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US Candidates Ignore Looming Debt Crisis
code_rage writes "Carolyn Lockhead of The San Francisco Chronicle has written an article about one of the most important, but overlooked, political issues we are facing. Baby-boomers will soon begin retiring, which will result in a huge fiscal imbalance (deficits and debts). The article says that the present value of the anticipated debt is estimated to be between $40 trillion and $72 trillion, depending on the source. To put that in perspective, the current national debt is $7.3 trillion.""
Former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill commissioned a study (free PDF) that was written by Jagadeesh Gokhale and Kent Smetters. To give a sense of how serious the fiscal imbalance is, consider some of the painful measures that the study said would be necessary to balance the books:
- More than double the payroll tax, from 15.3% to 32% of wages
- Raise income taxes by two thirds
- Cut Social Security and Medicare benefits by 45%
- Eliminate all "discretionary" spending (including such constitutionally mandated government functions as the military and the judiciary)
Peter G. Peterson has written a book about the issue: "Running On Empty: How the Democratic and Republican Parties Are Bankrupting Our Future and What Americans Can Do about It." He recently gave an interview at the Council on Foreign Relations. He prefers to express the issue in terms of cash flow, because Social Security and Medicare are "pay as you go" systems (there is essentially no trust fund). The cash flow impacts will be an estimated $783 billion in 2020, increasing to trillions later.
Peterson offers some concrete proposals in the interview, and offers some political cover to the candidates in saying "I have never thought that a political campaign is an optimum environment for serious discussion or practical proposals.
Former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill commissioned a study (free PDF) that was written by Jagadeesh Gokhale and Kent Smetters. To give a sense of how serious the fiscal imbalance is, consider some of the painful measures that the study said would be necessary to balance the books:
- More than double the payroll tax, from 15.3% to 32% of wages
- Raise income taxes by two thirds
- Cut Social Security and Medicare benefits by 45%
- Eliminate all "discretionary" spending (including such constitutionally mandated government functions as the military and the judiciary)
Peter G. Peterson has written a book about the issue: "Running On Empty: How the Democratic and Republican Parties Are Bankrupting Our Future and What Americans Can Do about It." He recently gave an interview at the Council on Foreign Relations. He prefers to express the issue in terms of cash flow, because Social Security and Medicare are "pay as you go" systems (there is essentially no trust fund). The cash flow impacts will be an estimated $783 billion in 2020, increasing to trillions later.
Peterson offers some concrete proposals in the interview, and offers some political cover to the candidates in saying "I have never thought that a political campaign is an optimum environment for serious discussion or practical proposals.
O'Neil's report is nothing new at all. Social Security is and always has been a grand pyramid scheme that worked because America's population grew fast enough that enought people came in at the next level lowerer on the scheme and enough people died off of the top. People live longer and don't reproduce as much - so the pyramid begins to collapse.
The best solution may end up being Bush's "ownership society" where we transition from a cashflow scam to personal investment programs. The problem with this, and it is a very big problem is that there is little risk to a healthy chashflow scam and investments are by definition risky. The other problem is that the money would not be 100% under government control and congress could not use the money when other sources of revenues dry up as it uses Social Security today.
At the end of the day, this issue is of critical importance as I really don't look forward to watching my parents generation financially crush my daughter's generation under the weight of some social contract. Taxes suck. So do governments, but ours is much better than the alternative.
-- $G
debt clock
The problem is, if they do not get it under balance, the dollar will plummet, and then loose value as people loose faith in it.
This is a real fear in 4-7 years. (I won't go into i18n economy bonds, and how they will weaken until the global economy becomes more bouyant)
#hostfile 0.0.0.0 primidi.com 0.0.0.0 www.primidi.com 0.0.0.0 radio.weblogs.com
Problem is, real issues like Debt or Fiscal Policy aren't sexy enough to campaign. You can't stake out turf, or slander the others.
