Politics again

[Unregistered]

I don't think that's how it works. Money going to Social Security are separate from money going to the military. You can cut back the military budget and it does not affect SS. .

You are correct about this much, but see my longer post. Cutting down on military spending will allow the government to pay back what it owes to the trust, plus interst hopefully. No money goes from the fed to SS but the fed has borrowed money from SS to pay for wars. That's how Bush kept those supplemental funding bills to pay for his wars of the budget. That and borrowing it from the Chinese.

Not a penny from the federal budget has ever been spent on SS. It is a program funded externally.

The $1 trillion + contributed to the national debt by SS is from the money borrowed from SS trust to pay for wars and the like, not from shortfalls in paying benefits. That is an obligation of the federal government just like our debts to the Chinese.

I think much of the misrepresentation on SS and impact on national debt is to create a hysteria where draconian measures can be taken to forestall or eliminate the need of the fed to ever pay that money back to its rightful owners, the workers who paid the taxes.

Don't fault the program, fix it. Its one of the best things the federal government ever did. Fault the politicians.

[Unregistered]

. But it is funny how the Conservatives who love Jesus and the ones who love Guns and killing people so much.

Not completely true. They are adamantly against killing blastocysts. They just don't have any compassion for people once they are born.

[Unregistered]

Either more intentional lying or ignorant and uninformed shooting from the hip. These programs are not on the verge of bankruptcy, particularly Social Security. Let's look at the facts according to what the Social Security Administration has to say:

" * In 2017, Social Security will begin paying out more than it takes in. For the first time, it will have to use the interest being paid on the securities it holds in order to meet its obligations.

* In 2027, Social Security would have to start redeeming the securities themselves.

* By 2041, Social Security would have cashed in the last security, and the system would have enough revenue to pay out only 75% of promised benefits. That percentage would drop over time if Congress failed to act. "

The trust fund wouldn't dry up until 2046, that doesn't make it bankrupt. They could just support benefits at a lower rate without the trust fund. Keep in mind that as the aging worker bubble passes after the next decades, SS taxes will be more able to keep pace with benefits.

I should be on the verge of bankruptcy like SS is. To be able to support my current lifestyle until 2041 while doing NOTHING would be a luxury. We should expect that even the idiots in Washington could tweak the program enough over three decades that they have to act so that the program continues to remain solvent for the program's second hundred years.

Over one trillion dollars has been raided (not including interest) from the SS trust fund overthe years. Johnson raided it to help pay for Vietnam and Bush raided it tohelppay for Iraq and Afghanistan (in addition to borrowing from the Chinese). Politicians don't really want to pay that money back. That is what they are good at.

Republicans pump the hysteria because they want the remnants of the trust + future SS payments from workers to wind up in "private"retirement accounts. "Private" means run by the criminals on Wall Street who can then pi$$ away retirement savings of the lower and middle classes while laughing all the way to the bank themselves. Teabaggers hate SS because like everything else they believe, if it is run by the gubmint it must be bad, bad, bad. They are too ignorant to appreciate what a successful program it is.

Anyone who makes the claim that SS is on the verge on bankruptcy is either a bald faced liar or so ignorant they should be supervised 24/7 for being a danger to themselves and others.

OK, so SS has a longer life. How about Medicare and Medicaid?

[Unregistered]

You are correct about this much, but see my longer post. Cutting down on military spending will allow the government to pay back what it owes to the trust, plus interst hopefully. No money goes from the fed to SS but the fed has borrowed money from SS to pay for wars. That's how Bush kept those supplemental funding bills to pay for his wars of the budget. That and borrowing it from the Chinese.

Not a penny from the federal budget has ever been spent on SS. It is a program funded externally.

The $1 trillion + contributed to the national debt by SS is from the money borrowed from SS trust to pay for wars and the like, not from shortfalls in paying benefits. That is an obligation of the federal government just like our debts to the Chinese.

I think much of the misrepresentation on SS and impact on national debt is to create a hysteria where draconian measures can be taken to forestall or eliminate the need of the fed to ever pay that money back to its rightful owners, the workers who paid the taxes.

