That is the government does not do anything at all, peace or war related without identifying a revenue source to fund it that does not require borrowing.

The most outrageous borrowing is Republican based, because half of the entire national debt is owed back to Social Security. The most OBSCENE sugggestion is that of lowering Social Security payments, because payroll taxes fund 40 percent of the federal budget, while outgoing payments to to Social Security recipients make up about 13 percent of the budget.

The Social Security Trusts fund MUST be locked. It was originally designed as a “dedicated” tax that could only be used to pay for trust fund obilgations. This changed in 1984, when in light of the future baby boom generation, the idea of creating a “surplus” to be put aside for future needs, rather than raise payroll taxes when the baby boomers started retiring was made law. The original intent of the legislation should be put back in place. Prevent payroll taxes from being used to finance military ventures or corporate welfare, and THEN start cutting funding to OTHER government programs.

The Republican presidents from 1984 onwards, started to borrow the surplus income from payroll taxes in order to fund tax cuts to the wealthy, who of course pay very little into the retirement program trust fund, or pay nothing into it.

The neo-con Republican party is virtually the inventor of the concept of deficit spending as it exists today. Since 1980, only ONE president has come in with a balanced budget, and that was Bill Clinton. only one president has virtually ELIMINATED government borrowing to fund the federal budget. The average rate of federal borrowing during Clinton’s presidency was one third of one percent per year. The Republican presidents Reagan, Bush 41 and Bush 43 borrowed at rates no less than 40 times the rate at which Clinton did. In Clintons last year as president, the government had to borrow 18 billion dollars. Clinton’s successor IMMEDIATELY borrowed over 140 billion in his first PARTIAL year as president, 2000.

Since the end of World War II, for every dollar borrowed during Democratic presidencies, the Republicans borrowed TWO DOLLARS AND EIGHTY FOUR CENTS, largely during peacetime.

The ONLY president other than Clinton who has submitted a balanced budget since 1961 was Lyndon Johnson, and he was able to do this during the height of the Vietnam War, which was as costly as the current Iraq/Afghanistan operation when adjusted for inflation.

Republicans, for all their talk about “fiscal conservatism” have shown themselves to be very bad at actually banalcing the federal budget.

They live in an illusory world where government borrowing for military purposes is totally acceptable, and no tax increases to fund these items is allowed.

They rail against Keynesian economics, which are not based on government borrowing, but on raising and lowering taxation to fund government spending.

When looks at the portion of government spending that military spending makes up, and removing the portion of government borrowing in the form of borrowing from the Social Security trust fund in this calculation, the percent of spending on the military out of the federal budget becomes truly staggering, with almost 3 out of every 4 dollars of INCOME taxation being spent on either direct or indirect defense.

For all the railing against “social spending”, there is not enough of it to make much of a difference when it comes to balancing the budget.

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Off to a hot breakfast and worship services… later, all.

Well, I probably jinxed things with my bit about Peachtree yesterday @ 10.57–I’ve tried twice with two browsers, but my 10K race applications got EATED twice.

Methinks the servers melted down. (Actually, it appears that Active.com’s handling this, and they just can’t take ~45,000 or so trying at once.)

have your coffee (orange juice is better) or green tea. yahhhh.

you dont want to punk the chinese homes.

bow to the salmon

Pardon me, but your “Conservative” editors left off part of your President tries new approach: Blame Bush, Urinal article-

“The trick,” Jacobs said, “is how do you shift blame to George Bush and retain any credibility on the idea that you are looking past partisan warfare? This looks like a doubling down on a very partisan approach.”-WaPo

(The article published in the Urinal is butchered to make it appear as though Bush really is to blame, which is not the intention of the WaPo article.)

See for yourself-

http://www.ajc.com/metro/content/printedition/2009/03/15/obamablame0315.html

I’m not sure if you are arguing for some specific legislation or philosophy or party or what. However, I do understand your situation. You are not the only person in the US suffering as a result of this recession. Now, what this country needs to do is get people working again so they can put a roof over their family’s head and put food on their table. Big businesses are not doing that. In fact, big businesses, in order to cut their losses and preserve their bonuses, are doing nothing more than increasing the severity of the recession by cutting jobs. Then again, that’s their prerogative in our society and so we have to be prepared for such events and deal with them. Now, one option for dealing with this economic crisis would have been to keep government out of everything. As far as I understand, that is what the Republicans say they wanted to do. Suppose we had taken that approach. How many people understand what would have happened. Do you realize how many banks would be bankrupt and how many people’s savings would be gone if it were not for the FDIC. What about their increase in the insured amount of savings from 100k to 250k. That was done to help keep more people from panicking and starting runs on more banks than what we had. Did you know that there was an electronic run on the banks last September that would have shut down our entire economy if the Fed had not intervened. There was 550 billion withdrawn in a few hours before they intervened. The estimates were that we would have seen trillions pulled out in one day’s time. We need to be grateful that the Fed stepped in and stopped it. Then, there’s AIG and their credit default swaps and all the banks that relied on those “insurance” policies. So much to say, so little room to say it all.

A white paper prepared by the company says that AIG is contractually obligated to pay a total of about $165 million of previously awarded “retention pay” to employees in this unit by Sunday, March 15. The document says that another $55 million in retention pay has already been distributed to about 400 AIG Financial Products employees.

Our tax dollars hard at work.

Obama’s spending spree gone wild.

How many more execs will ‘have to be paid’ ridiculous sums like this?

Porkulicious is what the stimulus is, so maybe AIG is just rewarding themselves for a job well done in stealing our money.

How about basing a mortgage on 1/4 of income? That’s what I did 10 years ago no more than I was making in a week. Last year my job was sent to India and I could not follow. Never given the option. Had to take a job with half the pay and start out all over again after looking for eight (8) months. Anyway now my spouse of 20+ years has had to decide to have the hours at work cut or leave. I am not behind but I am very close. Cushon from savings account almost gone and 401K LOL down about 40% plus penalties if I withdraw the little that is still there. And my mortgage is a 30 year fixed not some dumb A$$ product they tried to get us to take. It’s real easy to lump “everybody” in to a category isn’t it? We, the american people, have been sold it doesn’t matter if it’s China or the Mob the people who run the financial markets in this country have theirs and too bad for the people too dumb to have gotten in on the good thing. Just look at the AIG people in todays news still giving it all away and NOBODY, securities and exchange, government, or wall street can or will convince them they don’t deserve it. (By the was the letter a was left lower case on purpose)