I find it amazing that Bush’s spending ways are raising ire with Democrats. Come on! You people wrote the book on squandering government money. It’s like a prostitute getting her back up about country club wives giving blow jobs. It just don’t cut no moral dice. ONLY Republicans have a right to be angry with Bush about his stupid squandering to pander to Democrat voters especially education, labor and such. I would have imagined that this would have been to most Democrat’s liking. And if this is an issue because of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the amount we spend equals 3.5 percent of the total budget. That could be saved in one fell stroke by axing the dept of education. Any takers on that? How about the dept of labor? Housing and Urban Development? After all the latter has been a real bastion of success hasn’t it? Or better yet, we can raise all the money by privatizing the post office and selling the property its buildings are on? How about that? Any takers? Then, shut the F*** up hahaha
legalhardware.com/economics/charts.htm
[quote]“It [this new approach] will retire nearly $1 trillion in debt over the next four years. This will be the largest debt reduction ever achieved by any nation at any time. It achieves the maximum amount of debt reduction possible without payment of wasteful premiums. It will reduce the indebtedness of the United States, relative to our national income, to the lowest level since early in the 20th Century and to the lowest level of any of the largest industrial economies.”
Hurray MT:
You agree with me that the deficit is too high! What should we cut first? I suggest saving US$65 billion per year by axing the Dept of Education. Then, how about privatizing the post office. This could bring in US$60 to US$100 billion and would save the US$1.5 billion we lose every year plus it would free the US government from being responsible for the overly generous pension benefits of the organization. Do people really need to retire after 20 to 25 years of working with the same organization and have the taxpayer cover the costs? Or how about Housing and Urban Development for US$12 billion per year. With gentrification in full swing, why not let the market rejuvenate these cities which all the federal funding could not do? How are those housing projects doing? Being ripped down? Then why should they have been built in the first place? Hurray, cut the HUD? How about Dept of Labor? Let’s axe the Dept of Commerce and Agriculture too? Then, take out the Dept of Energy, tranfer all nuclear labs to Dept of Defense and be done with that too. Can anyone tell me what the Dept of Energy has actually accomplished? Finally, failing schools? More vouchers. If a school can educate a child for US$1,500 to US$3,000 with far better results than we are getting for US$7,000 to US$11,000 then let’s close down the expensive schools and use the ones that work. How about it MT? Ready to get serious about the deficit? Yeehah. Let’s do some cutting!
Well, for starters, how about not giving tax cuts to the richest americans. . .
But more importantly, QUIT SPENDING SO MUCH ON THE GODDAMNED MILITARY!!!
[quote]PRESIDENT BUSH wants guns (Iraq) and butter (tax cuts). The cost of having it both ways is mounting, for him as well as for the country. On September 7th, he presented the latest instalment of the Iraq bill: $87 billion next year. He did it in a nationally televised speech, a sure sign of how much his political future depends on events in the Gulf.
Usually, Mr Bush’s set-piece speeches turn public opinion to his advantage. This one did not. A Washington Post poll found 61% of respondents opposed to granting the extra money. . .
In July, the administration’s Office of Management and Budget increased its estimate for this year’s budget deficit from $300 billion to $450 billion. In August, the Congressional Budget Office put the figure slightly lower. Neither figure includes the extra $87 billion. If you add that in, the budget deficit will increase next year from 4.2% of GDP to around 4.7%.
The administration pooh-poohs the deficit as manageable and claims that economic growth will erode it away. It may not do so, because the [b]deficit is compounding more general economic worries that are causing alarm in Congress
We should do away with income tax. That will cause immense savings and a huge budget surplus.
Of course leave it to a Republican to attack institutions promoting education and supporting lower-income Americans. 
That really comes as no surprise. Criticizing an overbloated military budget, however, is seldom mentioned. If you want to privatize everything, why not ask other countries to defend themselves and not expect the US to defend them? Let them cut their social programs to buy chunks of exploding metal. What’s the point in being a wealthy country if the wealth isn’t going to be spent for the benefit of its citizens? Ah, I forgot I was talking about a Republican: of course, kiss rich booty and screw everyone else.
The statistics on the deficit are very telling. :help: This despite years of preaching ‘small government.’ I’ll believe that when I see it.
By the way, Fred, have you looked in honest at the results of the privatization of American schools? Scary stuff. I worked at a charter school myself. Though mine was good, there are ten times as many that are more corrupt than communist China.
[quote=“Mother Theresa”]Well, for starters, how about not giving tax cuts to the richest Americans. . .
…
But more importantly, QUIT SPENDING SO MUCH ON THE GODDAMNED MILITARY!!!