Don't fault the program, fix it. Its one of the best things the federal government ever did. Fault the politicians.

What has Obama done to change that? He seems to actually be following Bush's military policies.

[Cujo]

OK, so SS has a longer life. How about Medicare and Medicaid?

All the numbers for all three systems are based upon outdated actuarial tables. These numbers were fine when people were retiring at 62. They are still working off of demographic assumptions that have been irrelevant for 10 years or more. It is a political slant. Nobody will pay attention to a crisis until it is a few years off. So you keep tweaking the model until alarm bells go off. The environuts have done it on global warming and the Rw nuts have done it on SS. Their goal has always been to put the fund into the hands of the banks and financial institutions so they can make billions off of their .0015% commission. When you steal a penny here and there over a few trillions dollars it adds up.

[Unregistered]

What has Obama done to change that? He seems to actually be following Bush's military policies.

Surprisingly, this is where Obama has been quite successful to date. He's doing far better than Bush ever did after initially entering Iraq.

[Unregistered]

OK, so SS has a longer life. How about Medicare and Medicaid?

That's allyou can say? You claimed SS was on the "verge of bankruptcy," then when you are shown it is not in a big way you want to shift your focus? You should apologize for your ill-informed fear mongering instead.

I have an idea.Maybe you should make sure you are actually informed about something beforeyou open your mouth in the first place.

For the record,medicare is more complicated since it is funded by a combination of revenue streams including payroll taxes (and therefore a trust fund just like SS), general revenues (i.e. line items in the federal budget, just like military spending and everything else), taxes on SS benefits (affects higher income SS recipients), and premiums (rememberthere aremedicare Parts A, B, C, and D, some of which are subscribed to and premiums paid like any other kind of insurance). So somewhat like SS, one cannot simply say "Xdollars were spent on medicare last year" and imply it all came out of the federal budget. Since SOME of the money does come from there,there are a lot of opportunities for the uninformed or disengenuous (say which in particular are you?) to mislead and fear monger by abusing the facts.

I am not going to take the time to get into the weeds on this. If you actually care about being factually correct rather than just propagating gibberish one liners that appeal to the teabaggers (OH NO! GOVERNMENT PROGRAM! ENTITLEMENTS! SOCIALISM! ON THE VERGE OF BANKRUPTCY! BAD!), then I presume you have the capacity to do research on your own and learn from it.

[Unregistered]

That's allyou can say? You claimed SS was on the "verge of bankruptcy," then when you are shown it is not in a big way you want to shift your focus? You should apologize for your ill-informed fear mongering instead.

I have an idea.Maybe you should make sure you are actually informed about something beforeyou open your mouth in the first place.

For the record,medicare is more complicated since it is funded by a combination of revenue streams including payroll taxes (and therefore a trust fund just like SS), general revenues (i.e. line items in the federal budget, just like military spending and everything else), taxes on SS benefits (affects higher income SS recipients), and premiums (rememberthere aremedicare Parts A, B, C, and D, some of which are subscribed to and premiums paid like any other kind of insurance). So somewhat like SS, one cannot simply say "Xdollars were spent on medicare last year" and imply it all came out of the federal budget. Since SOME of the money does come from there,there are a lot of opportunities for the uninformed or disengenuous (say which in particular are you?) to mislead and fear monger by abusing the facts.

I am not going to take the time to get into the weeds on this. If you actually care about being factually correct rather than just propagating gibberish one liners that appeal to the teabaggers (OH NO! GOVERNMENT PROGRAM! ENTITLEMENTS! SOCIALISM! ON THE VERGE OF BANKRUPTCY! BAD!), then I presume you have the capacity to do research on your own and learn from it.

You are confusing me with someone else, but here is a little something from me to you.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/09/opinion/09brooks.html

March 9, 2010
Op-Ed Columnist
The Emotion of Reform
By DAVID BROOKS
We all have our emotional hot and cold spots. If you asked me about the New York Mets, you’d see a glow in my eyes. If you asked me about banking reform, words might come out of my mouth, but you’d notice me nodding off midsentence.

