don't get gigabucks per year in subsidies.

<SNIP good examples of biofuel crop-growing that are *not* getting the
annual multigigabucks that corn-for-biofuel is getting>

 

[Don Klipstein]

In <2d20c357-5209-4b67-9fa2-c66b5fee1d51@c29g2000yqd.googlegroups.com>,
Fred Bloggs wrote:

Seriously- even a huge domestic oil find supplies the market for a
only few days, and over 90% of the coal output is used for domestic
electricity production. Your food situation is changing all the time,
and it is not for the better. There are areas of once major food
production in places like Iowa, Indiana, and Ohio totally depleted of
agricultural grade topsoil, for one example.

An answer has been known for a goodly century already - crop rotation.

Not that I believe Iowa has totally lost its ability to grow corn...

Then there is this pesky global warming throwing a wrench in the works.

I agree that AGW exists. But in (what I think is) the unlikely event
its degree of existence is that proposed by most of the proponents of its
existence, Canada will become an agricultural superpower.

 

[josephkk]

If we killed all Democrats we'd have a budget surplus ;-)

...Jim Thompson

No we wouldn't, the same about of spending would go to "corporate
welfare"!

?-(

 

[josephkk]

That's easy. The best public policy to create jobs and wealth is to
make it easier (less time, money, and overhead) to do those things.

The new guy's building all sorts of costs into employing someone, plus
heaping inefficiencies on the businesses themselves, and raising his
cut of their action.

The gain's quite high. A few percent extra load is more than enough
to obliterate a big share of our enterprises, or send them scurrying
for their lives overseas.

And vice versa.

Everyone *wants* to do business at home--for so many reasons it's so
much easier and better--they simply can't.

Fixing this is easy.

Yeah, sure. By the same token the "courts" never did anything about the
perpeTraitors of "Love Canal". Nor many other ugly corporate
externalizations of costs. They weren't actually illegal, just ethically
ugly.

There has to be balance and corporate accountability as well. Of course
the biggest part of the problem is the government sponsored corporations.

No, i am not a lover of corporations (especially nigh impossible to
regulate mega-corporations, see cars, banks, oil vendors, and much of the
NYSE top 100).

?-(

 

[josephkk]

Huh? If the gvt takes in 2.2 T$ and spends 3.5 T$ then that is
(3.5-2.2)/2.2= 60% more spending than revenues...

You seem to have heartburn with entitlements while conveniently
ignoring they're funded by government managed trusts into which the
receipients paid for 30-40 years.

There are no such trusts IDIOT!!! SS is a transfer payments system and
has been so since the very beginning. The politicians have conned the
sheeple with that old "insurance/trust fund" gag since the beginning.

Start here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Security_Act#Creation:_The_Social_Security_Act

The text of the original act by Congress is here (item 2 in the above
articles references):

http://www.socialsecurity.gov/history/35actinx.html

It's your nation too, learn what the laws really say.

 

[josephkk]

Yes, but Social Security has enough assets in bonds to pay benefits
for the next 26 years. But I guess that could change if collections
don't keep up with payouts. All I know is SS is a sacred cow, and most
politicians avoid the problem since they want to keep their high
paying jobs.

-Bill

The actual pay isn't all that much. The major compensation comes from
corruption.

www.senate.gov/reference/resources/pdf/97-1011.pdf

?-)

 

[josephkk]

Problem is, there are quite a few sectors that HAVE TO buy government debt.
The Social Security fund, for one. And banks (regulated) need to hold a
certain amount of reserve in ultra safe forms (T-bills, etc.) That's what
all this "quantitative easing" was about.

Riiight. Show the legislation that provides this. Better, read the
actual SS legislation then tell us what it says (but not before reading).

See reference item #2 in the wikipedia article.

 

[josephkk]

What resources are gone? Even gold mining is coming back.

We have a lot of oil and huge amounts of coal and natural gas. Lots of
water, too.

But the trump card is that we have, and can make a lot more, food.

John

And being primarily a food exporter instead of a tech products exporter is
a much lower standard of living.

?-(