"My opponent is sending us into debt. I pledge, if elected, to send us _less_ into debt than he. This is leadership."
Electionining at all levels is always about tangibles. 'Tough on crime', 'tough on terror', 'taking a stand on gay marriage'. Debt isn't cool in that context. No one likes debt, but no one wants to talk about it.
Oddly enough, having researched the issues, I support the candidate I do because he has a record of slashing the budget in a way I agree with, as opposed to the other guy, who slashes stuff I think he could keep.
(Well, I had to mention slash, this is slash-dot!)
They should run elections just by listing all issues candidates mention, but don't list the candidates. You just vote 'yes/no/don't care' for each _issue_ and whichever matches most with a given candidates platform-on-record, they get your vote.
So 'ban on gay marriage' would have yes/no/don't care'. You vote 'yes', that may tally for either candidate-- or both, if they both support it, or neither, if they both don't care or are both against it. And your vote is the tally of all issues, whomever you support most gets your 1 vote.
So, yeah, maybe you'd only find out who you voted for _after_ voting, but it'd be on the real issues, not the spin or marketing of the candidate!
A.
We are headed for general warfare. The Republicans seem to think that we can spend spend spend and give away all our piggy bank and the sun will somehow still shine. Democrats are convinced that letting in waves of immigrants from the South will fund the Social Security system. What a mess. The fact is that the younger generation will not have enough to give, and the Me Generation (they call themselves 'boomers') will not be willing to give up anything they have been promised. It will come to a head when the younger generation finally is in power, like the Me Generation is now, and hard decisions are made about whom gets what. Generational Warfare.
But most Americans don't have a clue what is going on. I saw a billboard last night that said, "Remember, it's your money" -- and it was an ad for Bush-Cheney! The administration that insisted tax cuts were the prescription for times of plenty, for times of recession, for times of peace and times of war, has now seen the unwanted side-effects: a languid recovery, and a trillion dollars added to the debt. A budget surplus, the first in modern times, converted instantly to massive deficit.
Sometimes I wonder if there isn't a way to start talking about the debt as the balance on our nation's credit card. Maybe if we put overspending into terms that the average consumer could understand, and stuck to those terms, people could finally start to get it. This country produces $11 trillion of wealth every year, and, through our government, we are $7.4 trillion in debt. Maybe if we start comparing the government to a family that's making $110,000 a year, but is $74,000 in debt, we could have a real national debate about government spending. The question is not whether "it's your money," but whether, being $74,000 in debt, it's a good idea for you to get a brand-new credit card and go rack up another $4,000 on it every year -- as Bush and the Republican Congress are now doing.
Especially when massive, unavoidable costs are just over the horizon.
Grover Norquist has declared his goal of drowning the government in a bathtub, and his way of doing it is to spend it into oblivion. The Republican Party has sold out the country by signing on with this brand of destruction. What it's going to yield is not prosperity and limited government, but anarchy and -- very possibly, in the decades to come -- the end of America as an economically powerful beacon of freedom. When our children are serfs for the wealthy who have bought up the country, when the old are baking to death because we can't afford to buy them air conditioners, when the poor and the sick die alone because we can't provide them with basic health care, when the unregulated food makes us sick and the unregulated drugs are a crapshoot, when half the country will never be able to retire and will be forced to work at McDonald's and Wal-Mart until their bodies fail, I hope people remember the name of Grover Norquist, and who it was that put his theories into practice. One percent of this country will always enjoy all the best things in life, but everyone else will be wondering what it was like before our government was drowned, and if those folks back in the '90s and '00s knew how good they had it.
The problem is, if they do not get it under balance, the dollar will plummet, and then loose value as people loose faith in it.
The trick to surviving such a crash is to choose investments that aren't tied to the value of the dollar. We're advising our clients to put everything they have into canned food and shotguns.
