It is difficult to believe the U.S. is serious about fixing the debt.
The leadership is serious about maintaining a credit rating, but credit is best used with someone that can pay their bills.
The spend-thrift attitude in D.C. is more of a danger to U.S. citizens than any external enemy.
It is also hard to believe the senior political leadership has a clue about defense cuts. For instance, maintaining bases in Europe provides no real national defense value. Nor does the side-show in Libya. Any real strategic thinker knows that Iraq is going to go bad (is starting to go bad) as U.S. troops leave. The enemy in Afghanistan only has to wait as we have now announced a pull out date.
And for those interested; we spend over two billion dollars per week on these useless, no-gain wars. All while over 40 percent of our federal budget is borrowed money.
There seems to be a lot of wailing about personal tax rates. This is not the problem. If you taxed the highest earners at 100 percent it would be much less than a drop in the bucket. No, the real loss in revenue is from off-shoring over 50,000 U.S. companies since the glory days of the Clinton years that the administration was so happy to mention in a tweet. They mentioned Clinton and higher tax rates and left out the bit about our civilian leadership approving off-shoring everything that isn’t nailed down. Our biggest export is empty shipping containers.
THAT, is a lot of lost tax revenue.
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5 comments:
It would certainly help if the right wing nutters weren't so distracted by their own intense hatred of Obama (But he's BLAAACK!), and weren't just focussing on trying to engineer a financial crisis just before the election next November.
Seriously, and we here in Oz think our politicians are useless...
It's very similar to our own much smaller scale system - a giant Ponzi scheme.
The so-called 'right wing nutters' are the only politicians I've so far run across who seem unwilling to play the Ponzi game and keep giving voters a false good life at a cost that must be borne one day by someone n the future.
It would be unfair to name one individual politician as being the one who started it, but the one (in the US at least) who set the hare running totally out of control was Bill Clinton - and still, to this day, many love the man for the good times he gave them, good times that led to the sorry situation the US is in today.
Since Clinton, the US has been like a man falling from a high rise building saying repeatedly to himself "So far, so good..."
The right wing nutters seem to be the only ones who recognise that there's a very hard pavement approaching - and very, very fast.
Sorry Albatross, the right wing nutters arent that smart. They just want to get rid of Obama and they're prepared to sacrifice everyone else to do it.
I have great respect for our American friends and their huge human sacrifices in the Pacific war from the fierce Guadalcanal campaign onwards - a debt Australia can never repay.
But the stark reality is a staggering and unaffordable 24 percent of their total national expenditure is defence-related. Continued pursuit of so-called 'primacy'in the South East Asian region, where they have outlived their welcome a la the Brits, seemingly aims more at arms peddling than politico-military stability.
The US cannot realistically any longer view itself as safeguarding the world and will inevitably have to retreat more toward its own territories (shades of the Roman Empire). It would likely create a more stable strategic scenario for Australia if the US withdrew militarily from within China's perceived First Island Chain and focused more on their Pacific Ocean territories.
There is no alternative for America than to hugely prune spending, especially on defence, and a very similar situation is emerging for Australia. We simply cannot afford the futuristic ambitions of DWP2009 and the unrealistic Force 2030 goals.
Powerline US is running a competition regarding the best way to advise the average American of the debt problem.
http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2011/07/next-up-for-the-power-line-prize.php
Here is one of the entries:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MqoGORXAv2o&feature=player_embedded
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