For the Democrats, expanding health care coverage is an emotional hot spot. Over the past year, Democrats have fought passionately for universal coverage. They have fought for it even while the country is more concerned about the economy, and in the face of serial political defeats. They have fought for it even though it has crowded out other items on their agenda and may even cost them their majority in the House.

And they’ve done it for almost no votes. The 30 million who would be covered under the Democratic proposals are not big voters, while the millions who would pay for the coverage are strikingly unhappy.

There is something morally impressive in the Democrats’ passion on this issue. At the same time, it’s interesting to compare it to their behavior on other issues in which they have no emotional investment.

For example, Democrats say the right thing when it comes to helping small businesses create jobs, but there’s no passion there. For the past year, small business owners have been screaming that they can’t hire people because they don’t know what the rules will be on health care, finance or energy. Democrats hear them, but those concerns take a back seat to other priorities.

Small business owners have been screaming about the health care bill that forces them to offer coverage or pay a $2,000-per-employee fine but doesn’t substantially control rising costs. Democrats hear their concerns, but push ahead because getting a health care bill is more important.

Then there is the larger issue of exploding federal deficits. A few Democrats are genuinely passionate about this, President Obama among them. He has fought tenaciously to preserve a commission that might restrain Medicare spending. But 90 percent of the people in Congress have no emotional investment in this issue.

They’re going through the motions. They’ve stuffed the legislation with gimmicks and dodges designed to get a good score from the Congressional Budget Office but don’t genuinely control runaway spending.

There is the doc fix dodge. The legislation pretends that Congress is about to cut Medicare reimbursements by 21 percent. Everyone knows that will never happen, so over the next decade actual spending will be $300 billion higher than paper projections.

There is the long-term care dodge. The bill creates a $72 billion trust fund to pay for a new long-term care program. The sponsors count that money as cost-saving, even though it will eventually be paid back out when the program comes on line.

There is the subsidy dodge. Workers making $60,000 and in the health exchanges would receive $4,500 more in subsidies in 2016 than workers making $60,000 and not in the exchanges. There is no way future Congresses will allow that disparity to persist. Soon, everybody will get the subsidy.

There is the excise tax dodge. The primary cost-control mechanism and long-term revenue source for the program is the tax on high-cost plans. But Democrats aren’t willing to levy this tax for eight years. The fiscal sustainability of the whole bill rests on the naïve hope that a future Congress will have the guts to accept a trillion-dollar tax when the current Congress wouldn’t accept an increase of a few billion.

There is the 10-6 dodge. One of the reasons the bill appears deficit-neutral in the first decade is that it begins collecting revenue right away but doesn’t have to pay for most benefits until 2014. That’s 10 years of revenues to pay for 6 years of benefits, something unlikely to happen again unless the country agrees to go without health care for four years every decade.

There is the Social Security dodge. The bill uses $52 billion in higher Social Security taxes to pay for health care expansion. But if Social Security taxes pay for health care, what pays for Social Security?

There is the pilot program dodge. Admirably, the bill includes pilot programs designed to help find ways to control costs. But it’s not clear that the bill includes mechanisms to actually implement the results. This is exactly what happened to undermine previous pilot program efforts.

The Democrats have not been completely irresponsible. It’s just that as the health fight has gone on, their passion for coverage has swamped their less visceral commitment to reducing debt. The result is a bill that is fundamentally imbalanced.

This past year, we’ve seen how hard it is to even pass legislation that expands benefits. To actually reduce benefits and raise taxes, we’re going to need legislators who wake up in the morning passionate about fiscal sanity. The ones we have now are just making things worse.

[Unregistered]

OK, so SS has a longer life. How about Medicare and Medicaid?

And for you.

At its start, in 1966 Medicare cost $3 billion. It was estimated that it would cost only about $12 billion by 1990 (adjusted for inflation). But in 1990 Medicare actually cost $107 billion. It's cost today: $487 billion. If there is one thing government is very, very bad at it's predicting or controlling future costs.

[Unregistered]

Not completely true. They are adamantly against killing blastocysts. They just don't have any compassion for people once they are born.

