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Suspend Medicare and the farm bill (far and away two of the biggest entitlements), and watch what happens

Facts, again, do not help you. The annual farm subsidy isn't anywhere close to near the size you think. Again, I have the US Budget online,

http://www.mightyware.com/federalbudget.bhs

as do many other people, so before you spout stuff off, you should check!

But, with that said, what would happen is that some farms would go belly up, there would be consolidation, and the price of food, particularly corn, would go up. Indeed, you haven't even considered the notion that sans federal government, farm states could form a food cartel like OPEC, and could use the cost difference to make up the difference in price for medical insurance.

Would it cause problems, sure? But I bet plenty of states, to my point, see the federal government the way some guys see their ex-wives. She was nice sometimes to have around, but pretty much a whore and likely better off without them.

A big portion of our bleeding economy is flowing out the giant bullet hole labeled "War against terror." and if we just stopped a _single_ _war_ that we're involved with we'd have a ton of money to put towards all sorts of stuff.

The USA spends twice as much money on entitlements as it does on the entire US military.

http://www.mightyware.com/federalbudget.bhs

And thanks for clearing up why you're so uninformed

I have the entire US budget down to every gory detail online at my web site.

http://www.mightyware.com/federalbudget.bhs

What has done Obama (and late Bush as well),is the simple fact that entitlements have exploded at the same time corporate profits have eroded. Yeah, the US military is up there, and Obama does bury the war now in the DoD budget proper, but have a look at outlays for everything from student loans, to medicare, to social services.... its increased enormously. I mean, Obama actually gets a nearly 150B break from TARP repayments, and Bush actually paid out 700B to TARP, and Obama is still over a trillion in the whole, and, at the rate of growth of entitlements, even if you completely surrendered the wars and cut the military in half, we would still be 700B in hock, and more, every year.

Go ahead and have a look - how much is out there for disability, old age retirement, medicare... even student loans have gone bezerk..

Happy Universal Service Fund / Terrorism Insurance Program / Payments to Copyright Owners Day! That's what your life was devoted to today, working for the Federal Government. And, tomorrow will be Happy Other HUD Mortgage Credit, and Payments to the Post Office (on and off budget) day!

Enjoy!

But we'll have to wait until half the country grows up or at least until they're not so scared of there being a black man in the White House.

See, maybe the other half should realize that you actually have to work to produce those billions of dollars. So, now, here's a question: How many hours do you think you should be required to devote of your life, each year, to the Federal Government. Go have a look. I set the site up. I've got the whole federal budget, every program, even the military broken out, entitlements, social security payouts by demographic (for old age), and by disease, for disability.

http://www.mightyware.com/federalbudget.bhs

Balance the budget, chop away, and if you feel like working more for the government, come right around here and throw that out there!

As an added bonus, I've got the whole budget distributed across a calendar, so we can all share, every day, in the special knowledge that every working stiff in the United States devoted his or her entire productive capacity for today, to Happy Universal Service Fund / Terrorism Insurance Program / Payments to Copyright Owners Day!

Oh, by the way, just to -balance- the budget, you have to work an additional 127 hours above and beyond what you are working now.

I guess my question would be, how many additional hours a year would you be willing to work to pay for all of this statist stuff?

There's the US budget.

http://www.mightyware.com/federalbudget.bhs

Right now, the number of additional hours you have to work, just to balance it, is 127. So uh, how many?

I could care less and am generally opposed to
world trade. Currency conversion is a total fraud, particularly when converting asian currencies, because somebody is always gaming the system. This sort of free trade is just like socialism, nice idea on paper, but completely cannot work.

I wrote a stupid shooter called Independent. It's pretty fun - a bottom moving spaceship blasts a bunch of things dropping from the sky. It uses 3d graphics but runs fine on a corporate Dell Latitude D610. Go to http://mightyware.com/independent.htm and help yourself. The registration code is 1138 (after the famous movie). Heck, I'm not selling it, so, if anyone wants it, go ahead and download and mirror.

I wrote a 3d shooter called Independent. You can download it from http://www.mightyware.com/independent.htm. It's shareware, but, since all of you folks put up with my loony rants, the registration code is 1138. Enjoy!

The issue here is really whether the sender of a message to a consumer should have to pay more or less depending on how the message is sent. If the internet were structured so that, yeah, a person pushing out content might actually have to pay when they hit a certain threshold, then, automatically you would see some cruft cleaned out.

Spam would certainly diminish. If every email message cost two cents, you would certainly wind up with less of it. My web site, http://www.mightyware.com/ only gets about 1000 uniques a month, but sometimes I wind up with nearly that many spams per day. It's just out of control.

Sure, you can argue that the government pays for a lot of the internet, but the government certainly isn't paying for that much anymore. The bulk of it is coming out of comcast and other ISP's pockets, and, to their eyes, seeing the lions share of their bandwidth being consumed by google or microsoft surely seems somehow unfair. It's like, comcast is laying out a ton of money, so google and microsoft and cnn can all get rich really on the hardware that other people have bought.

So, yeah, if ISPs could soak the likes of Ballmer and the Google guys, then, why not...

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