[/quote]
well said MT. However you must remember that the military likes to get really expensive new toys to play with even if they are not what is needed for the war on terror. Let’s think…Missile defence. Lovely. Now that the terrorist have ICBMs, missile defence is a must. What about this pre-emptive strike idea? Won’t that make the Star Wars thing a waste of time? Come come, star wars is cool, and remember the money spent will be spent in places where it can be used for a good cause. Yep, getting somboody re-elected. 
This thread is very hateful, and uses offensive terms to describe Democrats. There is such a thing as tact.
You could rename this thread, “Democrats have a reason to be angry with fred smith”.
Fred, can’t you privatize the military? By how much would that reduce the deficit?
Missile defense system. 
That is a good one butcher boy. I guess you read the news today.
[quote]The first test in nearly two years of a multi-billion-dollar United States anti-missile shield failed yesterday when an interceptor missile shut down as it prepared to launch in the central Pacific, the Pentagon said.
About 16 minutes earlier, a target missile carrying a mock warhead had been fired from Kodiak Island, Alaska, according to a statement from the missile defence agency. The aborted $85 million test appeared likely to set back plans for activating a rudimentary shield against long-range ballistic missiles that could be fired by countries such as North Korea.
In 2002, George Bush, the US president, pledged to have initial elements of the programme up and running by the end of this year . . . The system is a scaled-down version of a missile shield dubbed Star Wars, first outlined by Reagan in March 1983.[/quote]
thescotsman.scotsman.com/interna … 1433962004
Just paste Dubya’s face over Ronnie’s.
I think it’s in the interests of big industry to support and fully fund education for the nation’s children. We don’t know where what class of society our next geniuses will all come from. While there might be some point to the concept that high-IQ parents produce hi-IQ kids, what’s to be said about those who purely inherited their wealth? For every super-smart Adams family, you run across plenty of Addams families (or Hapsburgs, or whatever…).
If the United States doesn’t want to be completely reliant upon immigration to handle its need for educated scientific folks, we had better get back to being serious about our own educational system. In the long run, more and more of them are going to do exactly as US-educated Taiwanese, Japanese, Indian and Mainland Chinese are starting to do: return home to open up companies that compete with our own. The “brain drain” was only bound to be a temporary phenomenon.
Rather than sell our own society short, we should be doing everything possible to open up teaching to experts who might be interested in switching in from the private sector. The pay for most teachers is still ridiculously low (outside of wealthy suburbs, there are many states where the districts pay 12,000/year + 7,000 from the state), which as a matter of economics leaves these jobs highly undesireable for anybody with a lick of sense or even grad-school loans to pay off. Meanwhile, many people would find teaching (in itself) quite rewarding if they could make a decent living out of it.
Perhaps because of the strategic need for well-trained, literate workers who are integrated with our economy, our corporations could pony up. Workers can come from pretty much any geographic location in the U.S. these days – people move around so much that it simply doesn’t make sense to limit good education by neighborhood property-tax rates. We can then lower the tax burden on lower- and middle-class Americans (who bear a huge brunt of the current school taxes) while helping to ensure that all schools enable our kids (our economic future) to put their best foot forward.
Guns or butter, Fred?
[quote]The president’s [Social Security] plan may cost $1 trillion to $2 trillion over 10 years, according to the Congressional Budget Office. He also promised during his re-election campaign to cut the U.S. deficit, $412 billion last year, in half in five years. . .
A $127 billion budget surplus has vanished since Bush took office, amid an economic slowdown, enactment of $1.85 trillion in tax cuts over 10 years and spending for military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan as well as homeland security. . .
Discretionary spending authorized by Congress has grown an average of 6 percent a year and a cumulative 27 percent over his first term, according to the White House Office of Management and Budget. While the president has repeatedly called for budget restraint, he has yet to veto a spending bill. . .
The CBO projects a deficit of $2.3 trillion over the next decade. That will grow to $3.6 trillion if Congress adopts other Bush proposals, such as extending tax cuts when most of them expire in 2010 and allowing middle-class families to avoid the alternative minimum tax, the CBO estimated. . .[/quote]
bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid= … Y&refer=us
MEANWHILE. . .
[quote]The grinding insurgency in Iraq continues to exert upward pressure on at least one important aspect of the US war effort: monetary cost.
Deployment of extra troops, plus the need for new armor and other changes to counter insurgent tactics, may increase war spending by at least 25 percent for fiscal 2005, say experts. The total cost of the US military effort in Afghanistan and Iraq through next year will almost certainly surpass $200 billion. . .
“It seems useful to at least begin the debate as to what the Iraq war will cost [in total],” writes Anthony Cordesman, a war expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, in a new analysis.