Yeah, like those GD Catholics.

[Unregistered]

And for you.

At its start, in 1966 Medicare cost $3 billion. It was estimated that it would cost only about $12 billion by 1990 (adjusted for inflation). But in 1990 Medicare actually cost $107 billion. It's cost today: $487 billion. If there is one thing government is very, very bad at it's predicting or controlling future costs.

Only a percentage of that comes out of general revenues, somewhere between 30and 40% as i recall. Say $150-200 billion.

Now for the real budget buster:

Military spending was $50 billion in 1962.

The 2010 budget approved $680 billion. (http://thehill.com/homenews/senate/6...-defense-bill#,)

Chairmen of Joint Chiefs expects a $40-50 billion additional supplemental request to fund the wars (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/05/wo...tary.html?_r=1)

Defense-related expenditures that occur outside of the department of defense cost are estimated to cost an additional $216-361 billion. (http://www.independent.org/newsroom/article.asp?id=1941).

Total annual defense spending for 2010: $880 billion - $1.03 trillion.

Either justify it or start crying about it. I would be happy to reduce that by half right off the bat and use the money to modernize our infrastructure, provide health care for the poor and elderly, invest in education,etc. Life would get a lo tbetter for the citizenry. Except for the fat cats making fortunes on the status quo.

[Unregistered]

You are confusing me with someone else, but here is a little something from me to you.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/09/opinion/09brooks.html

And right back at you. Maybe you can comment why Brook's piece should be accepted as any more accurate than Conason's. Conason's certainly a lot more coherent.

http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/jo...3/27/deficits/

Dick Cheney was right
Deficits don't matter -- and Republicans who are complaining about Barack Obama's spending are hypocrites.
By Joe Conason


Dick Cheney once observed that "deficits don't matter," which may well have been the most honest phrase he ever uttered. His words were at least partly true, which is more than can be said for the great majority of the vice president's remarks -- and they certainly expressed the candid attitude of Republicans whenever they attain power. His pithy fiscal slogan should remind us that much of the current political furor over deficit spending in the Obama budget is wrong, hypocritical, and worthy of the deepest skepticism.

In our time, the Republican Party has compiled an impressive history of talking about fiscal responsibility while running up unrivaled deficits and debt. Of the roughly $11 trillion in federal debt accumulated to date, more than 90 percent can be attributed to the tenure of three presidents: Ronald Reagan, who used to complain constantly about runaway spending; George Herbert Walker Bush, reputed to be one of those old-fashioned green-eyeshade Republicans; and his spendthrift son George "Dubya" Bush, whose trillion-dollar war and irresponsible tax cuts accounted for nearly half the entire burden. Only Bill Clinton temporarily reversed the trend with surpluses and started to pay down the debt (by raising rates on the wealthiest taxpayers).

Republicans in Congress likewise demanded balanced budgets in their propaganda (as featured in the 1993 Contract with America), but then proceeded to despoil the Treasury with useless spending and tax cuts for those who needed them least. Even John McCain, once a principled critic of those tax cuts, turned hypocrite when he endorsed them while continuing to denounce the deficits they had caused.

But was Cheney wrong when he airily dismissed the importance of deficits? In the full quotation, as first recounted by Paul O'Neill, Bush's fired Treasury Secretary, he said, "You know, Paul, Reagan proved deficits don't matter. We won the [Congressional] midterms [in November 2002]. This is our due." What he evidently meant -- aside from claiming the spoils -- was that the effects of deficit spending tend to be less dire than predicted. And that insight deserves to be considered if only because all the partisan barking over the projected deficits in the Obama budget is so hysterical -- as if nothing could be worse than more federal spending.

Such is the institutional bias of the Washington press corps, which habitually refers to deficits "exploding" and to the nation "engulfed in red ink," and so on. But in fact the United States has recovered from considerably deeper indebtedness than that now on the horizon. Besides, as history warns, there are things much worse than deficits and debt. One such thing was the Great Depression, prolonged when Franklin Roosevelt decided to curb the deficits that had revived the economy, and ended only when he raised spending even higher in wartime. Another was worldwide fascist domination, a threat defeated by expanding America's public debt to unprecedented levels during World War II. No sane person cared then that public debt had risen well above gross domestic product.

