>And I actually laughed (in a sad way) about the comment about the debt
>owners being countries like Japan and China. That was also a big worry
>during the Reagan years.
Who the debt owners are doesn't matter, I agree.
>Something to remember is that during the Clinton years we actually
>balanced the budget and paid back a chunk of debt, lowering the
>national deficit for the first time in 25 years. While under Bush,
>just this year he has pushed us to a record $521 billion deficit
>forcing Congress to raise the national debt ceiling. In fact, if you
>look back during the last 50 years, it is consistently under
>Republican presidencies that have seen increases in the national debt
>despite the ad hominem criticisms that Democrats are the ones who want
>to spend willy nilly.
The Republican Congress after 1994 was responsible for the budget surplus. They forced Clinton to play even more to the center. Part of the current problem is that Republicans control both houses of Congress and the White House- they have no counter-balance to their power.
>And if you want to look at line items, the defense budget is almost
>the same as social security despite the fact that the military budgets
>of the "axis of evil" are about 2% of ours even when added together.
>That's less than the $8.8 billion we supposedly gave the Iraqi
>provisional government that is now missing.
>http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,129489,00.html The nearest
>military spender to us, Russia, spends about 17% of us and they're an
>ally.
Today Defense is almost as much as SS, but wait ten years when the Baby Boomers are all getting paid and the situation will change dramatically. The current spending level is not sustainable.
>With current social security and medicare funding, the retired
>population is mostly living in poverty and has to choose between
>medicine and meals. So even if we do have the military defend our way
>of life, we have to ask what the overall quality of life is that we
>are defending.
The whole notion of retirement, the idea that you shouldn't have to work after a certain point in your life, is a recent concept. For most of the 5,000+ years of recorded human history, people worked until they could afford to stop working, until their families could care for them, or until they could retire. The philosphical basis of Social Security in the New Deal was to give some minimal support to people who lived beyond the average life expectancy, then 65 years. That program, along with Medicare, has morphed into the single largest entitlement program in world history.
Your apparent indignation that our retired population is laregly living in poverty just indicates how much we have been brainwashed as a country to believe that it is morally wrong to expect people to be responsible for themselves, even in part. I don't have a problem paying to support the childless widow who doesn't have a penny to her name, but that is not where the money is going.
As for what we are fighting for in Iraq- we are fighting for opportunity. Thomas Jefferson wrote "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" in the U.S. Declaration of Independence. He didn't write "life, liberty, and the guarantee of happiness". He didn't write "life, liberty, and property", that was John Locke. Jefferson specifically changed property to the pursuit of happiness- what he believed in was the opportunity. How is it that Jefferson's famous phrase has turned into life, liberty, prescription drugs and an automatic cost of living adjustment after 67?
The entire economics of retirement is about to be turned on its head. In the not-so-distant future, there will be as many retired people as working people, and that ratio will only tilt more toward retirees over time. Nothing anyone can say or do will change the facts. The money to pay for this massive Ponzi scheme will run out, it's only a matter of when.
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