The cost of the war through the end of 2004 will be some $128 billion, according to Mr. Cordesman’s figures. That does not include major maintenance, the replacement of destroyed equipment, and costs associated with the need to recruit more troops and retrain those deployed to Iraq. Through 2005, the cost of military operations in the Iraq theater will be between $212 billion and $232 billion, according to Cordesman. By the end of 2007, it could be as high as $316 billion[/quote]
csmonitor.com/2004/1217/p01s01-usmi.html
But of course it must be the fault of democrats. :loco:
Sorry in bali and no time to respond. Let me just say one thing. I find it interesting that everyone here seems to equate spending more money no matter how poorly with no matter how few results with caring more about education. Given that the squandered trillions have if anything resulted in lower standards why not let the republicans take over. The Democrats have had 60 years to try and fail at their games especially since the 1960s. So why not vouchers. Why not a new attempt. Why not recognize that more money is not the answer but more choice and accountability is? Why is this such a threat to Democrats? Oh yeah, I forgot the teachers unions, federal workers unions and trial lawyers all vote Democrat. Interesting that 70 percent of poor black parents in DC support vouchers. Don’t they know that they are only falling for an evil republican plan to profit at their children’s expense. But then you think that they would have become very good at spotting this since that is exactloy what the Democrats have been doing since 1967 but oh yeah we are the uncaring greedy ones. Wanna explain then what the hell you have been doing for 40 years with trillions of dollars down the drain with not a whiit of improvement. Compare this with welfare reform. Everyone said that would fail too and was all about greedy republicans not caring but what happened? A true success. More responsibility and accontabililty has beens shown to be successul. Shame on all of you here who seem to think that democrats are the party that cares. If that were true how could it have consigned millions of black children to such a pisspoor existence and future. give me a fucking break.
Actually, Fred, I’m still educating myself on Bush’s policies and wouldn’t argue that the Democrats are always pro-education. I agree that throwing money at schools won’t reform them, but I’m not impressed by Bush’s ‘No Child Left Behind’ program. It really takes away a teacher’s ability to teach since basically it forces teachers to teach how to pass a test. Excessive reliance on standardized testing is really harmful to American kids in the long run. I don’t think kids should be forced to compete with kids in other countries who are successful at rote memorization but not creative thinking. Most of us here will acknowledge that. A teacher, who is the supposed expert, should have more power than the government in deciding what and how a student should learn and if it has really been learned. Teachers are more than computer programs that input information. Many of us are merely stating that Bush’s spending is reckless and, while Saddam’s overthrow was nice, we cannot afford to spend all of our resources on ‘changing the world’ while cutting social programs in the US. What proof do you have that all social programs have failed? You fail to cite specific programs and their cost compared with military jaunts overseas and useless military hardware. Despite Republican philosophy, we do have a limited amount of wealth and ability for other countries to assume our debt. Military action is occasionally necessary, but Iraq was not. You can’t fail to see the negative consequences of the invasion along with its benefits. It’s for that reason that I’ve been divided.
[quote=“Mother Theresa”]Missile defense system. That is a good one butcher boy. I guess you read the news today.
So? Apollo 1 burned up on the pad, killing Grissom, Chaffee, and White. You mistake “testing” for “deployment”. The reason that one tests is to work out any problems so that they won’t occur when the system is deployed.
If people like you ran the world, we’d all still be living in caves because great-great-great-grandfather Thag’s attempt at a stone house collapsed and killed him.
I have also often been amused by those who oppose spending on missile defense because it “doesn’t work”, for exactly the reason that Squid describes. No technology works, until it does.
On the other hand, I think that one can be opposed to, for example, a plan to deploy the system on Date X, if in fact deploying on Date X means that they will just need to tear it down and redeploy one that works better on Date X+365. I recently read a critic of Bush’s missile defense plans making essentially this argument (i.e. ‘Yes, it is something we should have, but let’s not deploy early just to score political points – keep at the R&D stage until it makes sense to set it up.’) Although this seems to be a rather rational and pragmatic point of view, I actually believe that this article was in the NY Times, although if people refuse to believe the NTY would be that even-handed without me providing a link, I will forgive them their incredulity.
The bottom line (for me) though, is that the technology involved in a missile defense system is so complex that I would be very doubtful that anyone who is not involved in the project has enough knowledge to say how close it is to being ready to bring online (although we can safely assume that as of this week it was not).
When I say I am “doubtful”, I am talking about the opinions of weapons scientists and engineers, who are interviewed for articles and news stories but are not actually part of the team doing the work. When it comes to those who are simply well-educated, intelligent citizens who keep informed via the news – the “doubt” disappears. I no doubt that non-weapons-physicists such as myself are in no position whatsoever to have an intelligent opinion on the subject. 