Do we really know who is ignoring the issues? I know that the only time I've heard more than two sentences from Kerry was his acceptance speech at the DNC, and only on CSPAN. On network news his speech was overlayed and overshadowed by Talking Heads. Beyond that time, I don't hear anything else about Kerry's proposals. The news covers polls, Swifties, fonts, and superscripts. They don't cover election issues, as far as I can tell.
I honestly can't comment on Bush's ability to get his words out. In a way, it just doesn't matter, because Bush has had nearly 4 years with a friendly Congress, so we don't need to hear what he says. We can see what he has done. We can expect more of the same, changing only the degree of aggression in pursuit, based on Congressional makeup.
I have 4 possiblities:
1: The news services are incompetent, and have forgotten how to cover hard news in favor of covering fluff.
2: The news services are interested primarily in revenue, and know that pushing emotional hot buttons is the best way to Sell More.
3: (mild tin-foil hat) The broadcasters that own the news services want to keep consolidating, and know Kerry is less likely to go along. Therefore they want Bush to win. Open coverage of issues like the National Debt hurt Bush, so they don't get covered.
4: (strong tin-foil hat) The news services are in it with the Space Aliens and the Republican Comittee, and all want Bush to win. The rest is like (3).
For any choice above, IMHO the new services are failing in their responsibility to cover the news and enlighten the population.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
Bush talked about Social Security reforms at the convention.
The rest of the Federal debt is constantly overhyped. I remember in the 80s it was going to kill us all, and in 2000 we were going to pay it off on 10 years. Now it's going to kill us all again.
The solution is very simple: cut spending, grow the economy, reform Social Security into private accounts. Bush is saying he'll do all those.
The Social Security "obligations" can be retired by selling government land. The Federal government owns most of the land west of the Mississippi.
The perception is that politicians get re-elected by spending money in their constituencies. The aim of course is to spend tax dollars in whatever way will register with the largest group of voters.
As evidenced by the Bush administration, politicians really don't give a fig about debt - they care about getting re-elected. If a few billion dollars of deficit spending will bring in the votes, that's what they'll do.
Of course, voters aren't much different. I have yet to hear a fiscal conservative make a list of the things that they are prepared to forego in the name of debt reduction, only the things that everyone else should give up.
Three Squirrels
Taken from badnarik.org
Every working American is acquainted with the principle of balancing his or her checkbook. You have income. You have expenses. If your expenses are larger than your income, you either cut expenses or you start getting nasty letters from your bank and your creditors about bounced checks. Maybe you end up in court. Maybe you go to jail.
Unfortunately, we--the people--are the federal government's "bank" ... and right now, we don't have any way to bounce the rubber checks that Congress writes and the president signs.
Deficit spending is no different in principle for the government than it is for you or me. It happens when government spends more money than it takes in.
When that happens, the people must inevitably take it on the chin sooner or later. Either the government raises taxes, or it inflates the currency--reducing the spending power of the money we've earned--to pay off the debt it has amassed.
One obvious solution, of course, is to forbid Congress to spend more than it takes in. While a "balanced budget amendment" to the Constitution has been proposed--and while I support such an amendment--there's no substitute for a chief executive whose veto pen stands ready to shut down any congressional appropriations in excess of revenues.
As your president, I'll veto deficit spending. Period. I expect this to be an easy thing to do, since I'll be slashing the size of the federal government at the same time--so much so that taxes will be slashed as well.
A second solution is to put the American economy back on real money, backed by gold and silver, and to take away the ability of the Federal Reserve to create "money" out of thin air, debasing the value of the "money" in your wallet.
The Constitution delegates the power to coin money to Congress. As your president, I'll insist that they discharge that responsibility instead of fobbing the job off on an external entity like the Fed. And I'll veto legislation for any such operation that doesn't meet the true test of money: It is either made of gold or silver, or can be redeemed for a fixed amount of gold or silver.
