Budget talks: This is getting nasty

So is Cutaphobia.

If taxpayers are having to make do with less the government needs to as well.

 

For starters we need to stop spending 120 bil a year in Afghanistan.
Time to rebuild our own country.

 

I would feel different about the cuts if I felt that the govt used tax dollars efficiently. I don't think that is the case. Cuts will force the issue.

 

DoD cost overruns alone account for nearly $300 billion . . . per year.

http://www.galorath.com/wp/296-billion-dollars-in-dod-cost-overruns-2009-gao-weapons-systems-assessments.php

 

It won't force efficient spending across the board. The areas of government most affected will spend frugally to survive, but other areas won't if they aren't as affected by cuts.

I wonder who will be hurt most by this? Hmmmm.

 

SSI has been in effect for more than 70 years, and has been tweaked several times to make it more efficient (didn't noted anti-taxer Ronald Reagan pass the largest SSI tax increase in history?). Checks are deposited on time, month after month, year after year. People unfailingly receive the benefit they are promised. People are not screwed out of their contributions, and SSI undoubtedly improves the lives of almost everyone who receives the monthly check they earned via their contributions over the course of their working lives.

People and politicans fight so hard to preserve SS because it's one government program that works.

Private industry has regularly defaulted on pensions, summarily reduced benefits, or seen the value of 401 K plans dramatically reduced or completely bankrupted. Yet big government can't be trusted with your money, but the banks and other who perpetuated fraud on millions and caused this depression can?

The SS tax should be lowered to about 2 percent, and made to apply to every dollar of income. More than 90 percent of the wage-earning public would benefit from such a change and guess what, it's a unear-universal TAX CUT that would actually put money in the pockets of middle- and lower-class workers.

 

Then you have new bridges, roads, schools, etc., to show for your investment. Not burned out tanks and Humvees aznd empty military bases in Iraq and Afghanistan, or (in my generation), military hardware worth billions being shoved into the South China Sea or surrendered to the NVA, and billions in abandoned infrastructure in Southeast Asia.

No business creates more spin-off business than construction projects. And there will never been a shortage of need for newer, safer road, bridges, sewers, schools, etc.

 

To your first question of what happens when infrastructure jobs end, NASA is the best example historically. Based on the current political environment, we'd have to assume a project like that would never get off the ground today. But investing in it in the 1960s led the way to the computer industry, the economic engine that has carried the world for 50 years, and quite a few other economic benefits. And you could say the same thing about government research at universities leading to huge advances in health care and pharmaceuticals.

I don't put any faith in high-speed rail. But would energy investments lead to the same thing? Could be. All over the U.S. there are stadiums that were built with WPA funds, and then businesses built up around them.

 

More folks should consider the alternative of driving over dirt roads. They'd sober up, quick.

 

Reason No. 1,293 why he is not going to be re-elected. People are frightened when they think about what kind of crap Obama would pull in a second term...and will do everything they can not to find out. Thank God.

 

Nobody is debating that Social Security was a program that was started with good intentions, but you and I both know the system is broken and nobody has the balls to fix it.

Or are all of the projections about SS going bankrupt completely off-base?

And by what creative accounting practices has the federal government kept those checks being deposited on time year after year?

Because when I get to 65 (after working since I was 15) and file for SSI benefits, only to be informed there's no more money for me, I'm not going to feel too much different than the Enron shareholders who sunk 30 years of retirement pay into what they thought was a stable company and wound up losing it all.

More than that one particular example, though, I really wonder where so many posters on this board have come by their seemingly unshakable faith in a massive centralized federal government as a force for good in people's lives.

Has government made many noteworthy accomplishments throughout the history of the United States? Yes, and anybody who argues this point is an idiot.

But you don't have to possess a Master's in political science to recognize that the federal government as currently constituted is nothing more than a bloated, corrupt machine that exists primarily to enrich and empower its leaders at the expense of their constituents.

There are no more statesmen, just cheap-hack politicians on both sides of the aisle in bed with the big-money special interests who help get and keep them elected. And these are the people we should trust to properly allocate the country's tax revenues?

I'll say it again. Oy.

 

He's pretty much been a Republican's wet dream throughout his first term, yet you're afraid of what he will pull in the second term?

What a world.