Those scary charts and graphs often deployed to illustrate our parlous state of indebtedness rarely date back as far as the Forties and Fifties -- and the reason is simple. The massive deficits incurred during the war didn't matter, as Cheney might say, because the wartime national investments in industry, technology and science undergirded a postwar boom that lasted for nearly three decades, creating the largest and most prosperous middle class in human history.

The average annual growth rate remained close to four percent for that entire period -- and over time the combination of constant growth and smaller deficits reduced the ratio of debt to a fraction of its postwar dimension. What mattered more than the size of the deficits was whether they were spent on things that enabled consistent growth.

Today, President Obama is more troubled by the enormous threats to the nation's future than by deficits, even if they are projected in trillions of dollars. Clearly he believes that there are still some things worse than debt.

One such thing would be a global depression that drags on for several years. Another would be the catastrophic consequences of unchecked climate change, potentially more devastating than a world war; deteriorating public schools that will undermine democracy and demote us to secondary status; and a national health system that costs too much, provides too little care, and burdens enterprise. By investing now, he hopes to prevent disaster and create the conditions for sustainable expansion.

Not all of the warnings about deficit spending are false. Wasteful federal spending can eventually lead to inflation; excessive deficits can cause interest rates to rise, although that doesn't always occur. But as Clinton proved in confronting the huge legacy of debt left over from the Reagan era, it is possible to raise taxes and slow spending without damage to the broader economy.

As for the Republicans, it is difficult to listen to their doomsaying predictions without laughing. They want us to worry about the evils of deficit spending when they obviously don't worry about that at all. Just yesterday, the House Republican leadership distributed what they called an alternative budget. Missing from that thin sheaf of papers was any attempt to estimate what their plan would cost and how much it would increase the deficit. Their ironic ignorance of history was illustrated by their single concrete proposal. They insist that we must cut the maximum tax rate from 36 percent to 25 percent – or the same as the top rate in 1929, on the eve of the Great Depression.

[Unregistered]

Yeah, like those GD Catholics.

I am really opposed to the use of such a term applied to any racial, ethnic, or religious group. Criticize their policies or positions on the merits or just shut up.

[Unregistered]

Only a percentage of that comes out of general revenues, somewhere between 30and 40% as i recall. Say $150-200 billion.

Now for the real budget buster:

Military spending was $50 billion in 1962.

The 2010 budget approved $680 billion. (http://thehill.com/homenews/senate/6...-defense-bill#,)

Chairmen of Joint Chiefs expects a $40-50 billion additional supplemental request to fund the wars (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/05/wo...tary.html?_r=1)

Defense-related expenditures that occur outside of the department of defense cost are estimated to cost an additional $216-361 billion. (http://www.independent.org/newsroom/article.asp?id=1941).

Total annual defense spending for 2010: $880 billion - $1.03 trillion.

Either justify it or start crying about it. I would be happy to reduce that by half right off the bat and use the money to modernize our infrastructure, provide health care for the poor and elderly, invest in education,etc. Life would get a lo tbetter for the citizenry. Except for the fat cats making fortunes on the status quo.

Poor and elderly already have health care. It's called medicare and medicaid.

[Unregistered]

And right back at you. Maybe you can comment why Brook's piece should be accepted as any more accurate than Conason's. Conason's certainly a lot more coherent.

http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/jo...3/27/deficits/

Dick Cheney was right
Deficits don't matter -- and Republicans who are complaining about Barack Obama's spending are hypocrites.
By Joe Conason


Dick Cheney once observed that "deficits don't matter," which may well have been the most honest phrase he ever uttered. His words were at least partly true, which is more than can be said for the great majority of the vice president's remarks -- and they certainly expressed the candid attitude of Republicans whenever they attain power. His pithy fiscal slogan should remind us that much of the current political furor over deficit spending in the Obama budget is wrong, hypocritical, and worthy of the deepest skepticism.