A nation's money is its economic lifeblood. Passing on our debt to future generations, or defrauding the people and the government's creditors with inflation, are not options. Those paths lead inevitably to economic collapse; mine leads to long-term prosperity.
I'm Michael Badnarik, Libertarian for President. I ask the tough questions--to give you answers that really work!
At least President Bush discusses the problems facing Social Security and gives the general philosophy behind his solution. John Kerry doesn't even list Social Security as a national issue.
.. because the People ignore it, too.
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Ignorance of the issues concerning the National Debt lead to Big Profit on the part of Banks (and other Lenders) to whom the Debt is owed... so you can be damned sure that popular culture has no clue just deep in the red the nation is
In other words, its not enough to blame the politicians. Blame the people, and the Banks, too
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
How the Democratic and Republican Parties Are Bankrupting Our Future and What Americans Can Do about It.
Quite simple realy... We'll wait until they are all old and feeble and then stop paying for them. It's cruel, but they brought it on themselves.
Corporations go bankrupt, and their investors lose everything they have invested when they do.
All these privatization of Social Security plans are scams devised by the filthy rich to have the stock markets flooded with capital so that THEIR investments will be massively increased in value. The investor class has their investment spike while the average worker is forced to pay a premium.
None of these privatization schemes offers any suggestions about what to do when the next Enron happens and people lose their retirement savings. Are we supposed to shake our heads at old people and tell them to starve in the streets because the senior management of the corporation looted all the value out of the company?
There has to be a safety net for the elderly and disabled in our society. Ensuring they have minimum standard of living is far more important than the investor class getting a huge increase in their account values from a massive sump of capital into the stock markets.
The investor class declared war on the middle class and poor long, long ago. 90% of the wealth in the US is held by the top 10% and 50% of the wealth is held by the top 1%. I'm so tired of trying to point out that fact and hearing "CLASS WARFARE!" in response from right wingers.
NO... "class warfare" is all the policies since Reagan was sworn in that got almost all the wealth in this society in the hands of the investor class.
It's under medicare, go figure.
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
It's possible to start responsibly paying down the debt without any huge shifts in economic policy, Clinton proved that. The amount we pay on interest on the national debt every year is often less than the deficit itself, which implies that if we didn't have the debt now, we wouldn't get into more debt! So all we have to do is start paying it down, and eventually our interest payments will shrink as well.
As a percentage of the budget, it isn't that big a chunk, so we wouldn't have to cut back too much. As for Social Security, I suggest we raise payroll taxes and income taxes slightly, and/or possibly institute a small national sales tax on luxury items. Simultaneously, we can start saving the Social Security surplus for Social Security, instead of spending it on the rest of the budget--because we know we'll need that money!
So there; no drastic changes. It isn't all bread and circuses, but it's at least somewhat responsible and forward-thinking.
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
No, a baby boomer, at least in the context of the Social Security problem, was a child born during the baby boom of 1945-65. The group you refer to as their parents is either the Silent Generation or the G. I. Generation (aka the Greatest Generation, and a handful of other names, reflecting their involvement in fighting WWII).
Run "baby boomer definition" through Google and see what you get. I'd be curious to know which web dictionary you got you're definition from; it's not correct.
Canthros
-End the "War on Drugs"
-Pull out of Iraq. Now.
-End military aid to ALL foreign coutries
-Stop development of Star Wars defense system and new nuclear devices.
----
This concludes our transmission to Oceania.
Just to be a bit dismal, I think you miss one of the key problems with both Medicare and Socical Security: Longevity.
When both Social Security and Medicare were conceived (heck most pension plans for that matter) life expectancy wasn't much pas age 65 or so. If you managed to live long enough, you could benefit from your company's penson plan, or the government backup (Social Security) and get government medical benefits so that getting sick once didn't wipe you out financially (Medicare).
However, medical technology, good dentistry, and the "health craze" movement have all added years on to people's lives. Now people live longer, and expect to partake in the government largesse. People who live longer need expensive medications and surgeries to help them live longer. The longer they live, the more Social Security and Medicare money they soak up.
