Thanks Bush! Another $60 Billion down the drain...

archer wrote: I made this point months ago........whenever Democrats suggest we cut here....or add revenue there.......all I seem to hear from conservatives is "well THAT won't solve our deficit problem", and of course you are right.....THAT alone will not.....but add all the possibilities together and you have filled up the bucket that you need. That is the reasoning behind such ideas as letting the tax cuts for the wealthy expire....no, that will not solve the problem, but it adds some more to the bucket. Just as changing the formulas for medicare and social security will add to the bucket, and eliminating the waste in the military, that should add a lot of drops, and allowing medicare, medicaid and the Vet Admin negotiate RX prices.....all will add to that bucket. Where I take issue with some of the Tea Party ideas is that they want to take huge chunks out of some programs while not investigating other ideas......not using increased revenue as a way to lower the deficit is short sighted. We are in such a BIG mess, we need to use all the tools available to us to chip away at the enormous debt we carry.

Just as any family would do what they can to reduce their debt, cut what spending they can, take in as much new revenue as they can, but preserve what makes their family healthy and happy. It can be done.....it has to be done, but both parties have to be willing to let go of some of their sacred cows. So far all I hear from the right is the democrats have to give up SS, medicare, medicaid, education, labor, and any other program that is declared a "social program" by the Tea Party.....but the Tea Party will give up nothing......the wealthy will still get their tax breaks and their tax loopholes, corporations will be given even greater tax breaks, and increased revenue is forever off the table. That's a lot of drops that will never make it into the bucket, and we will be much longer in dealing with our debt.

And I made this point months ago as well, reducing the deficit by a couple hundred billion a year using every tool available won't make a bit of difference when the annual deficit is 8x this amount - there is still 7x the sum total of using all the tools available that needs to be shed from the annual spending of the DC government. Democrats love to tell us that the tax cuts for the rich will cost the treasury $760 Billion over the next decade while failing to mention that the federal deficit spending over that same period of time will be a minimum of $9 Trillion, perhaps as high as $14 Trillion.

And so we return to what is the annual amount of revenue, expressed as a percentage of GDP, that can be relied upon when we look at the last 70 years of tax revenues? What can the federal government reasonably expect to collect each year? When the facts and figures are analyzed, we find that this number is slightly less than 18% of the nation's annual GDP. That seems to be what the government collects on average regardless of tax policy, regardless of tax rates. Not 20%, not 25%, not 33% - 18%. All of the tools Obama consistently refers to might add as much as another 2.5% of GDP to the revenues, which would take us from the current rough figure of 15% up to 17.5%. Problem being Obama's budgets consistently call for a minimum of 25% of GDP - a figure that is over 7% of GDP higher than what the federal government can hope to realize in revenue even if every Obama wish is granted.

Guess what that means archer - we need to scale back the federal spending by at least a third even with every Obama tax hike to bring the budget back into balance. Since the vast majority of the current federal budget is found in acting as the central clearinghouse for the collection and distribution of the nation's charity there is absolutely no hope, even if every Obama tax hike is implemented, of balancing the federal budget without drastic cuts to the federal charity programs - unless, that is, you are willing to forgo spending a single Roosevelt dime on every other legitimate function of government in order to allow the federal government to continue to act as the central clearinghouse for the collection and distribution of the nation's charity and make that its sole purpose, its sole reason for existence.

NPR was reporting on this story this morning and one point they wanted to make was that some of that waste was the Iraqi's and Afghani's not maintaining the infrastructure that was built for them. (Like certain US states?)

And some of the other waste was paying contractors to do jobs that were traditionally done by the US military, like hiring foreign nationals to peel potatos instead of GI's. This might have been political, if you send tens of thousands more troops over to Afghanistan, it would be a higher political price than letting KBR do the kitchen work and also provide security for Americans working there.

:Whistle Easier to just write a check, right?

Well, at least here's one place where Bush got some "bang for his buck":

WikiLeaks: Iraqi children in U.S. raid shot in head (PHOTO)

A U.S. diplomatic cable made public by WikiLeaks provides evidence that U.S. troops executed at least 10 Iraqi civilians, including a woman in her 70s and a 5-month-old infant, then called in an airstrike to destroy the evidence, during a controversial 2006 incident in the central Iraqi town of Ishaqi.

The unclassified cable, which was posted on WikiLeaks' website last week, contained questions from a United Nations investigator about the incident, which had angered local Iraqi officials, who demanded some kind of action from their government. U.S. officials denied at the time that anything inappropriate had occurred.

But Philip Alston, the U.N.'s special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions, said in a communication to American officials dated 12 days after the March 15, 2006, incident that autopsies performed in the Iraqi city of Tikrit showed that all the dead had been handcuffed and shot in the head. Among the dead were four women and five children. The children were all 5 years old or younger.

http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2011/08/31/1 ... in-us.html

neptunechimney wrote:

archer wrote: kool-aid indeed, If you don't think that the Tea Party's ultimate agenda is to decimate the social programs in this country, then you have indeed drunk too much of it.

For a free thinker who arrives at independent findings , it is amazing how your opinions mirror every DNC talking point.

The truth is hard to miss....

Your attempts to dismiss my posts because I see the same truths others see is pretty funny.