In our time, the Republican Party has compiled an impressive history of talking about fiscal responsibility while running up unrivaled deficits and debt. Of the roughly $11 trillion in federal debt accumulated to date, more than 90 percent can be attributed to the tenure of three presidents: Ronald Reagan, who used to complain constantly about runaway spending; George Herbert Walker Bush, reputed to be one of those old-fashioned green-eyeshade Republicans; and his spendthrift son George "Dubya" Bush, whose trillion-dollar war and irresponsible tax cuts accounted for nearly half the entire burden. Only Bill Clinton temporarily reversed the trend with surpluses and started to pay down the debt (by raising rates on the wealthiest taxpayers).

Republicans in Congress likewise demanded balanced budgets in their propaganda (as featured in the 1993 Contract with America), but then proceeded to despoil the Treasury with useless spending and tax cuts for those who needed them least. Even John McCain, once a principled critic of those tax cuts, turned hypocrite when he endorsed them while continuing to denounce the deficits they had caused.

But was Cheney wrong when he airily dismissed the importance of deficits? In the full quotation, as first recounted by Paul O'Neill, Bush's fired Treasury Secretary, he said, "You know, Paul, Reagan proved deficits don't matter. We won the [Congressional] midterms [in November 2002]. This is our due." What he evidently meant -- aside from claiming the spoils -- was that the effects of deficit spending tend to be less dire than predicted. And that insight deserves to be considered if only because all the partisan barking over the projected deficits in the Obama budget is so hysterical -- as if nothing could be worse than more federal spending.

Such is the institutional bias of the Washington press corps, which habitually refers to deficits "exploding" and to the nation "engulfed in red ink," and so on. But in fact the United States has recovered from considerably deeper indebtedness than that now on the horizon. Besides, as history warns, there are things much worse than deficits and debt. One such thing was the Great Depression, prolonged when Franklin Roosevelt decided to curb the deficits that had revived the economy, and ended only when he raised spending even higher in wartime. Another was worldwide fascist domination, a threat defeated by expanding America's public debt to unprecedented levels during World War II. No sane person cared then that public debt had risen well above gross domestic product.

Those scary charts and graphs often deployed to illustrate our parlous state of indebtedness rarely date back as far as the Forties and Fifties -- and the reason is simple. The massive deficits incurred during the war didn't matter, as Cheney might say, because the wartime national investments in industry, technology and science undergirded a postwar boom that lasted for nearly three decades, creating the largest and most prosperous middle class in human history.

The average annual growth rate remained close to four percent for that entire period -- and over time the combination of constant growth and smaller deficits reduced the ratio of debt to a fraction of its postwar dimension. What mattered more than the size of the deficits was whether they were spent on things that enabled consistent growth.

Today, President Obama is more troubled by the enormous threats to the nation's future than by deficits, even if they are projected in trillions of dollars. Clearly he believes that there are still some things worse than debt.

One such thing would be a global depression that drags on for several years. Another would be the catastrophic consequences of unchecked climate change, potentially more devastating than a world war; deteriorating public schools that will undermine democracy and demote us to secondary status; and a national health system that costs too much, provides too little care, and burdens enterprise. By investing now, he hopes to prevent disaster and create the conditions for sustainable expansion.

Not all of the warnings about deficit spending are false. Wasteful federal spending can eventually lead to inflation; excessive deficits can cause interest rates to rise, although that doesn't always occur. But as Clinton proved in confronting the huge legacy of debt left over from the Reagan era, it is possible to raise taxes and slow spending without damage to the broader economy.

As for the Republicans, it is difficult to listen to their doomsaying predictions without laughing. They want us to worry about the evils of deficit spending when they obviously don't worry about that at all. Just yesterday, the House Republican leadership distributed what they called an alternative budget. Missing from that thin sheaf of papers was any attempt to estimate what their plan would cost and how much it would increase the deficit. Their ironic ignorance of history was illustrated by their single concrete proposal. They insist that we must cut the maximum tax rate from 36 percent to 25 percent – or the same as the top rate in 1929, on the eve of the Great Depression.

Deficits do matter. That's why the Tea Party folks aren't too happy with Republicans either.