Just look at President Clinton or VP Dick Cheney. Both men would be dead (or unable to do much more than lay in bed) without nifty cardiac surgeries. Those surgeries cost thousands and thousands of dollars. (I am not saying that the price of these procedures is too much, just that they cost lots of money.) Now that their lives have been prolonged, they can expect to continue taking medicines to keep their cholesterol down, blood pressure down, and so on for the rest of their lives. This costs more money. When they finally make it to the age where cancer starts to take them down, they can expect to use more money on cancer treatment.
The longer you live, the more it costs to keep you alive. Multiply that by all the people eligible for Medicare, and you can see how the policy of providing medical treatment to people is a positive feedback loop that rapidly chews up all your spare money.
How do we solve this problem? Heck if I know. I don't want to turn us into some parody of Logan's Run where people are forcibly retired from living at age n. But I do want those who run for political office and who claim "leadership" as one of their defining adjectives, to discuss this seriously.
Don't conflate the issues. I'm a mega-liberal, and I'll challenge any of those pansy conservatives out there to a duel any day.
There's a difference between raising the retirement age and privatizing Social Security and medicare or a flat tax. If people are living longer, it makes sense to raise the retirement age.
But, privatizing services, or going to a flat tax would be disastrous, I agree. There's a real chance that our country will move in the next few years from being a democracy, to a plutocracy. The rich will rule and get richer. The rest of us will have to bend a knee to our royal dynasties. Their power will continue generation after generation with no estate tax, and in the end we'll be no better than the regime that we fought a revolution against.
No weapon in the arsenals of the world is so formidable as the will and moral courage of free men.-Ronald Reagan
Good idea, but why not go all the way and just allow voting on the issues directly?
The thing I really hate about current democratic systems is that you're always voting for a person (or worse, a group of people). You have to pick the person whose stand is closest to yours on a range of issues. Unless you're using one of the candidates as the source of your opinions, you're unlikely to find a candidate that wants the all the same things as you do.
So let's say you're anti-X and anti-Y, and all the candidates are pro-X, anti-Y or anti-X, pro-Y. You're forced to either support something you don't believe in, or not vote. And even after you vote for the pro-X candidate (because you don't want to suffer these assholes who think you've no right to complain if you don't vote), you have no guarantee they'll actually deliver on what they promised.
The system we have today for discovering and enforcing the will of the people is ...suboptimal.
Are there any better methods available? I know we won't get a perfect solution to a problem this complex, but surely we can do better.
Fuck the system? Nah, you might catch something.
The government does not have the stomach to stop it's ponzi scheme. When the proverbial shit hits the fan people will still receive their "entitlement." It just won't be worth anything. The sitting President will have to go to war (wag the dog) as long as the countries who design our weapons systems let him :).
You just need to be willing to think outside the box. To look at the big picture.
Problem:The debt is every growing, unless drastic measures, which are politically implausible are taken. Why?
Not enough tax money is being taken in to cover the costs. Simple. So you can either cut costs, or you can figure out ways to expand the tax base. Can you expand the tax base without raising taxes? Sure can!
Steps that can be taken:
#1. Raising the minimum wage by a substantial amount. This would increase the tax base by quite a wide margain. As well, it would relieve strain on various governmental services by quite a wide bit. Sure, it would cut down on corporate profits...boo fucking hoo.
#2. For the cost of the medicare system, we can publicize the whole thing and bring out Universal Health Care. Again overal this would create more a more efficent system, which basic economics says creates more jobs, meaning a higher tax base. As well, it would have a nice side-effect of fighting overseas job loss, as rising health care costs are a big motivator to move the jobs in the first place. Cut the parasites out.
#3. Make it official government policy to have as many people to work as possible. Current government policy is to maintain a certain unemployment rate to fight inflation. Get the people you need to do whatever jobs needed to be done. Sure it costs tax dollars. But with all the spinoff money of those jobs, the amount of taxes taken in will much more than account for the additional costs.
Three steps that can be taken to enlargen the tax base without costing you a dime. (Unless you pay somebody minimum wage, which in that case FUCK YOU parasite). Yeah the corporations will bitch and scream. But it's pure survival folks. It's them or us.
Take your pick.
I'm afraid the problem is more basic than that.
Anyone who spends any time doing enough study on this to grasp the scope of the problem will end scared out of their wits. If the candidates explain the issue to their constituents so that the voters start to understand, they will start to scare the voters out of their wits. The sheep in this country will be traumatized by this, and associate the trauma with the candidate explaining this. They will then usually change the channel to make the bad man go away. Whether they do or not, come the voting booth, Pavlovian conditioning ("aiigh! scary man!") will make them vote against the honest man.
As Walter Mondale so memorably demonstrated, voters don't vote for people who tell them the bad news; they shoot the messenger. This, lamentably, may well set up a memorable demonstration of "evolution in action" as applied to societies.
The problem may get scarier. I am not an Economist (and I'd be delighted if one can explain why I'm wrong), but according to my old ECON201 textbook, stagflation (inflation combined with slowing economy and job loss) is caused by economic shocks to the national aggregate supply curve-- IE, something suddenly causes making things to be more expensive. Government deficit spending can somewhat reduce the effects.
Stagflation was first triggered in the 1970's by the rise in oil prices, coincident with OPEC tightening supply-- and, perhaps more importantly, the peak of the US oil production Hubbert Curve. The Reagan era's deficit spending (continuing to the present) helped make this problem disappear-- but not necessarily go away.
Estimates for the peak of the global oil Hubbert curve are at 2010, plus or minus 10 years. (Yes, that means some people worry it has already peaked.) So, we'll be facing a global economic slowdown that reduces the US tax base, we'll have exhausted our ability to hide this via deficit spending, and we'll be facing this financial shortfall from needing to pay for the Boom going out to pasture.
Oh... and the diminished likelihood in such an economy for those at lower income levels to earn enough for the necessities of life will result in increased numbers resorting to illegal means to do so... just to add widespread small scale mayhem to probable riots in the streets. With luck, though, we should be able to avoid a civil war fought with nuclear weapons. =|
Now, where did I put that electronic thumb I borrowed from Ford Prefect....
//Information does not want to be free; it wants to breed.
Overall, the big problem I see with the economy, what entitles "success", and the expectation there-of. Basically, increasing profits as far as the eye can see, which frankly, has its limits.
#1. I would suggest using a region based minimum wage based on some sort of scientific formula. Basically, add together all basic costs and add 10% or so for discretionary spending/saving and tie that in to a 140 hr/month work.
Do that for individual areas, and it would make sure that people see the value of hard work and labour.
#2. What you say is very true, which is why to make it happen it has to be done right. Generally speaking, in what's paid out in Medicare alone, on a per person basis, could pay for UHC for the whole country, with quite a bit of savings. That's the numbers and how they work out.
#3. Actually it creates quite a bit more than 7%. Money doesn't get spent once and disappears. It keeps on spinning around, creating more demand for services, creating more demand for labour.
In any case, it's more of a re-calibration of the economy than anything else into a service based economy. Eventually there will be enough money/jobs flowing around that government intervention will be minimal.
I don't have anything against corporations. What I do have something against is the assumption that profits are infinate. As well, short-term thinking is the rule of the day, which is good for CEOs and their bonus checks, not so good for the average investor, worker, or citizen.
Good idea. I want to be competing with 70 yr olds who have 45 years of experience. Young people have enough trouble finding decent jobs. Thanks Mr. AARP.
Think about the debt in the same way you think about a mortgage.
Say you buy $1,000,000 house with a loan. Your salary is $50,000. You are in trouble.
Say you buy a $1,000,000 house with a loan. Your salary is $200,000. This is perfectly acceptable.
The point is, just looking at the debt amount is meaningless. You also have to see what the income is to see if you are in debt trouble.
Let's put this in the perspective of the national debt. The debt seems pretty large. However you need to look at the income. What is income? It's national GDP (gross domestic product). As our GDP goes up, so does our ability to sustain a larger debt.
This is the one thing the deficit demagogues never mention. Our GDP has gone up dramatically over the last 20 years. So when looking at a national debt, first you need to adjust for inflation. Then you need to take the proportion of the debt compared to the gdp. Do this with our current national debt, you will realize that our debt is very manageable and much less than it was during Reagan and FDR.
Here's a good graph of Debt vs GDP:
http://zfacts.com/p/318.html
So yeah, the debt is too high right now. No one disputes that. But its not the end of the world. The economy isnt going to collapse, even if our debt was double what it is now.
Its not just social security either: Many economists now believe that the effect of baby boomers retiring will send shockwaves through every industry.
Healthcare will not escape unscathed, as demand for limited and expensive drugs goes through the roof. The pressure to legislate away the basic economic problems of supply/demand will be near overwhelming -- and either big-pharm will become increasingly socialized, or radical restructuring of medical financing will be required.
Housing and Real-Estate *will* crash as sure as night follows day when retiring baby-boomers, needing extra cash downsize into retirement communities. (Remember that almost 90% of high-end real estate is owned by boomers). The notion that real estate always goes up (while true in the long term) will be challenged by a 20 year downtrend as baby boomers' real estate assets inundate the market in an unprecedented deluge.
And the list of impacts goes on and on... inheritance law, banking, education... everything is going to be affected by this -- the largest of population trends in the next 20 years.
What's really scary are the downstream effects -- like what happens to Freddie and Fannie when the great boomer real-estate liquidation happens... but that's O.T.
------ The best brain training is now totally free : )
A fellow boomer gave me pertinent advice that I feel obliged to share. Given the state of Social Security, corporate retirement plans, and post-dotcom bust 401K's, he recommends the following strategy: "Once a week eat a can of cat food. That way, by the time you retire, you'll be used to the taste".
[Insert pithy quote here]
The biggest problem with Bush is he is not a conservative! Why the hell do Republicans like him so?
"Avoid employing unlucky people - throw half of the pile of CVs in the bin without reading them." -- David Brent
I was curious about your claim about US Gov't land ownership so I did a little looking and found this site that tallies government land ownership, took that data and ran it through a spreadsheet. Not including Alaska and Hawaii, state and federal government ownership accounts for 34% of the land in states west of the Mississippi (including those states stradling the river). Including AK and HI the total goes up to 47%.
The next question though is how much of this land is actually worth anything, since the states with the highest proportion of government land (Alaska, Nevada, Utah, Idaho, and Oregon are the top five by percent) tend to have the largest percentages of land that is worthless or nearly so. There's a whole lot of mountains, desert and arid plains in the west, and in Alaska there's less of the desert, but they make up for that with tundra and boreal forests. Sure there's some valuable resource-rich land out here, but extractive industries won't buy public lands that they already have rights to take resources out of. These two factors alone will likely make the total saleable goverment land plummet to a small fraction of the total government holdings. Some desireable lands will remain, but some portion will be in state and national parks and outside of the Libertarian party you'll find scant public support for selling those, dropping the saleable number even further.
b) I encourage as many baby boomers as possible to do their part for mother Earth and my paycheck by early euthanization. I'll miss some of you, but frankly, most of you are just dead weight to me. You boomers are responsible for this massive federal debt, our crushing bureaucracy and nanny state, and by the time I live long enough to enjoy any of it, it won't exist anymore, so F you very much.
c) Did I mention that raising tax rates has never increased tax revinues?
d) back to (b)
"Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves