Ted Cruz Proposes Reviving SDI To Counter N. Korean Nuclear Threat (blastingnews.com)

MarkWhittington writes: One of the more substantive issues that was discussed during the Republican presidential debate in Detroit concerned the latest threat to come out of North Korea. That country's mad, bad, and dangerous to know leader Kim Jong-Un has ordered his nuclear arsenal prepared and is firing missiles in the vicinity of Japan. The United States and South Korea have started military maneuvers, partly as a result of North Korea's actions. Discussions on deploying the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) system in South Korea have also become urgent. Sen Ted Cruz, R-Texas would go one step further. He proposed reviving the idea of space-based missile defenses that were part of the Reagan-era Strategic Defense Initiative.

Comments

And by that he means

[JeffOwl]

Spending a bunch of money and making it look like we are making great progress in missile defense so that NK bankrupts itself trying to counter the counter measures? Aren't they already basically bankrupt?

Re:And by that he means

[Anonymous Coward]

Aren't they already basically bankrupt?
 
Yes, the US is bankrupt. 19 trillion in the hole in wasted tax breaks, welfare and wars.

Oh, you mean the North Koreans? Yeah, them too.

Re:And by that he means

[Anonymous Coward]

Sure Ted... we need to spend more money on another boondoggle!

On a side note, pretty much. Most of Best Korea's money comes from counterfeiting foreign currency and up until recently producing methamphetamines, with what remains of their gem trade making up the rest of it.

When you think of it, you could describe most of Best Korea as a boondoggle. How many ski resorts, private spas, and amusements parks have never been finished since they ran out of money?

Re:And by that he means

[hey!]

You don't know what "bankrupt" means. It refers to liquidity; you are bankrupt when you can no longer meet your current obligations, which the US government has never been close to.

You also seem to be of the delusion that the US spends a lot of money on public assistance. It spends very little. For what we paid for the Iraq war (not including nation building expenses) we could fund US public assistance programs at the current levels for 219 years.

Re:And by that he means

[houghi]

Remeber when some Saoudis living in Afganistan flew in a building and the next day we said we must invade Iraq and later found an excuse to invade them having WMDs they did not have? That went so well Europe gets a lot of visitors.

Is he unaware that a threat is only scary if the other person gives a fuck. The leader of NK does not give a fuck.

Re: And by that he means

[Bartles]

Bullshit, we spend more in two years of public assistance than we spent on the entire war.

Re: And by that he means

[FictionPimp]

It would be amazing if either of you pointed to a source.....

I guess facts can't be used in political conversation.

Re:And by that he means

[Anonymous Coward]

You are aware that our defense budget isn't the largest single line item in our annual budget, right? I'll give you a hint what is, it deals with public assistance.

Re: And by that he means

[CanadianMacFan]

I guess you haven't seen one of the televised debates lately.

Re: And by that he means

[Bartles]

I don't need to post facts when I have the truth on my side. But here you go. Social security and Medicare alone accounts for at least 1.7 trillion a year. I may have to restate it, as we spend more on public assistance in one year than we spent on the entire war.

Re: And by that he means

[Bartles]

Hell, when Democrats passed Obama's stimulus bill, it was about as costly as the Iraq war up to that point. Money only means something to the left, when it's not spent directly benefitting them.

Re:And by that he means

[Jhon]

Wow. Re-write history much? I'm not going to argue that going in to Iraq wasn't a mistake -- it was. But that's based on hindsight. We went back in to Iraq in 2003. After nearly 20 years of trying to get Iraq to fulfill it's obligations which it AGREED to after the first Iraq war.

BTW, WMDs were found in Iraq (see NYT).

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11...

Old, yes -- Iraq, violating the UN and the agreements they signed to end the 1991 war, held on to what he had and maintained the ability to ramp up production the moment the world gave up playing inspection games.

The ONLY thing 911 did was make the US (and not JUST the US) say 'enough is enough'.

With regards to the 'visitors', that is almost ALL due to the mis handling of the middle east in the last 15 years -- and in particular the last 6. Seriously? Destabilize Iraq? Ok. But Egypt, Lebanon AND Syria all at the same time? That's just stupid.

Re: And by that he means

[hey!]

My source is the federal budget. My figures are actually a little bit off, in that the TANF program (the successor to the old AFDC welfare program) has a budget of 17 billion, not the 10 billion I was estimating, but it's still miniscule.

Re:And by that he means

[halivar]

The ONLY thing 911 did was make the US (and not JUST the US) say 'enough is enough'.

I am quoting this portion only to take exception on behalf of the countries that joined us in Afghanistan, even though it wasn't their fight; especially non-NATO countries, who were there for no other obligation than that they are our friends. We were not alone.

Re:And by that he means

[hey!]

Well, if you're talking about Social Security, you also have to include the fact that it also brings in revenue. Yes, eliminating Social Security would reduce the deficit, but not by the amount we spend on it, and it would have no effect whatsoever on our liquidity.

And "Social Security" is not "welfare".

Re:And by that he means

[dave420]

The few chemical and biological weapons found were old and unusable, with many having been lost or misplaced by the Iraqi government over the decades since they bought many of them from the US.

Re: And by that he means

[Anonymous Coward]

Social Security isn't welfare. It's a ponzi scheme.

Re: And by that he means

[myowntrueself]

I guess you haven't seen one of the televised debates lately.

You mean those reality tv shows?

Re: And by that he means

[Anonymous Coward]

Except your wrong

Nevermind that public assistance isn't only an expense, it also boosts the economy and eases the burden on hospitals because people can afford to eat and heat their homes so they don't get sick.

The Iraq war tally will easily reach 6 trillion plus we have a ton of Veterans we aren't taking care of which is costing more and more money to deal with. But by all means, let's keep making more veterans, put more people needlessly into harms way to accomplish what?

Weapons got us into this mess, if we hadn't armed people during Iran Contra there would be a hell of a lot less weapons in the area and if we hadn't toppled the democratically elected Iran the whole region would be a lot more stable.

I have no idea why Reagan is held up as some kind of standard for Presidents. From what I can tell he united Germany, that was about it from what he did that was good. I'm sure there is more but trickle down economics started with him which was horrible, he helped solve Childhood hunger but then cut taxes so we couldn't afford it anymore. He removed our ability to deduct credit card interest rates on taxes. I would say he probably started the battle with the middle class.

Re: And by that he means

[Ryan McLaughlin]

According to the SSA https://www.ssa.gov/budget/FY1... budget page they spent $850 billion in 2013. Even if spending stayed the same that would be 1.7 Trillion in 2 years. This is not including other public assistance programs

The food stamp program is $74 billion according to this story http://www.thefiscaltimes.com/...

According to http://www.reuters.com/article... the iraq war has cost roughly 2 Trillion. So the GP is correct.

Actually I found a better website http://www.usgovernmentspendin... If you add up the Pensions (which the lions share is SSA), Health (Medicare), and Welfare, You get a total spend of 2287.5 billion spent on social welfare programs.

Considering that our total 2015 budget was 3,650.5 billion, that means we spent 62% of our budget on welfare programs. If my math is correct.

Now look at military spending for 2015 and it is 820.2, smaller than either SSA, or Health spending. and only 22% of the budget. If my math is correct

Re:And by that he means

[budgenator]

The main attack was on the World Trade Center, which was located in the Host City for the Headquarters of the United Nations, it really was an attack on western culture and values, not just a country.

Re: And by that he means

[Anonymous Coward]

You say that like its a bad thing. When you decide to spend your own money don't you make your determination based on what you're getting out of it?

We spend money going to war, what do we get out of it?

Re:And by that he means

[Jhon]

Yeah... and Iraq's open and transparent inspection process showed they were lost and misplaced right? Not that they were hidden.

As far as old and unusable... Read up on how many of our guys have been injured due to exposure while destroying them.

You claim they were unusable, lost or misplaced. I call bullshit. Iraq spent the better part of 20 years hiding what they had. They probably were only "lost" or "misplaced" after Iraq fell and anyone in the government or military who KNEW about them were either killed or went in to hiding.

Re: And by that he means

[FictionPimp]

Now this is how you frame a argument. Thank you.

Re:And by that he means

[AlterEager]

Wow. Re-write history much? I'm not going to argue that going in to Iraq wasn't a mistake -- it was. But that's based on hindsight.

You are re-writing history. Many people said it was a mistake before the war. Hindsight wad not needed.

Re: And by that he means

[Anonymous Coward]

Pretty much. The decline of the middle class begins with his presidency.

Re:And by that he means

[cayenne8]

And "Social Security" is not "welfare".

You are correct, it is more accurately defined as a ponzi scheme.

Re:And by that he means

[hey!]

Well, a "Ponzi scheme" where the initial investors die off and their interest is transferred to the remaining investors.

Re:And by that he means

[cold fjord]

You also seem to be of the delusion that the US spends a lot of money on public assistance. It spends very little. For what we paid for the Iraq war (not including nation building expenses) we could fund US public assistance programs at the current levels for 219 years.

That is rubbish.

Two-Thirds of All Federal Spending Went to Entitlement Programs in 2014

Federal Spending by the Numbers, 2014: Government Spending Trends in Graphics, Tables, and Key Points

Share of 2013 Spending

23.55% Social Security
18.33% National Defense
15.53% Income Security
14.41% Medicare
10.37% Health
06.39% Net Interest
04.02% Veterans Benefits and Services
02.65% Transportation
- truncated -

The US spends a great deal on public assistance / social welfare. The additional spending for the war in Afghanistan and Iraq was a minor portion of the defense budget, and was dwarfed by social welfare spending every year. And please note that this is only Federal spending. States, counties, and cities also have their own budgets for social welfare spending.

Re: And by that he means

[cold fjord]

Here you go:

Two-Thirds of All Federal Spending Went to Entitlement Programs in 2014

Federal Spending by the Numbers, 2014: Government Spending Trends in Graphics, Tables, and Key Points

Re: And by that he means

[blue9steel]

You're seriously underestimating the cost of the war. The newest data suggests the total cost will be close to $6 Trillion, which is a staggering sum for such a low return. Citation: http://www.reuters.com/article...

Re:And by that he means

[hey!]

Entitlement programs aren't welfare. I know you feel the same way about them as welfare, but it's dishonest to treat them if they're the same.

If you were to go down to Florida with the message, "Eliminate all welfare!" that'd be a popular program with all the elderly people there, because they would assume you meant what you were actually saying. But if you said, "Eliminate Social Security!" I guarantee you'd get a different response.

Re: And by that he means

[Anonymous Coward]

Spending on war gets funding for advanced R&D. The civilian avionics business just promotes cheaper people and cargo movement.

Even the Internet itself started as a DOD program.

Re: And by that he means

[blue9steel]

It's a bit disingenuous to include the full cost of Social Security spending without subtracting taxpayer contributions to the program.

Re:And by that he means

[blue9steel]

Not quite a ponzi scheme, though it is based on actuarial assumptions that no longer hold true.

Re:And by that he means

[budgenator]

The few chemical and biological weapons found were old and unusable, with many having been lost or misplaced by the Iraqi government over the decades since they bought many of them from the US.

We'll never know for sure, but more and more stories are surfacing about soldiers finding chemical munitions that were covered up. Additionally this was a quantitative matter, not qualitative; I know Everybody was lying from day one. You simply can't have a chemical defense program as big as Iraq's without having live agents, if for no other reason than to validate your simulants. Personal Protective Equipument has to be tested for penetration, and under a wide array of conditions. When the official line was "We found nothing" everyone who has been in the business knew they either were lying, or hadn't looked hard enough; Gulf War Syndrome wasn't caused by oil well smoke.

Re: And by that he means

[Austerity Empowers]

No, I think he's referring to that thing with Will Farrell and Mark Wahlberg challenging each other with schoolyard insults. I think Will Farrell won.

I could provide a source to that, but I'd hate to break the fugue.

Re: And by that he means

[cold fjord]

So you were using ONE program versus the defense spending? I don't think that is a valid comparison.

Welfare Spending at All-Time Highand Growing

Welfare spending has hit a stunning, all-time high. A new Congressional Research Service report confirms what research here at The Heritage Foundation has shown: The government’s means-tested welfare programs now cost taxpayers roughly $1 trillion a year. (This figure does not include either Social Security or Medicare.)

Unlike general government programs, mean-tested welfare programs provide assistance exclusively to poor and low-income individuals. The federal government runs over 80 means-tested programs providing cash, food, housing, medical care and social services to around 100 million Americans.

Re: And by that he means

[wiggles]

What's disingenuous is not including Social Security receipts in federal tax income figures.

Re: And by that he means

[rickb928]

"Nevermind that public assistance isn't only an expense, it also boosts the economy and eases the burden on hospitals because people can afford to eat and heat their homes so they don't get sick."

Please explain how this is not an example of the broken window fallacy

Now, I'm not oblivious to the need. But the federal government is perhaps the worst method to provide the needed assistance. LiHEAP for instance would parcel out assistance based not on degree-days or income, but on funding levels. People are just as damned cold if Congress fails to authorize funding, or the bureaucracy squanders more of it on administrative costs, as they would be if they had no program at all. Let these programs be run by local government, where need is recognized better and responded to with less waste and failure.

And yes, if your norther community refuses to care for the poor and needy, either someone else will, or the poor will move where they have a chance.

Remember, even if your miserable community lets the poor freeze in the dark, it's no different than if the Feds merely misallocate funding. Just as cold. Just as dark.

Re: And by that he means

[rickb928]

Only a Ponzi scheme if it's underfunded. And that is a choice.

Yes, fully funding Social Security would mean admitting that it has been used to float much other spending, and then all the other lies come ablaze.

Re: And by that he means

[tnk1]

Military spending also boosts the economy. Admittedly, it doesn't do anything for easing the burden on hospitals.

As for weapons, most of what is being fired are AK-47s and RPGs, which are Soviet and Eastern Bloc licensed weapons. Yeah, we provided some of them indirectly but, they'd get the weapons no matter who gave them to them. The world is absolutely awash in small arms. If you were talking about more sophisticated weaponry, I might agree.

Note that in Iran-Contra, we armed Iran with TOW missiles and some anti-aircraft Hawk missiles. As far as I can tell, the terrorists, ISIS, Taliban or whoever are not using TOW missiles and certainly not antiaircraft missile batteries. Iran-Contra is a total non-factor here.

As for the overthrow of the Mosaddegh government, it is pure speculation that it would have made the area more stable. Clearly it led to a bad result, but there was a reason that Mosaddegh was considered dangerous to US interests. It is not entirely clear that Iran would not have been a problem no matter who was in charge. We spent quite a bit of effort working to ensure that the Soviets did not gain access to Iran and the Soviets were always there causing what trouble they could.

So in terms of that goal, we actually succeeded, even the religious government which hates us was still not friends with he Soviet Union and did not become Communist. Obviously, we did pay for that in the long term by creating a new, albeit somewhat less immediate enemy.

Re: And by that he means

[rickb928]

Yes. And thinking it through, it is possible that we will soon enough be spending 101% of our federal budget on 'welfare programs'.

And then it's over.

Re:And by that he means

[rickb928]

It wasn't supposed to be. Fix that.

Re: And by that he means

[Anonymous Coward]

You seem to be under the impression that poverty and the lack of opportunity that causes would be a boost to the economy.

Re:And by that he means

[cold fjord]

Nearly all of the entitlement programs are "social welfare" programs, as is the actual program called "Welfare." Trying to pretend that the US doesn't spend large amounts of money on social welfare programs because not all of the money is funneled through the program actually titled "Welfare" isn't particularly honest either. The US spends a huge amount of money on social welfare spending, enough that the continuing growth of spending in those programs constitutes a genuine danger to the financial health of the republic. It isn't sustainable unless something changes.

Re: And by that he means

[hey!]

I was responding to the poster was claiming that "welfare" was bankrupting the country. Actual welfare is a tiny program.

Re: And by that he means

[MachineShedFred]

I don't need to post facts when I have the truth on my side.

Seriously? Is this the Donald Trump School of Arguing?

If you are trying to argue truth, you DO need facts, you twit. In case you forgot, the process for making an argument without sounding like a demagogue is the following:

1. State your position
2. Present your supporting evidence (FACTS)
3. State your conclusion, where you tie the FACTS to your position.

Re:And by that he means

[phantomfive]

For what we paid for the Iraq war (not including nation building expenses) we could fund US public assistance programs at the current levels for 219 years.

That really depends on whether you include medicare in that figure (and social security)

Re:And by that he means

[cold fjord]

Iraq manufactured it's own chemical and biological weapons. It developed the technology to do so either on its own (some such as mustard gas are relatively simple to make with industrial chemicals), or working with other Arab nations (mainly Egypt). It didn't buy any of them from the US. The US wouldn't even consider selling them.

Although there were some of those weapons found scattered around the country, there were also large numbers in Iraqi munitions bunkers. They were in good enough shape to cause a number of chemical weapons casualties in Iraq.

Re: And by that he means

[yodleboy]

what's more disingenuous is using a big word like disingenuous in an election year. why do you want to destroy democracy by using confusing language?

Re: And by that he means

[Bartles]

No, The Costs of War Project at Brown U thinks the cost will be 6 trillion over 40 years including interest. That's clearly a group without an agenda. The cost of public assistance over the same time period will be at least 80 Trillion, not including interest and maintaining current levels of spending. So sorry, you lose.

Re: And by that he means

[Bartles]

No, The Costs of War Project at Brown U thinks the cost will be 6 trillion over 40 years including interest. That's clearly a group without an agenda. The cost of public assistance over the same time period will be at least 80 Trillion, not including interest and maintaining current levels of spending. Sorry, you lose.

Re: And by that he means

[Anonymous Coward]

Except *you're* wrong. Irony.

Re: And by that he means

[Bartles]

So are you telling me a ponzi scheme isn't a ponzi scheme until it fails?

Re: And by that he means

[Bartles]

Tell me, what was the poverty rate before and after we spent 10's of trillions on public assistance programs?

Re: And by that he means

[Bartles]

What is this program called "wellfare", that you speak of?

Re: And by that he means

[Anonymous Coward]

He must be a Muslin.

Re: And by that he means

[Bartles]

So maybe now you can admit that I had the truth on my side, and was correct in my assertion.

Re:And by that he means

[Anonymous Coward]

You are forgetting the debt ceiling fights in congress. We've been close to being bankrupt several times, not because we couldn't pay, but because congress refused to pay. Ted Cruz led at least one of those fights.

Re: And by that he means

[Bartles]

Then it's disingenuous to include the full cost of the war without subtracting taxpayer contributions that paid for it.

Re: And by that he means

[hey!]

TANF, which supplanted AFDC under the Clinton Administration.

Re: And by that he means

[cold fjord]

So you responded to someone using welfare as a reference to the massive US social welfare spending, which really is a danger to US fiscal health, and you responded with the 1/80th of social welfare programs formally titled Welfare? Nice. Nice.

Did the idea of discussing total social welfare spending in comparison to the defense budget ever cross your mind?

Re:And by that he means

[hey!]

Yes, well that's how language actually works, isn't it? "Social welfare" programs are a superset of "welfare", not a subset.

Re: And by that he means

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't know what alternate reality you're living in. Social Security and Medicare are not Welfare.

I pay into Social Security and Medicare. While there's some small chance I may be deluding myself that I will ever get any of that money back, I am paying into it with the expectation that I will actually be getting it back. Some day when I start to draw Social Security, I will do it knowing that I paid for it.

You're truth needs a reality check.

Re: And by that he means

[Anonymous Coward]

"Except your wrong"

Except your wrong what?

Oh, wait I see....YOU'RE WRONG in your spelling.

I mean, if you're going to spend time correcting people, your words will carry more weight if they're written intelligently.

Re: And by that he means

[Bartles]

That's all great, but your OP was talking about public assistance, not some obscure program from the 1990's.

Re: And by that he means

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't worry, censors are here to try and hide posts like this. So far everything has been modded in one direction.

Re: And by that he means

[Anonymous Coward]

Or a Linen. Or a Fine Woolen.

Re:And by that he means

[cold fjord]

Yes, and "Welfare" is a specific instance or subset of welfare.

Re: And by that he means

[hey!]

Well, to answer your question literally, we'd have to go back to the 1930s, but that's skewed by the Great Depression, so let's look at Lyndon Johnson's "Great Society" programs.

In 1959 the poverty rate for blacks was about 55%. Ten years later it was just over 30%. The poverty rates for whites + hispanics was about 17% in 1959, and about 10% ten years later.

Now saying the Great Society reduced poverty is post hoc ergo propter hoc reasoning. We can't know that for sure. But the one thing we can conclude is that the public assistance programs of the 1960s didn't mire people in government dependency -- at least most people who were targeted. It's conceivable that this may have happened to some people, just as some people are injured by vaccines.

Re:And by that he means

[larkost]

Your NY Times reference appears to be be disagreeing with you. You are technically correct in that there were things that could be called chemical weapons in Iraq, but "All munitions found were left over from pre-1991 Iraqi program". Many of the reports about these weapons were very clear that they were in no way serviceable, and were so dangerous to handle that they were often incinerated on-site to reduce the danger to those handling them.

That link says nothing about Iraq having the ability to ramp up production, and I have never seen any evidence that that was so. There is no denying that Sadam talked about wanting/having it, but that was just talk (and many intelligence agencies said so). And the Bush administration's main justification for going to war was that they had an active program (no evidence at the time, and we now know they did not), with some vague references to them talking to terrorists (al-Qaeda specifically) with the idea that Iraq would be arming them. At the time it was known that there had been a meeting, but all of the intelligence agencies were pretty sure that despite having common enemies, the two groups despised each other on basic grounds (e.g. the Suni vs. Shia strife that is playing out now).

No one is ever going to argue that Sadam Husain was a good man or leader, nor that his son's were going to be when he passed the reign over. But he was holding Iraq together (brutally), and without major civilian casualties. We destroyed the military that was holding it together, and then disbanded all of the local police forces on the theory that they were loyal to the previous regime. Only counting the first 4 years the estimates in Iraq are between 151,000 to over a million civilian deaths. If we had not invaded, those would not have happened.

There was really nothing for us to accomplish in Iraq, and the only thing we did was to open up a cesspool and set fire to the middle east for the next generation or so.

Re: And by that he means

[cold fjord]

The question before us was one of budgets, spending in one category versus another. Your comment is unrelated to that.

Re: And by that he means

[dywolf]

its not some obscure 90s program
TANF is WELFARE.
when you "go on welfare" you sign up for TANF.

this is not a difficult concept.

Re: And by that he means

[Dragonslicer]

I guess you haven't seen one of the televised debates lately.

There was political discussion during the debates?

Re: And by that he means

[dywolf]

that bogus article includes many expenditures that are not welfare.

they included Pell grants for college and Head Start for preschoolers, and other such most definitely not welfare programs in their tally.

it is a deliberate deception by Heritage (which frankly isn't surprising).

Re:And by that he means

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh, they were QUITE usable. Read the New Your Times story quoted - it is criticizing the US military for failing to protect the troops from being hurt by these 'old' weapons.
Sure, being old meant they were less efficient at melting your eyes or rotting your lungs out... but I won't gargle with 20 year old mustard - because I'm not stupid and don't want to DIE.

There were also millions of liters of dual-use chemicals found in caches all throughout the country. Tell me, when you find and pesticide and an industrial acid buried together, a hundred miles from any farms or manufacturing plants, what do you have? A chemical weapons depot.

Re: And by that he means

[cold fjord]

They clearly are social welfare programs and trying to pretend they aren't is nonsense.

Re:And by that he means

[Anonymous Coward]

One can also argue that it was a retaliation to previous US involvement in the middle east, rather than a unprovoked attack.

Re: And by that he means

[dywolf]

Yes.

better stated:
-A Ponzi scheme is simply an investment vehicle
-There is no requirement that the investment actually be "invested" in any sort of commodity or good or what have you.
-This particular vehicle operates by promising investor A some sort of return on investment, and then fulfills that promise by finding Investor B, and using his monies to pay A.
-It then repeats this process with more and newer investments, typically also including some sort of fee for handling the work.

The most successful Ponzi schemes don't end quickly, and don't rely on snagging and investors cash to make their money, at least until the end. Instead the biggest profit comes from the fees they charge for running it, much like any other investment management operation. It's only when they run out of new investors and can no longer meet promised obligations that the scheme collapses and people lose money. It is when the remaining investors have been defrauded that a crime has been committed.

As such Ponzi schemes are completely legal for investors to invest in, even knowing that it is a Ponzi scheme.
the only threat to the investor is that they might lose their money if their round of investing is the one to finally get screwed.

Again: the Ponzi scheme is legal for the person running it....as long as he keep meeting his obligations to his investors.
It is only once he fails to do so that a crime has actually been committed.

Re: And by that he means

[blue9steel]

The SS receipts aren't general revenue despite the fact that politicians have played fast and loose with the rules over the years.

Re: And by that he means

[blue9steel]

You're comparing apples and oranges. The war was paid for out of general revenue whereas Social Security is not. (That may eventually happen if they fail to revise the program, but currently receipts exceed payouts)

Re: And by that he means

[Anonymous Coward]

Bah. Follow-up to my own post because yes, I know the diff between your and you're.

Your truth needs a reality check.

Re: And by that he means

[Bartles]

Yes, all TANF is welfare. But not all welfare is TANF. All welfare is public assistance, but not all public assistance is welfare. The original claim was made that 219 years of "public assistance" is the equivalent to the cost of the Iraq war. It's not a difficult concept.

Re:And by that he means

[JackieBrown]

Remeber when some Saoudis living in Afganistan flew in a building and the next day we said we must invade Iraq and later found an excuse to invade them having WMDs they did not have?

If the Bush Administration was knowingly lying about WMDs, then don't you think they would have had a plan to plant them?

Re:And by that he means

[dywolf]

Dude, talk about re-writing history....
Bush specifically committed us to war specifically because of the threat of a current and on-going weapons program, not the existence of weapons from the 1980s that we (and by that we mean Cheney and his old employer) gave them. Old weapons that Bush himself acknowledged the existence of, and stated were not the weapons he was referring to, while selling the country on the war.

Re: And by that he means

[shaitand]

"As for weapons, most of what is being fired are AK-47s and RPGs, which are Soviet and Eastern Bloc licensed weapons. Yeah, we provided some of them indirectly but, they'd get the weapons no matter who gave them to them. The world is absolutely awash in small arms. If you were talking about more sophisticated weaponry, I might agree."

It's hard to get weapons no matter who gave them when you don't have CIA slush funds to pay for them. But let's be honest here, the real issue is the one neither side wants to tamper with. We directly take sides on a holy war in Israel. We picked a chunk of territory after WWII, declared it the nation of Israel and shipped a bunch of Jews from Germany there and we've been arming it the teeth ever since. Thus declaring a side. Israeli arms are almost all either US arms or funded directly by the US.

Stop funding ANYONE in the goddamn holy war and actual terrorism attempts (as opposed to the police matter of a random domestic nut) will curtail, slow, and stop.

Re: And by that he means

[Anonymous Coward]

Social Security isn't a Ponzi scheme until Congress raids it to pay for other things.

There, fixed it for for you.

I guess the only way we'll ever stop the fscking thieves from raiding Social Security is if we add an amendment to the Constitution. One that strings any congress critter up by the short hairs whenever they steal from the Social Security trust fund. I would have said any time they steal, but then we'd be stringing them up every day. Wait, maybe that would be a good thing.

Re: And by that he means

[FictionPimp]

I never said you were incorrect. What I said was "It would be amazing if either of you pointed to a source.....I guess facts can't be used in political conversation."

My complain was arguing without backing up your argument with actual referenceable facts and not the accuracy of your assertion. Basically I was trying to point out how we have reached a terrible point in our society where arguments look like this.

"This is true!"
"No it's not!"
"Yes it is!"
"You have tiny fingers!"
"I have a large penis, you are wrong" ..etc..

So by posting links to facts that backup your assertion you make a real argument that needs to be refuted. This is the only way to have a debate that goes anywhere useful (unless you like dick jokes).

Re: And by that he means

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't need to post facts when I have the truth on my side.

That's the stupidest thing I've seen written in ages.

Re: And by that he means

[Bartles]

Sure, and the constitution also says we don't have to actually pay income taxes. Good luck with that one. There are hundreds of ponzi scheme laws in the United States.

Re: And by that he means

[shaitand]

You are aware that social security is a retirement plan and medicare is the medical plan that goes alongside it and that participants get distributions based on how much they contributed? It isn't welfare.

Medicaid, that is welfare. Food stamps are welfare. I'm not saying it is welfare I'm opposed to, I actually want to go to my grave having supported making the world a better place. Having grown up the child of a single mother who needed both of those things and having received medical care only because of them as a child they no doubt contributed greatly to me being where I am today.

Are there losers and deadbeats on the programs? Sure there are, most of them, but then that is true of most of those holding large wall street power accounts as well. All the red tape thrown up trying to prevent abuse and minimize these programs costs more in administrative overhead than the abuse itself creating a self-fulfilling prophecy on the inefficiency of government.

If you want to reduce the cost of these programs stop fighting the public option and start fighting to cut the costs and complexity of bringing medical devices and drugs on to the market that keeps the large scale healthcare industry entrenched and raises the barrier to entry.

Re: And by that he means

[Anonymous Coward]

Please explain how this is not an example of the broken window fallacy

[...] because people can afford to eat and heat their homes so they don't get sick.

In the broken window fallacy, the net effect is to reallocate resources from productive enterprise to window repair. The window repair industry and some satellite industries benefit at the cost of everybody else.

In public assistance, money is reallocated from some productive enterprise to another productive enterprise.* In particular, the part about people not getting sick because they are eating and heating their homes -- here it seems that not giving them public assistance is the broken window fallacy. It's breaking people in order to keep the economy going.

*Yes, yes, there are also cases where things get ridiculous. You try to solve those.

Re:And by that he means

[sjames]

You'll need to remove social security from that list. It's all paid for by a specific line item in your withholding and is net positive (except for the loans to other government uses SSA was forced to make).

Re:And by that he means

[Anonymous Coward]

Lots of questions about the Iraq war. Why are conservatives soo eager to go to war and in debt to fight religious fundumentalist who believe in family values. Why are liberals sooo eager to defend people who want women to walk 6 steps behind their men.

Why are liberals soo eager to fund entitlement programs that ultimately benefit the rich white entitled like Hillary Clinton, while the underclass gets just enough scraps to keep them alive and needing more. Why are the soo called republicans who are supposed to be evil and heartless so against the entitlement programs. It seems to me they are a great way to keep the lower class down and accepting handouts from the rich privileged elite.

The thing that can unify these differing points of view is a national space program. Let's band together and head for the stars. Stop fighting against ourselves. Let's beet those Godless Chi-coms and the homosexual hating Putinites to colonize Mars first. If we can place a couple orbiting missile and energy batteries that can reign hell down on the space aliens that choose to invade Earth, I am all for it.

Filthy Space aliens are right now plotting to abduct and sexually molest your women. We need to bring the fight to them first. Space NOW.

   

Re:And by that he means

[dgatwood]

Two-Thirds of All Federal Spending Went to Entitlement Programs in 2014 [heritage.org]

Of course, Social Security and Medicare are not part of the federal budget They're an entirely separate organization funded from an entirely separate income source. We pay into those programs in exchange for a promise of income or health coverage later, which means these programs cost the government nothing, because every penny in those trust funds is owed back to the people who paid into it, and thus cannot legitimately be used for anything else other than the operation of those programs.

Re: And by that he means

[Bartles]

SS and Medicare/medicaid most certainly are public assistance, which is what the OP was talking about. And it is not a retirement plan if it cannot sustain itself, which is most certainly the case.

Re: And by that he means

[sjames]

So, compare the ROI of public assistance vs. the war.

Re:And by that he means

[dywolf]

And lets not forget that Bush had a hard on for getting Iraq, someway, somehow.

Security briefing on day 1 of Bush's presidency: "How do we get Iraq?"
Security briefing on 9/11 attacks: "Can we use this to get Iraq?"

http://www.motherjones.com/pol...
http://www.timelines.ws/countr...

1/30/01
Saddam's removal is top item of Bush's inaugural national security meeting. Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill later recalls, "It was all about finding a way to do it. The president saying, 'Go find me a way to do this.'" [Date the public knew: 1/10/04]

8/10/01
Major air raid on Iraq. (air defense installations destroyed)

Sep 2001
Curveball granted German asylum, ceases cooperating. British spy agency MI6 has told CIA that "elements of [his] behavior strike us as typical offabricators." [Date the public knew: 11/20/05]

9/11/01
Al Qaeda attacks. Minutes taken by a Rumsfeld aide five hours later: "Best info fast. Judge whether good enough [to] hit SH [Saddam Hussein] @ same time. Not only UBL [Usama bin Laden]." [Date the public knew: 9/4/02]

9/12/01
According to counterterror czar Richard Clarke, "[Bush] told us, 'I want you, as soon as you can, to go back over everything, everything. See if Saddam did this.'" Told evidence against Al Qaeda overwhelming, Bush asks for "any shred" Saddam was involved. [Date the public knew: 3/22/04]

9/20/01
British PM Tony Blair advises Bush not to lose focus on Al Qaeda. Bush replies: "I agree with you, Tony. But when we have dealt with Afghanistan, we must come back to Iraq." [Date the public knew: 5/1/04]

9/20/01
PNAC letter to Bush: "Even if evidence does not link Iraq directly to the attack, any strategy aiming at the eradication of terrorism and its sponsors must include a determined effort to remove Saddam Hussein from power." [Date the public knew: 9/21/01]

11/21/01
Bush collars Rumsfeld physically and asks: "What have you got in terms of plans for Iraq? What is the status of the war plan? I want you to get on it. I want you to keep it secret."—Bob Woodward. [Date the public knew: 4/18/04]

12/9/01
Cheney on Meet the Press: "Well, the evidence is pretty conclusive that the Iraqis have indeed harbored terrorists." Also claims 9/11 hijacker Mohammed Atta met with Iraqi spy in Prague, a claim he'll repeat long after CIA and Czechs disavow.

12/12/01
Rumsfeld demands plan for war against Iraq. Gen. Tommy Franks proposes softening up Iraq: "I'm thinking in terms of spikes, Mr. Secretary. Spurts of activity followed by periods of inactivity." [Date the public knew: 8/3/04]

12/28/01
Gen. Franks briefs Bush on Iraq war plans. [Date the public knew: 3/5/03]

Feb 2002
"I was asked by one of the senior commanders of Central Command to go into his office. We did, the door was closed, and he turned to me, and he said, 'Senator, we have stopped fighting the war on terror in Afghanistan. We are moving military and intelligence personnel and resources out of Afghanistan to get ready for a future war in Iraq.'"—Sen. Bob Graham. [Date the public knew: 3/26/04]

March 2002
"Fuck Saddam. We're taking him out."—Bush to Rice and three senators. [Date the public knew: 12/8/03]

3/13/02
Bush on Osama: "I'll repeat what I said. I truly am not that concerned about him."

3/22/02
Downing Street memo: "US scrambling to establish a link between Iraq and Al Qaida is so far frankly unconvincingWe are still left with a problem of bringing public opinion to accept the imminence of a threat from IraqRegime change does not stack up. It sounds like a grudge between Bush and Saddam." [Date the public knew: 9/18/04]

3/24/02
Saddam "is actively pursuing nuclear weapons at this time."—Cheney on CNN

3/25/02
Downing Str

Re: And by that he means

[ItsJustAPseudonym]

I guess you haven't seen one of the televised debates lately.

You mean those reality tv shows?

Yeah, the one with that guy from The Apprentice.

Re: And by that he means

[blue9steel]

Sure, it's possible they've inflated the numbers due to having an axe to grind, though I'd be surprised if it was by that much. Wars are expensive. I believe that the direct costs only of WWII is estimated at around $5 Trillion in today's dollars and follow on costs probably tripled that. Not an easy comparison since it was a shorter but broader conflict among nation states vs. a longer but less intense conflict that included a brief clash with a large 3rd world power and an extended counter-insurgency campaign, but still these sorts of things aren't cheap.

A reasonable comparison probably looks something like this, trying to stick to high level overview of direct benefits only or this will get way too complicated:

SS, Unemployment, Labor, Medicare & Health Spending: $2.27 Trillion
Education, Food Assistance, Housing & Community: $0.22 Trillion
SS & Medicare Taxes: $1.07 Trillion
Total Net Cost: $1.42 Trillion per year

Time periods of comparison aren't an easy question since one is a one time event with some follow on costs while the other is a permanent ongoing expense. (Though Iraq certainly feels endless at times) I think a fair choice is the combat phase which is a period starting with the invasion and ending with the recent handoff to Iraq forces so we're talking 2003 - 2010. So that gives us eight years of war at a cost of $6 Trillion vs. eight years of benefits at a cost of $11.36 Trillion. So yes, the benefits were definitely more expensive, but not in a two year period as was asserted which would have been only $2.84 Trillion.

I was fine with the first invasion of Iraq, it was necessary to punish aggression against other nation states and preserve our access to middle eastern oil reserves. I seriously question the value of the second invasion though. Iraq had nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks and reports have since revealed that the CIA did not believe they had the WMDs Bush claimed as pretext. What exactly did we get for the lives and treasure expended?

Re:And by that he means

[sjames]

The report says just under 5000 total. Of those, a significant number were unusable and another significant number of them were already intentionally disabled (likely as part of compliance with their obligation). Another significant number had never contained the actual chemical weapon.

All were manufactured prior to 1991.

As for the rest, Iraq had nothing to do with 911. That was the first big lie that got America involved in yet another costly (in money and lives) and unnecessary war.

Re: And by that he means

[dinfinity]

Please explain how this is not an example of the broken window fallacy

Please explain how more sick people is better than or equivalent to fewer sick people, with regard to the economy, even taking into account the cost of the financial aid.

Additionally, I'd like to reiterate an oft forgotten point. Poor people are great at putting their money to work for the economy. Give a poor person money and you can guarantee that it will be spent almost instantly, locally and generally on something that we consider part of the real and essential economy (yes, some of them buy drugs, but on average it goes to food, clothes, transport and other necessities). They sure as hell aren't going to put the money in a bank in the Cayman islands or import Russian caviar.

LiHEAP for instance would parcel out assistance based not on degree-days or income, but on funding levels.

Anecdotes, my friend. Do you have any argumentation towards why a federal government cannot efficiently do this on a fundamental level?

the poor will move where they have a chance.

The only place poor people can easily move to is the street. And that is exactly what happens in places like the US. Americans coming to our 'socialist' country always (with great surprise) ask us where all our homeless people are. The number of homeless people, let alone the many people obviously on the brink of being so, I saw when I recently visited the US was disheartening and morally disgusting.

"But our country is different!'
True, many Americans have a very Darwinistic view of how a society should work (which is ironic, given how few people 'believe' in biological evolution). They fail to see that even though it feels really unfair, it is objectively better to spend money to have 'moochers' sitting at home than to leave them to fuck up their lives and those of friends and strangers around them by roaming the streets, committing crime and seeking refuge in terrible drugs. And that doesn't even take into account the (economic!) benefits to society when poor people actually use the aid to grow and become tax-paying members of society.

I will readily admit that even in our 'socalist paradise' the exact same lack of insight is all too present, but as always: everything is bigger in America.

Re: And by that he means

[operagost]

I'm pretty sure the Civil Rights Act of 1964 blows the straight numbers out of proportion. They're absolutely unreliable for other reasons as well, such as changing census questions that did not break out Hispanics and "whites", and the adjustment of the poverty line based on differing interpretations of the COL.

Re: And by that he means

[Anonymous Coward]

*you're

Re:And by that he means

[cold fjord]

Unfortunately that isn't how it has worked in practice, which is one of the reasons there is a huge and growing problem.

The money for the Social Security "trust fund" has been replaced with IOUs and used for general spending for decades. Now the Baby Boomers are retiring, and the money isn't there. The only way to get it is to raise taxes to repay the IOUs, take the money from other spending, print money, or pay less than expected. None of those solutions works to the advantage of the people.

Re:And by that he means

[Anonymous Coward]

It does not appear that the Bush Administration was capable of planning anything beyond lining their friends' pockets with money

Re:And by that he means

[kqs]

You are correct, it is more accurately defined as a ponzi scheme.

I think you misspelt insurance.

Re:And by that he means

[cold fjord]

There were chemical agent casualties caused by chemical munitions in Iraq.

There was an outbreak of anthrax in Iraq around the time some biological weapons were found and recovered.

As for the rest, Iraq had nothing to do with 911. That was the first big lie that got America involved in yet another costly (in money and lives) and unnecessary war.

The big lie is the one claiming that the Bush administration blamed 9/11 on Iraq. That didn't happen.

Iraq was very costly for al Qaeda - they lost many fighters and much treasure there. It helped expose their operations and finances in the wider region and to roll many of them up.

Re: And by that he means

[operagost]

I actually want to go to my grave having supported making the world a better place

Then support it with your time and money, not someone else's.

Re:And by that he means

[cayenne8]

I think you misspelt insurance.

No....insurance is something you generally believe will be there when/if you need it....unlike SS which is on the path to bankruptcy in just a few years from now.

Re:And by that he means

[oh_my_080980980]

Listen ass-hole. No, there were no WMDs. It was known at the time. Former weapons inspectors from the first Gulf War reported that fact. Even new weapons inspectors did not find WMDs, before the U.S. yanked them out.

The Bush Administration claimed Iraq had NUCLEAR WEAPONS. They claimed they got Yellow Cake Uranium from Niger and they were getting this centrifuge tubes to enrich the Uranium. The Uranium claim as debunked by Ambassador Wilson and the centrifuge tube claim was debunked by the Department of Energy.

The rise of ISIS was a direct response to the destabilization of Iraq, after Saddam Hussein was removed. Iraq is a land with many different tribal groups and Saddam Hussein kept them under control. It took a dictator the keep the country at bay. Once that was removed, you had chaos.

Re: And by that he means

[operagost]

he helped solve Childhood hunger but then cut taxes so we couldn't afford it anymore. He removed our ability to deduct credit card interest rates on taxes.

So I take it you're both FOR and AGAINST higher taxes?

Re:And by that he means

[oh_my_080980980]

No you are an ass-hole because repeated investigations stated these were from the first gulf war and did not pose the threat to the U.S. Bush Administration claimed. No Mushroom Clouds moron.

Re:And by that he means

[oh_my_080980980]

They lied about the mobile chemical program and the nuclear program and saying they (Rumsfield) knew where the WMDs were. You around Tikrit...

Re: And by that he means

[shaitand]

Medicare and Medicaid are two completely different things. Medicaid qualification is based on low income/expenses whereas medicare is based on an age or disability qualification, so if anything it is a form of insurance.

"And it is not a retirement plan if it cannot sustain itself, which is most certainly the case."

It's a retirement plan if you contribute pre-tax funds and it pays out at retirement. Which it does, no matter how much you make or how wealthy you are. When you retire you will get the benefits of any and all retirement plans you've contributed to, including SS/Medicare.

If you want to reduce the costs of those plans to make them solvent you don't need to dissolve the plans, you need to reduce the costs and overhead associated with them. You do that by slashing all the red tape that drives up the cost of healthcare. If MIT can build a prototype new inhouse designed MRI machine for $50k and MRI imaging is superior and ideally would be used for most imaging there is no reason the cost of that machine at scale shouldn't be more like $5-15k at scale and in most large doctors offices let alone hospitals. Currently these machines cost millions and insurance balks at even letting you have an MRI when it would be the best tool, demanding cancer causing x-rays and CT scans (which are still just x-rays) because they are cheaper.

The other reason these plans are insolvent isn't that you support people who make less it is that the plans are more or less structured with the assumption that subsequent generations will pay for previous generations and the previous generation hitting retirement age was the baby boomer generation. If you went back a generation before the plan would have been flush with cash. So maybe some restructuring needs to occur.

Obviously we have an obligation to previous generations in our country, the money we are making and the quality of life we enjoy exists because of their hard work, you owe them a royalty on every dollar you make. But maybe we should fund that from the tap of fed inflation instead of having that tap run to banks who then purchase bonds from the government. I can't think of any upside to giving banks funds at low interest and then selling them bonds at higher interest to get back the funds we gave them.

Re: And by that he means

[Bartles]

Why say it with a wall of text when 9 words will do. I didn't read your WoT, by the way. Social Security and Medicare/Medicaid are all public assistance.

Re:And by that he means

[murdocj]

so you'd just as soon live in NK as the USA? Wow, those blinders are on TIGHT!

Re:And by that he means

[cold fjord]

Social Security belongs right where it is. The "trust fund" money has been used for general spending and replaced by IOUs since the 1960s.

How would you close Social Security's deficit?

According to the 2014 Social Security Trustees Annual Report, Social Security's "annual cash-flow deficit will average about $77 billion between 2014 and 2018." After that, the report says, the deficit will rise "steeply as income growth slows (and) the number of beneficiaries continues to grow at a substantially faster rate than the number of covered workers."

Re: And by that he means

[hey!]

Well yes, there's always confounding factors as I noted. But I think the argument that welfare automatically makes people dependent on government handouts isn't supported by the data. That it may make some people dependent I don't doubt, but if the effect were as powerful as commonly suggested then you wouldn't see so many people lifting themselves out of poverty during the heydey of the welfare state.

Re: And by that he means

[tnk1]

Much funding for Sunni groups comes from the very rich denizens of Saudi Arabia and other Sunni countries. ISIS would not have gotten anywhere, for instance, without Sunni support. Even though the CIA money may well have contributed, I think you're vastly underestimating the support groups like ISIS get from sources more close to home. The CIA has definitely done some things in its history, but it hasn't been supporting these fighters since Reagan.

Remember, the support for the Afghan mujahadeen dried up after the Soviets left. While the impact of this money didn't go away, and indeed provided a base for groups like the Taliban and al-Qaeda, the stream dried up at the end of the 1980s, almost 20 years ago.

The problem with just going cold turkey with any involvement is that there is a reason we are in the Mideast, and it is not because we're trying to fund holy wars. While we're not trying to "steal" oil, we are definitely trying to keep the area stable enough so that no one can grab it and hold it for ransom. That is why we need forces in the region and why we need to remain interested.

However, that by itself, is not fueling the issue, it is merely a glaring example that the Middle East can't police itself without help. Some people there hate that, and still more people there want us gone so they can fight their wars.

The people in the Middle East hate each other in a way that few people elsewhere can appreciate. Sunnis hate Shiites, Shiites hate Sunnis, Turks hate Kurds, and then there are tribes out there that hate each other. I'd hazard to say that if the West hadn't been there with the mandates and protectorates, this would have all ended with a gigantic regional war which would have led to either a new Persian empire, or two regional Sunni and Shiite superstates. As much as the West didn't help, I see no evidence that they would have made it any better on their own.

Look at Iran. The shah was more than a little bit of a dick, but under his regime, Iran was relatively peaceful, prosperous, and Westernized. Women could and did go to school and participate in daily life. But there was always that religious group in the hinterlands who wanted to go back to what Iran is today. Even if the shah wasn't something of a tyrant, sponsored by the USA, you'd still have that dynamic.

Complaints about the CIA are honestly like complaining about the conquistadors now. They're a part of history. They had their impact, but their active involvement in the events of today pales in comparison to the forces now at work. Your Middle East trials and tribulations today are fueled mostly by their own money and anger. Whether it is directed at the West is irrelevant. You can see this today where ISIS is about Caliphate first, attack the West second. This violence is fueled directly by the profits on oil which are being spent by the regional actors themselves and it won't stop until they can be convinced to stop, or more likely, they run out of money.

Re: And by that he means

[rickb928]

No, I'm telling you that Social Security isn't a Ponzi scheme if it is funded as intended.

Re: And by that he means

[Anonymous Coward]

Debt funded consumption isn't boosting the economy. You are temporarily buying economic activity. There is no indigenous growth. Once the debt money disappears, so does the economic activity. We have been chasing the Keynes fantasy for 50 years and all it has gotten us is more and more debt.

(Yes, I understand Keynes did not advocate permanent debt spending.)

Re:And by that he means

[NoImNotNineVolt]

Hello hey!, Here, you're highlighting the distinction between what you call entitlement programs and welfare. However, in your earlier post, you made the following claim:

You also seem to be of the delusion that the US spends a lot of money on public assistance. It spends very little. For what we paid for the Iraq war (not including nation building expenses) we could fund US public assistance programs at the current levels for 219 years.

Regardless of whether you want to put Social Security and Medicare into the "entitlement program" bucket or the "welfare" bucket, they are US public assistance programs regardless. As such, it is unlikely that the amount spent on our recent military adventures abroad (even including nation building expenses) would cover anywhere near 219 years of funding at current levels.

I oppose wasting money on military blunders, and I support expanding public assistance programs, but let's not build our arguments in favor of such policies upon a foundation of falsehoods.

Re:And by that he means

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh Good Lord - Let's not forget that Clinton had a hard-on for Iraq too - It was "settled science" that something had to be done about Iraq that would include deposing Hussein.

Of course that doesn't quite fit your political meme now, does it?

Re: And by that he means

[smithmc]

Social Security and Medicare are not "public assistance" in the sense that Welfare is; employees pay into those programs via FICA taxes and then receive benefits when they retire. For someone who "has the truth on their side", you're stretching it a bit.

Re:And by that he means

[parkinglot777]

Hmm... I don't know why you are showing spending year for 2013 when you are trying to counter Iraq war spending (2003~2011) from GP? Besides, if you want to give data, you should give a link to real sources, not an article which may contain bias comments (a .org domain does not mean it is neutral). One source link could be https://www.cbo.gov/publicatio... , and readers should be able to calculate percentage by themselves.

Also, most people who are receiving social security had done their share (paid into the system) when they were younger. They are now receiving what they paid into. I failed to see that it is a welfare program for these people. Of course, there are those who abuse/cheat the system, but again I failed to see that these people are actually playing a big part of the whole program. Thus, it is unfair to compare the spending with the defense budget.

Re:And by that he means

[Anonymous Cow Ward]

Only if you don't include Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid as "public assistance programs".

Re:And by that he means

[Anonymous Cow Ward]

You initially said "public assistance", not "welfare". I don't know how you wouldn't consider Medicare and Medicaid to be public assistance.

Re: And by that he means

[Anonymous Cow Ward]

Hang on - your source says it's cost $1.7T + ~$0.5T in benefits. GP said those programs (not including Medicaid or other public assistance programs) cost $1.7T/year. Therefore, two years of public assistance is more than the war. You shouldn't include interest payments on the war unless you do on public assistance as well, which won't really change the picture.

And this got +5 Informative? Come on, people...

Re: And by that he means

[shaitand]

I do. And the moment one stops utilizing any and all technology and/or infrastructure, or products produced with the aid of such, that was developed/built/supported by or is derived from that developed/built/supported by, anyone who now qualifies for SS/Medicare I will support their right to not contribute. There are probably handful somewhere living in the mountains although even those are probably using solar, housing technology, architecture, and well technology that wouldn't exist without the work of the generation now on SS.

Until that happens, pay your damn share of SS and if is more than you can get back with the caps then think of it as royalties you owe because you wouldn't make as much money or enjoy the quality of life you have without the work of the people you don't want to pay.

Re:And by that he means

[Anonymous Coward]

'Entitlement Programs'.

I guess if we didn't really need them, they wouldn't be there, right? ALL of those are 'political fat', just waiting to be cut.

What fucking planet are you on?!? Go back to your hole from which you crawled out of...

Re: And by that he means

[Noble713]

Note that in Iran-Contra, we armed Iran with TOW missiles and some anti-aircraft Hawk missiles. As far as I can tell, the terrorists, ISIS, Taliban or whoever are not using TOW missiles and certainly not antiaircraft missile batteries.

It's well-known that the CIA and Turkey have been supplying TOWs to Syrian insurgents, and their weapons often end up in ISIS hands.
http://www.businessinsider.com...
http://www.almasdarnews.com/ar...

Re:And by that he means

[Anonymous Coward]

No blood for OIL! We KNOW bush just wanted the oil.

Re: And by that he means

[Anonymous Coward]

What are you smoking?

The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act cost $831Billion
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Recovery_and_Reinvestment_Act_of_2009

The Iraq War cost $1.7 Trillion, with ongoing costs related to veteran medical care of $1 Trillion
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraq_War#Financial_cost

The Afghan War cost $468 Billion through to 2011 without considering veteran medical costs
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_in_Afghanistan_(2001%E2%80%9314)#Costs

The math is simple

Re: And by that he means

[Noble713]

The CIA has definitely done some things in its history, but it hasn't been supporting these fighters since Reagan.

Complaints about the CIA are honestly like complaining about the conquistadors now. They're a part of history. They had their impact, but their active involvement in the events of today pales in comparison to the forces now at work.

from: https://www.washingtonpost.com...
"At $1 billion, Syria-related operations account for about $1 of every $15 in the CIA's overall budget, judging by spending levels revealed in documents The Washington Post obtained from former U.S. intelligence contractor Edward Snowden."

While we're not trying to "steal" oil, we are definitely trying to keep the area stable enough so that no one can grab it and hold it for ransom. That is why we need forces in the region and why we need to remain interested.

Iraq in 2002 had a stable secular dictatorship and virtually no problem with Islamic extremists. We removed the government in 2003 and the resulting power vacuum (and the unemployment of vast numbers of trained military officers) directly led to the creation of ISIS. Not to mention the expansion of Iranian influence amongst the majority-Shia population.

Libya had a somewhat-stable dictatorship that had made amends with the West, and Gaddaffi was arguably well on his way to putting down his Arab Spring rebellion....until we intervened and bombed all of his tanks. Now Libya is also a major ISIS base.

Syria had one of the lowest crime rates and highest levels of development in the MidEast ~2009. We conspired with the Turks and Qataris to accelerate "regime change" (because the Qataris and Saudis want a natgas pipeline to Europe through Syrian territory) and now the refugee crisis might very well collapse the European Union!

This is your idea of the US "keeping the area stable"?

Re:And by that he means

[tnk1]

Well, you'd definitely have a different reaction because Social Security is supposed to be withholding based on what you paid into. So I can imagine people would be upset with losing it, after having paid into it their entire working lives. That does not mean that they understand what the problem with SS really is.

One problem with SS is that it is mismanaged and has been used as a general fund for Congress. So instead of simply being enforced savings, it is losing money.

More to the point things like social security and retirement plans and health care plans are pyramid schemes. You need to keep the base levels of the pyramids wide or you can't deliver to the people at the top who are supposed to be collecting.

Look at the "Affordable Health Care" program. They are making healthy people pay into it who have no need for insurance. While this may save the ass of some younger people who end up with unexpected illnesses, the great balance of this is to simply remove the money from the younger people to pay for the people who are using the health care. This only works while the wider base of the pyramid can pay to maintain those who are ill. It absolutely requires population and more importantly economic growth. With a big helping of hope that medical technology somehow makes certain things cheaper.

So yeah, SS isn't welfare, but it works the same way in practice, except for the fact that the people getting it were supposed to have "earned it". In reality, to get the promised returns from SS, they're actually fleecing the younger generations to get a retirement. They want to have a retirement the government promised them, and it isn't their problem how the government does that.

But, in a very real sense, they are as responsible for that situation as much as people who voted for Obamacare will be for their own health care plans fleecing the younger folks. They could have voted to reform SS in their time, but failed to do so. Now that have no choice but to maintain a death grip on whatever they can eke out of it.

And the retirement age keeps getting higher... I'll probably have to retire at 90 at this rate. At least Obamacare will be keeping me on life support, so I can enjoy my retirement, I suppose.

This is why people fight health care and entitlement programs. They don't hate old people or the sick or the poor, they just see that it will become an increasing burden that we will just be throwing down the road to our children. If we ever end up in a real depression, the increasing social programs of the West are going to completely fail those people who will have come to rely on it. The only thing that has a prayer of stopping that eventuality is technological and economic growth. That is a very rickety hope, because there are periods in history where science can hit a plateau and then you're stuck with a standard of living that requires growth, and no way to get it.

Re:And by that he means

[BigFootApe]

Not sure if this is someone illustrating Poe's law, but there are enough people who genuinely hold this mistaken opinion that it's worth addressing.

Iraq wasn't invaded because there were gaps in the inspection regime (there were) or because Iraq was resistant to a more aggressive inspection regime (it was). Iraq wasn't invaded because of a criminal indictment of Saddam Hussein for the instigation of the Iran-Iraq war. Iraq wasn't invaded because of some 20 year old, probably inert gas shells buried, rusting, and forgotten in a ditch somewhere. Iraq was invaded to remove chemical, biological, and potentially nuclear weapons which constituted a grave and immediate threat to the security of the United States.

This justification was, of course, a complete fabrication. It was an utterly fantastic construction based on the stacking of all the worst case, low probability assessments generated by the US intelligence apparatus in order to stampede the public to war (and a highly successful general election).

We went back in to Iraq in 2003. After nearly 20 years of trying to get Iraq to fulfill it's obligations which it AGREED to after the first Iraq war.

The US wasn't trying to enforce sanctions on Iraq in 1983. At that time, they were selling them weapons.

Re: And by that he means

[emorning]

Stimulus money gets spent and, well, stimulates the economy. Money spent waging war produces, well, a lot of dead bodies and more war. The money spent on the Iraq war would have been used better if we had used it to wipe our asses.

Re: And by that he means

[tnk1]

It wasn't meant to be a Ponzi scheme in the pejorative sense, but it is very much a pyramid scheme, with all of the the attendant problems of such.

Social security relies on someone providing extra money to add interest to the withholding of payroll taxes so that at the end, you actually have more than you put in.

In an investment scheme like stock or fund buys, you are relying and betting on growth of the market to add money to your investments. The difference between that and an entitlement is that at the end of the day, you could end up with less money on an investment, and there is no guarantee that you will get a return or even not lose money.

In an entitlement scheme, you invest your money, the economic bet fails, but the government is still on the hook for you to make a certain return. The only way to ensure that this is possible is via adding something at the base of the pyramid, either more contributors or higher payroll taxes to make up the shortfall, or printing more money to *technically* meet the obligation, but fail to do so because the resulting inflation has driven up prices.

Realistically, there was *no way* to properly fund Social Security so that you could guarantee a certain return. There are years that you can make your investments, but also going to be years that you can't. In the end, you will always have a shortfall eventually. And since the shortfall can't be passed to the investor, you have a Ponzi scheme because sooner or later, you will fail to be able to fund Social Security but you have promised that you always will.

It certainly doesn't help that it got raided for general expenditures, but all that did was move up the date of insolvency.

Re: And by that he means

[Kythe]

Was waiting for someone to point this out.

Social Security and Medicare are insurance programs into which workers pay. "Welfare" is usually defined as public assistance, including AFDC and TANF. NOT the same thing.

Personally I think if someone is going to brag about not needing evidence, they really shouldn't go on and prove they don't know what they're talking about by trying to provide it anyway. Keep it general, don't try to prove anything, and you'll last longer in an argument.

Re: And by that he means

[Kythe]

Actually, the conversation was opened up with the term "welfare". At any rate, SS and Medicare are generally not defined as "public assistance".

Re: And by that he means

[Kythe]

If you pay your taxes (you know, the money you owe for getting to live in the U.S. and receive services rendered), you don't get to say the money is "someone else's". We all get to decide what to do with it based on liberal democratic principles. And if you don't like it, start walking north or south. You'll eventually get to a situation I guarantee you'd like even less.

Of course, if you don't pay your taxes, then you're a thief. So much for moral authority, huh?

Re: And by that he means

[riverat1]

I would call Pell Grants and Head Start investments in the future of our country.

Re: And by that he means

[rickb928]

Pension funds offer a good model. My wife draws a pension from a state teachers system, and it is funded from her and her employers' contributions in the past. Her contributions did not fund payments to previous pensioners.

And it's complex. Social Security would probably need to be run as both a pension and entitlement, since Asians other programs prevent a pure pension model.

And fundamentally, government entitlement programs are risky, as they expose the government, and therefore - US -, to substantial costs exceeding anticipated contributions.

This is good reason to both restrict entitlements to minimum necessary, and to employ them as close as possible to the recipients, local, municipal, county governments being good choices.

As we have seen, federal government can escape our control...

Re:And by that he means

[riverat1]

Social Security is not on a path to bankruptcy. With the current value of the SS Trust Fund it can pay full benefits into the 2030's and after that if nothing is done to fix it SS will still be able to pay 70-80% of full benefits after that. Fixing it is as simple as raising the maximum income subject to SS withholding by some amount.

Re: And by that he means

[Anonymous Coward]

Nah, he's talking about NADS: North korea Assured DeStruction.

Re: And by that he means

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh shut up, you self rightous idiot.
The only people that i am in debt with are my relatives and ancestors, the ones that actually put money and effort in my education. Other people weren't working for the benefit of me or the nation. They were working because they wanted to make money. I'm not going to support the gigantic ponzi scheme that SS is just because some idiots didn't think to find a legal way to avoid paying it. One could even argue that by making it's downfall more swift, i'm helping those who would've otherwise been caught in that nightmare.

Re: And by that he means

[Anonymous Coward]

Well yes, there's always confounding factors as I noted. But I think the argument that welfare automatically makes people dependent on government handouts isn't supported by the data. That it may make some people dependent I don't doubt, but if the effect were as powerful as commonly suggested then you wouldn't see so many people lifting themselves out of poverty during the heydey of the welfare state.

I am glad to see that where you point out the Post prop ergo propter hock logical fallacy above that our little buddy with the handle 'narc' didn't pop up and try to play like he was a college logic professor, but yet pointing out that logical fallacies are in fact logical fallacies because you pointed them out.

It is clear his mom un suspended his world of warcraft account to stop him from sticking the remote control up his butt again.

we are making progress here on /.

Re: And by that he means

[Anonymous Coward]

Except your wrong

Nevermind that public assistance isn't only an expense, it also boosts the economy and eases the burden on hospitals because people can afford to eat and heat their homes so they don't get sick.

The Iraq war tally will easily reach 6 trillion plus we have a ton of Veterans we aren't taking care of which is costing more and more money to deal with. But by all means, let's keep making more veterans, put more people needlessly into harms way to accomplish what?

Weapons got us into this mess, if we hadn't armed people during Iran Contra there would be a hell of a lot less weapons in the area and if we hadn't toppled the democratically elected Iran the whole region would be a lot more stable.

I have no idea why Reagan is held up as some kind of standard for Presidents. From what I can tell he united Germany, that was about it from what he did that was good. I'm sure there is more but trickle down economics started with him which was horrible, he helped solve Childhood hunger but then cut taxes so we couldn't afford it anymore. He removed our ability to deduct credit card interest rates on taxes. I would say he probably started the battle with the middle class.

Refresh my memory, was this before or after he started to succumb to his Alzheimers disease? Was this during the time he started nodding off in cabinet meetings and Nancy was essentially grabbing the wheel while he was asleep at it? That was where the disparity you are talking about between military spending and the middle class started. That was the beginning of the war on the middle class, when we transitioned from Reagan to Bush classic.

Re: And by that he means

[rickb928]

Using LiHeap as an example is not anecdotal. It is a fundamental example. One of many.

And it is not an exceptional or unique one. This program has run like this most of its existence. Year after year.

An example of how such federal programs fail by determining the need arbitrarily, being funded inadequately, and squelch ingredients other solutions. Which leaves blame at the door of local / state governments that often let federal programs absolve them off further responsiblity.

Re: And by that he means

[Anonymous Coward]

...But let's be honest here, the real issue is the one neither side wants to tamper with. We directly take sides on a holy war in Israel. We picked a chunk of territory after WWII, declared it the nation of Israel and shipped a bunch of Jews from Germany there and we've been arming it the teeth ever since. Thus declaring a side. Israeli arms are almost all either US arms or funded directly by the US.

To be truly honest, the sides were chosen long before "we picked a chunk of territory".

Stop funding ANYONE in the goddamn holy war and actual terrorism attempts (as opposed to the police matter of a random domestic nut) will curtail, slow, and stop.

We definitely agree on this... There are a number of world regions that are kind of a freaking mess, made worse by our attempts to "help". We probably ought to stop helping, unless asked. Then we decide what we want for the help and say "Sure, but it costs X". Where X is something we want, or some geopolitical goal we have. We might also want to refer them to the world police (the UN) for action if they'd rather go that route...

Re: And by that he means

[cold fjord]

Perhaps they are, but they are still social welfare programs.

It is a pity that Head Start doesn't seem to have an enduring effect. It only takes a couple of grades before it is a wash.

Re: And by that he means

[Anonymous Coward]

You are aware that social security is a retirement plan and medicare is the medical plan that goes alongside it and that participants get distributions based on how much they contributed? It isn't welfare.

Medicaid, that is welfare. Food stamps are welfare. I'm not saying it is welfare I'm opposed to, I actually want to go to my grave having supported making the world a better place. Having grown up the child of a single mother who needed both of those things and having received medical care only because of them as a child they no doubt contributed greatly to me being where I am today.

Are there losers and deadbeats on the programs? Sure there are, most of them, but then that is true of most of those holding large wall street power accounts as well. All the red tape thrown up trying to prevent abuse and minimize these programs costs more in administrative overhead than the abuse itself creating a self-fulfilling prophecy on the inefficiency of government.

If you want to reduce the cost of these programs stop fighting the public option and start fighting to cut the costs and complexity of bringing medical devices and drugs on to the market that keeps the large scale healthcare industry entrenched and raises the barrier to entry.

THIS EXACTLY!

We are on the verge of having the technology and evidence based medication methodologies of medical costs to society such as obesity, type 2 and type 1 diabetes and metabolic syndrome go away for good. These conditions if removed would take out the major causes of heart disease, many cancers and other large killers. The effect of removing these as causal factors for the major things that kill us over our lifetimes are the "keystones" to toppling the major diseases that both kill most of us and present the largest costs to the system. In the case of diabetes alone, it's removal as a disease would eliminate a yearly cost of $260,000,000,000.00 (Billion with a B) from the US medical system. This is money we don't have to spend, every year.

The FDA classically acts like all of this is science fiction, however a lot of very serious science has started to bear fruit on the concept of how gene therapies, immune therapies and diet (in contrast to the standard diet pushed by the food industry laden with carbohydrates and high fructose corn syrup in place of healthy amounts of fats as a caloric energy source) can essentially effectively make most cancers, diabetes and heart disease go the way of small pox. The FDA foot dragging, especially on the areas of gene therapies that could end a lot of terrible mono-genetic diseases in the short term if they would just be tested, is doing a lot of damage in terms of lives and costs to the system. Conservatives still cling to their conventional advice, all the while the rest of the world is pushing forward and leaving American medical research in the dust. (Countries like Columbia, South Korea and China to name a few..) If we want to stay leaders in medical research in the world, America needs a fundamental change of philosophy on this front from top to bottom, otherwise the trend of us getting fatter, weaker, more diabetic and dying younger will continue to accelerate and professionals will continue to throw up their hands and claim it's all about money and that the issue is more complicated and "incurable" and vexed than it actually is. We need to hold our presidential candidates and the government's feet to the fire on this one and not stop until they do the right thing and drop all of the outdated 1950's mindset crap.

Re: And by that he means

[Anonymous Coward]

> Anecdotes, my friend. Do you have any argumentation towards why a federal government cannot efficiently do this on a fundamental level?

Maybe because they never have? Fool me once shame on you, fool me twice shame on me. You'd have to be blind or delusional not to see this.

> , I saw when I recently visited the US was disheartening and morally disgusting.

The United States is royally f'd up. It has nothing to do with socialism being good or bad. What we can conclude from it is that big government doesn't work well. It may be able to do things small government can't, but it comes at a huge price. We need public programs, but not government programs. If you have a socialist society it won't matter if its the government handing out food and homes or a non-profit independent entity. The people will provide a portion of there money to take care of the stick and homeless. The evidence is in that they already do in socialist countries. The people in at least democratic socialist leaning countries that is. The people had to vote on this and obviously sufficient number did vote for the socialism. So you don't need mandatory government socialism to get people off the street. You need the good will of the people.

If you turn the United States into a set of states like it was originally intended you put people at the mercy of there neighbours. One has a much greater connection to ones neighbour than one has to someone in another country. However the United States is so huge that one does not have any connection to ones neighbour. In most if not all democratic socialist countries which have been successful the countries size is strikingly small relative to the United States. We can do what other democratic socialist countries do, but we got to do it differently. We need to eliminate the federal government and institute local systems. Preferably ones that are not government run.

There are libertarians moving to New Hampshire and you may think us liberty-lovers are cold hearted, but it ain't so. In Keene, NH there is a non-profit organization setup to do what the government doesn't. They shelter the homeless during the 100 coldest nights of the year. There are other religious organizations around the country that do similarly. We don't need government to take care of our neighbours. We just need good neighbours.

Re:And by that he means

[Anonymous Coward]

The report says just under 5000 total. Of those, a significant number were unusable and another significant number of them were already intentionally disabled (likely as part of compliance with their obligation). Another significant number had never contained the actual chemical weapon.

All were manufactured prior to 1991.

As for the rest, Iraq had nothing to do with 911. That was the first big lie that got America involved in yet another costly (in money and lives) and unnecessary war.

And the people who want to wash their hands of this fact, constantly try to paint the picture that all of the smoke and mirrors having to do with Iraq and the war were somehow, magically Barak Obama's doing. I hear this BS every day and I debunk it every day, but some idiots only believe what they want to believe, facts be damned. You get all of these braindead morons who want to claim that Obama is somehow a muslim. There is a bit of logic to their deception, but it is made up BS and the less informed and less intelligent amongst them try to say that Obama is at the same time a "Muslim", a "Communist" and a "Nazi". I find this interesting because, muslims hate communists, communists would not tolerate muslims or Nazis and Nazis would as soon kill communists or muslims as look at them. This does not stop these brain dead morons trying to bleat loudly that Obama is all three. They are just trying to shift the blame away from the Bush administration for all of the negative effect of the poor planning leading up to Iraq, and use the fear from 9-11 to do it. You can see that the stupid conservatives ar the ones that usually take this bait hook line and sinker.

Re: And by that he means

[Anonymous Coward]

No, those aren't "confusing language".

Re:And by that he means

[Anonymous Coward]

Alcoholism is a terrible disease

Re: And by that he means

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey, why not? It worked on the Soviets.

Re:And by that he means

[Anonymous Coward]

wefare? do you mean social security because actual "welfare" spending is a pretty minuscule part of the budget

Re:And by that he means

[AutodidactLabrat]

Oh sh!t, an honest statement by one who reads! What ARE you doing here?

Re: And by that he means

[Anonymous Coward]

"Nevermind that public assistance isn't only an expense, it also boosts the economy and eases the burden on hospitals because people can afford to eat and heat their homes so they don't get sick."

With that logic, we should pay for everyone's everything. Oh wait, there won't be any money when everyone quits working!

Re:And by that he means

[Anonymous Coward]

I am sure he is hearing voices, like all Indians. SDI is something you purchase in Civilization and it does NOT work that well ! I just omitted it in the last game last week/weekend. No one can ask him whose voices is he hearing?

Re:And by that he means

[Anonymous Coward]

Governmental budget is not private budget, it is essentially IMMORTAL, it is cushioned several ways, as long as people exist revenue will be there automatically, you cannot bankrupt if you can print money (only cause inflation), you can make several maneuvers to keep it the necessary level you decide, it is something so objective those guys do struggle to get their ways because it does have a force of its own... even by definition.

Re:And by that he means

[lsatenstein]

Rubio made me cry today. He was complaining that the military numbers are down, and that we need more armaments and body bags. Doesn't he have ptsd ill friends, or friends with missing limbs to whom to send his crocodile tears?

Technology today makes wars to be done with drones, and not with foot infantry. Infantry are great for training other armies. Infantry are needed at home to manage defense, disaster recovery. Modern terrorist warfare is "Take no prisoners, use chemicals, do be-headings to save bullets, and kill the innocent bystanders"

The USA has the Iron dome, and other anti-missle missles and attack missles. Is the USA war going to be providing footsoldiers to Asia, Middle east, and other dictatorships? I hope not. By the way, the Iron dome has proven itself in Israel, where it was developed and deployed. Now there are very long range anti-missles being deployed.

Obama is following the advice of his Generals. Reduction in foot soldiers is a technological consequence. Rubio, Get your facts straight!

 

Re: And by that he means

[lsatenstein]

Pretty much. The decline of the middle class begins with his presidency.

Your absolutely right!

Re: And by that he means

[Bartles]

Then no ponzi scheme is a ponzi scheme as long as it is funded. The problem with ponzi schemes is that you run out of funding. Every. Single. Time.

Re: And by that he means

[Bartles]

That's good. Your wife's pension is an example of the proper way to run an entitlement fund, without the scheme. Wisconsin by any chance? Social Security is in no way run like that. It is run like a ponzi scheme.

Re: And by that he means

[Bartles]

Additionally, I think your perspective is a little warpe. Entitlement programs don't expose the government to risk. What risk? The government doesn't make any contributions. They have nothing at stake. They mismanage other people's money. It is you and I and every other person that has ever paid a payroll tax, and depended on a promise, that is at risk. And it will fail.

Re: And by that he means

[Bartles]

Really? What did it stimulate? Democratic politicians, unions, and cronies.

Re: And by that he means

[Bartles]

If I invested what I am forced to pay into SS, and managed to clear 5% a year. I would retire with multiple millions in my account. Don't act like SS security is some sort of godsend. It's a curse, and stupid people like you are the reason we still have it.

Re: And by that he means

[Bartles]

Maybe that used to be the case, but these days we don't all get to decide what to spend things on. So in this new era, it will be just as easy to unilaterally end these parasitic programs as it was to create them.

Re:And by that he means

[dywolf]

fuck off mod.
thats niether flamebait nor trolling, but cold hard fact.

Re: And by that he means

[spire3661]

"Of course, if you don't pay your taxes, then you're a thief"

Considering taxes are paid under duress at all times, you should rethink your word choice. Its something, but its not theft. Also, your 'love it or leave it' attitude sucks, its the argument of a person who doesn't see others as fully equal citizens. Finally, no one owes for 'getting to live in the US', thats an incredibly stupid train of thought. We are citizens, not 'taxpayers'.

Re: And by that he means

[Anonymous Coward]

I always got a kick out of this cartoon.

Trump 2016!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Can't wait till 2016 when two power hungry children are comparing their dongs and members for world domination.

Re:Trump 2016!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Hillary's is bigger.

Re:Trump 2016!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

That is obvious, and why I'm voting for her.

Re:Trump 2016!!!

[CanadianMacFan]

That's why Bill went to Monica.

Re: Trump 2016!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

"Hillary's is bigger."

That's not a thermos, it's her vibrator.

We should do it

[halivar]

Untenable nuclear war strategies yield, as a byproduct, incredible technology with legitimate (and much more tenable) civilian use. I feel like our space and lazer technology has hit a rut, and something ludicrous like SDI could give it a much-needed jolt in the arm.

Re:We should do it

[Anonymous Coward]

Untenable nuclear war strategies yield, as a byproduct, incredible technology with legitimate (and much more tenable) civilian use.

Plus lots and lots of pork.

Re:We should do it

[Anonymous Coward]

Although I share your sentiment about the ludicrosity of SDI, I would like to debunk the myth of massive civilian benefit from defense spending. Money purposefully invested in civilian research programs (antibiotics, medical imaging, public health strategies providing healthcare for all Americans if I might be parochial, roads, bridges, trains, and space and lasers as you say, etc.) would have a much LARGER impact than hoping for trickle-down technology from Halliburton, after they enrich themselves.

Re:We should do it

[halivar]

Halliburton does oil and construction, not military or space R&D. And that's the problem with talking points like "Halliburton;" you completely undercut your argument by not actually knowing anything about what you are "debunking".

Re:We should do it

[halivar]

It's a sad fact that you have to bribe legislators into doing good thing as well as bad.

Re:We should do it

[convolvatron]

my guess is you weren't involved in the last SDI development effort.

just contractors lining up at the trough. an unequivocal waste. they tried to
keep it open for as long as they could after notable people came out and
said it will never be useful, but they had to shut off the spigot eventually.

Re:We should do it

[Anonymous Coward]

Plus lots and lots of pork.

Aha - at last, a viable way of keeping the Muslims out :-}

--------

Yay, verily, he that liveth by the Saud, so also shall he die by the Saud!

Re:We should do it

[Penguinisto]

Defense R&D spending gave us stuff like solid-state electronics, jet-engines, and oh... this thing called the Internet. It continues to help advance robotics, trauma medicine, aviation, communications, and quite a bit more - even today.

But, you know, maybe next time post with your normal pseudonym if you want to impress that hipster chick sitting next to you in the coffeeshop. Just sayin'. ;)

Re:We should do it

[Elder Entropist]

You're talking about the Halliburton that relocated their corporate headquarters to Dubai in the Middle East, right?

Re:We should do it

[dave420]

Yes, defense spending has yielded some very impressive technological results. That does not, however, mean that a reasonable return will be had on any specific investment. Some people have made a lot of money playing professional poker - does that mean playing poker is a great investment? Only if you ignore the losers...

Re:We should do it

[halivar]

That's right. That is very Halliburton of which I speak, that does not do any military or space R&D. Very astute.

Re:We should do it

[blue9steel]

Sure, but you have to be realistic about what you can get passed. Republicans would never sign off on civilian research spending and Democrats would mostly rather spend the money on transfer payments.

Re: We should do it

[Anonymous Coward]

Why would we not ignore the losers? You want them to get a participation trophy??

Re: We should do it

[Type44Q]

His point nonetheless stands but nice try with the strawman.

Re:We should do it

[MachineShedFred]

Did you fall through a time hole while writing that, and finish up in 2006 rather than 2016? Do you even know what Halliburton does?

Here's a hint: it's nowhere near anything to do with space, or military defense systems. Unless they construct the concrete pad that the rockets blast off from, but that would be it.

Re:We should do it

[bozzy]

massive civilian benefit from defense spending.

Yeah, the last time we had this in the US was WWII, with industry across the country producing something for the war effort. Now the money just flows to a good ol' boys club of defense contractors.

Re:We should do it

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, because that *same* amount of money spent on scientific research wouldn't have done just as much, if not more.

Re:We should do it

[cold fjord]

An "an unequivocal waste" you say? That's funny, since the US seems to have a small scale working ballistic missile defense system in operation NOW. Elements of that system are being deployed to Europe to protect them from Iran.

Do you think that system was created without research?

The Ballistic Missile Defense System (BMDS)

Re: We should do it

[beastofburdon]

He also has no clue how far the tentacles of Halliburton stretch. They have their blood-soaked hands in many different industries pertaining to war.

Why not? The Star Wars movies no longer suck.

[xxxJonBoyxxx]

>> Reagan-era Strategic Defense Initiative

Why not? The Star Wars movies no longer suck, so the populace is ready to digest the sequel. Personally, I can't wait for green 45-degree lasers travelling a bit under the speed of light.

Re:Why not? The Star Wars movies no longer suck.

[bkmoore]

....Why not? The Star Wars movies no longer suck....

I vote for the Chewbacca defense against North Korean aggression.

Re:Why not? The Star Wars movies no longer suck.

[xxxJonBoyxxx]

>> the Chewbacca defense

Shaggy dudes with crossbows? I have to think that's already been a crappy reality show on TLC already. (Does anyone on SlashDot still have cable so we can find out for sure?)

Re:Why not? The Star Wars movies no longer suck.

[Anonymous Coward]

....Why not? The Star Wars movies no longer suck....

I vote for the Chewbacca defense against North Korean aggression.

I thought North Korea WAS the Chewbacca Defense.
That's the only way to explain their behavior.

Push that button

[PopeRatzo]

Personally, I'm uncomfortable with the possibility that we could have the Zodiac Killer with his finger on the nuclear trigger. But that's just me.

And according to this news report, he also ate his own fucking booger on national TV.

http://www.inquisitr.com/28530...

Re:Push that button

[RoccamOccam]

Just in case someone actually falls for that idiocy, it was obviously the remnants of a Tic-Tac or some other breath mint. Sheesh. It was bright white, just like ... a breath mint!

Re:Push that button

[Anonymous Coward]

Why did he have breath mint up his nose?

Re:Push that button

[squiggleslash]

Quite, most Canadians keep Tic-Tacs up their noses in case they need a breath mint while they're speaking. Nothing wrong with that at all.

Re:Push that button

[rickb928]

At this point, what does it matter?

Re:Push that button

[PopeRatzo]

At this point, what does it matter?

It doesn't matter. But are you not entertained?

Re:Push that button

[RoccamOccam]

Because, he didn't?

Re:Push that button

[ItsJustAPseudonym]

Points, for the Gladiator reference.

from 0 to 60 in 3.2hrs outside

[Anonymous Coward]

our thermometer is broken? cease fire stand down,, in the moms we trust...

Technology continues its rapid advance

[Nova Express]

Meanwhile, more and more unstable third world dictatorships and Islamic theocracies are either on the path to developing or already having nuclear weapons.

I support missile defense because I trust American engineers far more than third world lunatics.

Re:Technology continues its rapid advance

[Nidi62]

Meanwhile, more and more unstable third world dictatorships and Islamic theocracies are either on the path to developing or already having nuclear weapons.

I support missile defense because I trust American engineers far more than third world lunatics.

You do realize that the costs involved with developing missiles capable of carrying nukes (which again have to be designed for use on missiles which also costs a lot of money) over the necessary distance means that unstable 3rd world dictators and Islamic theocracies are very unlikely to even bother developing said technology, much less use it, right? The only use SDI had in the Cold War was to help bankrupt the Soviets who were trying to copy everything the US was doing.

Re:Technology continues its rapid advance

[Ol Olsoc]

Meanwhile, more and more unstable third world dictatorships and Islamic theocracies are either on the path to developing or already having nuclear weapons.

This is what happens when you won't get along with your neighbors. Trotskyist Neocon Nirvana.

Anyhow, thanks for revealing your fearful nature.

I support missile defense because I trust American engineers far more than third world lunatics.

They've all been replaced with H1-B visa holders from India. Make certain you trust them.

The original Star Wars was a feelgood pork project. A new version would be much the same. The problem of course is that you have to kill the missile early in the boost phase of operation. That phase doesn't last long, and if you go detonating your enemy's missile over another country, you almost certainly make yourself another enemy. If it makes it to your airspace to be detonated, you still have a failure what with EMP and radioactive snowflakes and all. How are people going to access their facebook? Ooops, sorry, cheap shot.

Are we any better now? Electronics certainly is, but there still isn't much time to react. And in a country where everything is considered "too expensive" any more, And the political situation abroad, I don't think planting the equivalent of ABM's right against the borders of our enemies - which in your case, appears to be everyone - will happen.

These considerations are't even political - they are some physics issues, which in the past have proven remarkably resilient to votes on whether they were true or not.

Re:Technology continues its rapid advance

[Anonymous Coward]

Wha?

Who thinks that we really dropped the development of ballistic missile defense systems?

Last I heard we were surrounding Russia with them as a means to defeating Iranian missiles... um... yeah

http://www.johnstonsarchive.net/nuclear/bmd.html

Re:Technology continues its rapid advance

[RoccamOccam]

The problem of course is that you have to kill the missile early in the boost phase of operation. That phase doesn't last long, and if you go detonating your enemy's missile over another country, you almost certainly make yourself another enemy.

I'm pretty confident that a space-based missile defense would not be "detonating" an enemy missile. If anything could be done, it would be to destroy the missile, almost certainly before it was even armed.

Re:Technology continues its rapid advance

[pr0fessor]

This is why there are all these crazy plans to colonize Mars... Those are the people that are ready to say "You want a war, go nutz! I'm out of here, go fight with yourself."

Re:Technology continues its rapid advance

[larkost]

Third world lunatics don't need intercontinental ballistic missiles; those are only useful when you are in a shooting war and need to have it delivered in 40-minutes-or-less (or your money back). It would be much easier to sail a nuclear weapon into New York harbor on a personal yacht. It would not have quite the destructive effect since it would be at ground level, but for such a lunatic that would not be the point.

Re:Technology continues its rapid advance

[Anonymous Coward]

But you would probably have to detonate something in order to destroy it. Which may cause wreckage to fall over a third nation, including the nuclear warhead...

Re:Technology continues its rapid advance

[Anonymous Coward]

Of course not. A laser burns a small hole in the hull of a missile, and it'll tear itself apart in midair. Also, detonate? Seriously? It's so hard to get nuclear weapons to detonate AT ALL under the most controlled circumstances, and he thinks it might happen accidentally?

Re:Technology continues its rapid advance

[whodunit]

I typed up a nice long reply that just vanished because my browser crashed, and Pale Moon doesn't deign to backup form data. So you know what? You're gonna get the reply you deserve. For starters, you're wrong. The SM-3 missile is an ABM missile launchable from US Navy warships, which means we can - and have - posted ABM capability offshore anywhere we can park a destroyer, including, most recently the Med. Secondly, we can put this weaponry in shore installations, like the one we are building right now in Romania, which is pretty much at Russia's doorstep when it comes to them threatening the area with nukes: http://news.usni.org/2015/12/1... Furthermore, it's no longer the 80s. Terminal intercept is a licked problem, as the Army's Terminal High Altitude Air Defense system's track record demonstrates: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... Just in case the continued excellent track record of Iron Dome didn't clue you in. Furthermore, hitting a missile does not make its nuclear payload detonate, as evidenced by multiple Broken Arrow incidents where the conventional plastique in the bomb detonated without causing a nuclear blast.

Anyhow, thanks for revealing your fearful nature.

Maybe I'm just a poor lonely neocon nutcase clinging to my guns and religion, but in a world where China - which has developed extensive CONVENTIONAL ballistic missile weapons - is drawing closer to a seemingly inevitable confrontation with the US: http://www.theatlantic.com/int... and a newly aggressive Russia (currently invading the Ukraine) currently threatening to use their nukes to counter any tactical, conventional defeats: http://news.usni.org/2016/01/2... and sending nuclear-cruise missile armed subs to patrol right off the US East coast, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08... I think I'm entitled to some moderate level of concern. In fact, you'd have to be a god damned idiot to not feel some concern.

Re:Technology continues its rapid advance

[barc0001]

You do realize that no Islamic dictatorship would ever launch a nuke in a missile at the US right? Because that would be an open invitation and a clear marker for the US to blow them off the map. Those nukes on missiles will be used against their neighbors. Or, if the US will be attacked by one, it will happen when the nuke comes into a harbor aboard a container ship and detonates well before anyone can inspect said container ship. Spending a ton of money on missile defense will not help with either of those usage cases.

Re:Technology continues its rapid advance

[Anonymous Coward]

Calm your cold little neo-con heart

Countries do not nuke their trade partners, which includes the US/China relationship

Russia is on the outs trade-wise, but they are far more likely to attack China that the West, and fortunately China is our buddy

You really need to stop watching old John Birch propaganda and catch up on world events

Re:Technology continues its rapid advance

[Ol Olsoc]

I'm pretty confident that a space-based missile defense would not be "detonating" an enemy missile. If anything could be done, it would be to destroy the missile, almost certainly before it was even armed.

Arm early. Late in the boost phase, have it armed, and any large change in angular momentum, will result in ye olde earth shattering kaboom. Along with resultant EMP.

Oddly enough, that might be a better outcome than us destroying a missile and raining Pu on another country.

Or of course, lotsa dummies. Have the country with the defense system punch itself out so to speak.

Star Wars is merely the last action before MAD. You have to hope you have good intel, then if the threat is credible. immediately and prreduce the offending country to rubble. Then you have the rest of the world's reaction to contend with, but you kept the nucs from being launched in the first place.

The nclear option mostly sucks any way you look at it. But if you have to use it, you can't be half-assed about it.

Re:Technology continues its rapid advance

[Ol Olsoc]

This is why there are all these crazy plans to colonize Mars... Those are the people that are ready to say "You want a war, go nutz! I'm out of here, go fight with yourself."

It is the problem when half the population only has the reptile part of their brain functional.

Re:Technology continues its rapid advance

[Ol Olsoc]

I For starters, you're wrong.

Well hell, why didn't you just say that before, an the argument would have been over a long time ago!

Maybe I'm just a poor lonely neocon nutcase clinging to my guns and religion, but in a world where China - which has developed extensive CONVENTIONAL ballistic missile weapons - is drawing closer to a seemingly inevitable confrontation with the US:

Tell me dear neocon, whom in the world do you not want to wage war upon? We simply do not have enough money to take on the entire world, and the likelihood of China going to war with her largest trading partner is like sawing off the limb you are sitting on - financially suicidal.

But if you figure that we are going into a nucllear exchange with our largest trading partner, you at heart want war with the rest of the world.

and sending nuclear-cruise missile armed subs to patrol right off the US East coast,

And we haven't done the same? To anyone? Ever? You are going to have to get it into your head that the US isn't the sole remaining superpower in the world. That is an unstable situation, as the Neocons proved in the early years of this century. Completely squandering America's wealth in one unnecessary war, and now, pissing away our wealth and reputation in the longest war in US history.

Don't get me wrong - under the right circumstances, I'd reluctantly light the rest of the world on fire. then I'd enjoy a good night's sleep. Unfortunately you and your ilk want to light it on fire for almost anything. That's what internalized fear does to ya.

I think I'm entitled to some moderate level of concern. In fact, you'd have to be a god damned idiot to not feel some concern.

Hey, I am an ass, and an idiot. Make no mistake about that. However, I fear very little. I suspect that is beyond your comprehension.

But if there is one thing this ass an idiot has seen in this world, it's that people consumed by fear make really really bad decisions, and have a marked tendency to fuck things up royally. I just have to remember to tell myself, I'm the weird one.

Regardless, enjoy your fear. It's an addiction for some.

Rods of God

[swb]

Seems like the ideal weapon to use against DPRK launch targets. Enough destructive power and penetrating ability to use against primary launch sites or bunkers, yet almost undetectable enough against a country like DPRK that you might even get away with plausible deniability and blame target destruction on a mishap.

Re:Rods of God

[GameboyRMH]

I don't imagine it would be too hard to trace the source of a Rod from God. They should show up on military radar for one thing. The best bet at plausible deniability would be to blame a meteor, but a targeted nation will only buy that line once at most.

Re:Rods of God

[Penguinisto]

I was thinking something similar... after all, why keep depending on old-fashioned nukes? We got railguns - why not work on miniaturization (of sorts) and launching same into orbit*? If nothing else, we could do the relatively low-tech route of carefully aiming large meteors at a city (or seven) that needs to die, wiping 'em off the map completely without so much as a single sievert of radiation as byproduct.

* yes, yes - treaties and such... but if used purely for defensive purposes, I think it counts as utilizing a loophole.

Re:Rods of God

[avandesande]

I have to disagree- the research on limited yield 'bunker buster' missiles is much more import. Aside from disagreements about using nuclear weapons, it seems that it would be much more important to destroy them before they were launched. In addition, anyone familiar with the tunnels at the north/south border and the conventional artillery pointed at Seoul would understand their utility.

Re:Rods of God

[avandesande]

Or maybe I agree? Are we talking about the same thing :-)

Re:Rods of God

[avandesande]

Miniaturization and railguns don't really go together. Not really sure why research on compulsator power sources has stalled....

Re:Rods of God

[swb]

If the wikipedia page is to believed, they're very hard to spot. The launch signature from orbit is probably beyond the detection of anyone other than the Russians or the Chinese.

The high strike angle, low radar cross section and impact velocity of mach 10 would probably render them not detectable on all but the most advanced missile detection systems.

My guess is that blast forensics would be the giveaway that it wasn't a localized accident, but the general state of repair of DPRK infrastructure and their proven dishonesty and secrecy would mean only high resolution reconnaissance imagery would be the only way to verify DPRK claims. Since DPRK is likely to deny incompetence or bad systems as the source of any problems, even if it was true, their claims of sabotage would likely lack credibility anyway.

Re:Rods of God

[Anonymous Coward]

However, the Treaty does not prohibit the placement of conventional weapons in orbit.

Rocks are the third most conventional weapon type throughout human history!
(Sticks are second, and unarmed combat is first)

Re:Rods of God

[Anonymous Coward]

With a large enough Rod, you only need one shot.

Might actually make some sense now

[JoshuaZ]

This actually makes a bit more sense than it did in the 1980s. The technology has improved but more importantly this will be only defending against a small number of missiles. One of the big issues was that it wasn't feasible to scale up a system that could defend against a massive number of advanced missiles with good countermeasures and decoys from the USSR or China. But this would only need to defend against a very small number of missiles without sophisticated countermeasures. Probably not worth the cost but it at least makes more sense than it did in the 1980s.

Re:Might actually make some sense now

[Brett Buck]

Unable to achieve 100% intercept rate with SDI was not a "big issue". It was hyped as a big issue by people wanting to discredit the effort, mostly by smart-ass journalists and other ivy-league "intellectual" types to mock Reagan and make him seem like an imbecile. Achieving even a 10% intercept rate would be materially useful and save millions of lives, 50% tens of millions, and 75% a few hundred million.

          That's what they were mocking - a man trying to save American lives. In the end, he ended up more-or-less ending the threat of world destruction from the Cold war.

          Brett

Re:Might actually make some sense now

[Anonymous Coward]

Certainly missile defense makes more sense...I'm not sure that space based does. The problem with space-based defense is that most of the time, your satellite is in the wrong place. So you need LOTS of them to ensure that Kim doesn't just shoot when they aren't in the right place.

Re:Might actually make some sense now

[Kohath]

Complaints about this in the past basically amounted to the Nirvana Fallacy: it can never work good enough to completely protect us with absolute certainty, so let's do nothing instead.

Re:Might actually make some sense now

[Nidi62]

Complaints about this in the past basically amounted to the Nirvana Fallacy: it can never work good enough to completely protect us with absolute certainty, so let's do nothing instead.

Wasn't it more the fact that the Soviets had so many nuclear weapons that it simply wouldn't have mattered? And SDI really only works against ICBMs. Even if it had a 50% intercept rate that still leaves thousands of missiles. There there are aircraft armed with nuclear bombs/missiles, submarine-based nuclear missiles, you name it. The best case scenario had we fully developed SDI and there was a nuclear war was that you would have a slightly better chance of not getting bombed but would probably still end up dying from the fallout/long term consequences of having half the country nuked.

Re:Might actually make some sense now

[hey!]

Well, how close you get to 100% matters, and the amount it matters depends on the scale of the threat you're dealing with.

Suppose you are 90% effective. That's well worth it when you're talking about an adversary with the capability of striking you with ten, or even a hundred warheads, especially if they're small and unreliable. Russia currently has 1800 deployed warheads, with a stockpile of some 8500. But let's say conservatively in a period of high tensions the Soviets have a thousand warhead targeted at the US. 90% effective would mean we get hit with about 100 warheads, which in the Soviet era ICBMs were in the 3-5 MT range, or 200x to 300x the yield of the Hiroshima bomb. Two or three, or even a half dozen such warheads would be survivable for a certain value of "survive", but a hundred would mean a highly probable total collapse of our society.

Now at the risk of sounding like a scare-quotes-intellectual, you really ought to consider how the opponent in this game will perceive and react to your missile defense system. If a hypothetical missile defense system is 100% effective or very close to it, it's game over; your enemy's missile arsenal is just useless junk. But if we're talking 90% effective, we're talking about a system which cannot stop the enemy arsenal from destroying us, provided that arsenal is intact.

So if you are a defense planner in the Kremlin, what is your assessment of this situation? That the Americans are stupid? Or that they intend to whittle down your arsenal with a first nuclear strike and then whittle down the survivors with the missile defense system? And if you are in a tense situation with the Americans, how does this affect your decision making? Do you use your arsenal early or risk losing it later?

So yes, those of us "intellectuals" with the handicap of being educated do rather think how close a missile defense system gets to 100% matters quite a bit. How close it has to be varies by situation of course. A 10% effectiveness rate would be materially useful against North Korea; it would have been merely destabilizing against the Soviets.

Re:Might actually make some sense now

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't think you understand how many bombs and missiles Russia had during the Cold War. In 1988, Russia had ~45,000 nuclear devices, spread across ICBMs, submarine launched missiles, bomber dropped bombs, etc. Many of them were MIRV designs, which had up to 14 active warheads (and possibly dozens of decoy warheads) in them, all of which were substantially more powerful than the Hiroshima nuke.

In a full scale nuclear war, most of those would be launched. If you took out 99% of them, that would still be 450+ nuclear detonations substantially more powerful than the bombs dropped on Hiroshima. If civilian population centers are the main targets, and they managed to hit each of the 450 largest cities in the U.S., that's a detonation in every city from Scranton, PA up, covering a huge percentage of the population with direct explosive effects, and the suburbs of these cities would all be within the range of lethal radioactive fallout.

And that's before we get into the nuclear winter issues. The models for a nuclear winter that could devastate global food production (a drop of several degrees Celsius) only require about 50 Hiroshima sized detonations in a "small", regional exchange. If 450 U.S. cities burned to the ground, and a similar number of Russian targets, it would cause a decades long ice age. And that's with 99% success rates shooting down missiles. With a 75% success rate? You're dead. Live in a bunker in the middle of nowhere? Better have enough canned food to last a few hundred years, and seed stores for your great-great-great-great-great-grandchildren to plant.

Sure, it's better than the whole planet's surface being nuked directly. But it just encourages your enemy to build even more nukes (you'll notice, the Russians hit peak missiles at the end of Reagan's term in office) to get through the defenses. Which raises the risk of a malfunction leading to a missile launch, or one of the many missiles getting lost (or stolen, or sold for profit to terrorists). If either side had wanted to destroy the world, they could have, and SDI (particularly 1980s tech SDI) was never going to change that.

Re:Might actually make some sense now

[Anonymous Coward]

STFU republitard. I cum in your mom's mouth.

Now is that un-intellectual enough for you to understand?

Re:Might actually make some sense now

[Anonymous Coward]

10% is worthless when your enemy can launch 10 inbounds on each target of interest.

10% wouldn't have saved anyone. All it would do is make Russia launch/maintain 2x as many launch vehicles (spend more money). Between multiple actual warheads and decoys, MIRVs, and other multipliers, 10% is fucking worthless and you're a goddammed idiot.

Reagan was not a moron. He was dishonest scum, but he wasn't stupid. he *spent* the USSR into defeat. It wasn't a workable Star Wars they wanted, it was something to force the Soviet's economy into collapse. SW was just what they could sell to congress and the people.

Re:Might actually make some sense now

[Orgasmatron]

SDI was/would have been worth it for any of 3 distinct reasons.

First, life. If it worked when needed, even a little, as you pointed out, it would have saved millions of lives.

Second, MAD. By defending our retaliatory capability, it would have enhanced the A and the D, further increasing the costs of an initial attack.

Third, Strategy of Technology (google it). Chasing us helped bankrupt the soviets. Communism produces mostly poverty, at a time when the west was producing apparently endless wealth. The soviets could afford to keep up with two or three fields, but at the cost of everything else. They won the first stage of the space race, but in the long run our computers made our shitty rockets safe, and took us to the moon first. Still, it was close enough for the soviets to retain some credibility. Computerized lasers in space? Pack it in and hope you get out alive.

(By the way, I'm a typical American boy who had rocket trading cards as a kid, and once upon a time could recognize and name every launch vehicle, capsule and variant we ever used. Don't take my comment about our shitty rockets the wrong way. As rocket motors get bigger and/or more efficient, the cost of controlling them mechanically, or with analog electronics, multiplies.

The end of this road is the SSME. Without digital control, the SSME would explode long before you could even start the pumps that feed the precombustion chamber that powers the pumps that keep the engines from exploding. If you don't have access to digital computers, if you haven't lived with them long enough to trust them with your life, this is a shitty design because the only difference between the SSME and a bomb is a couple milligrams of doped silicon.

Keep in mind that in 1982 we (allegedly) blew up a soviet pipeline by planting an easter egg in a digital control system which we quietly allowed the soviets to acquire. After that, it should be pretty obvious that they couldn't make their own computerized laser platform using stolen computers. They either needed to develop a computer industry fast, or go without space weapon platforms. The western press (their allies) tried their best to ridicule the idea so that they wouldn't lose too much face by going without, but that backfired by drawing so much attention to it.

Possony and Pournelle deserve medals.)

Re: Might actually make some sense now

[Anonymous Coward]

I can't help but notice what the "smart-ass journalists and other ivy-league "intellectual" types" are carrying on about these days.

Re:Might actually make some sense now

[Anonymous Coward]

Buddy nobody needed to mock Regan to make him seem like an imbecile. The man did that plenty fine on his own. Go look up a movie called "Bed time for Bonzo" and watch Ronnie literally get out-acted by a chimpanzee.

SDI was 75% pie in the sky bullshit pork, and 50% cold war era propaganda, and another 75% pie in the sky bullshit pork.

If you take a physicist, employ him at a defense contractor, hand him a check, and ask him to do what he considers impossible at current technology levels he's going to say "This is impossible" but he will take the check and write up a nice report, and go about his day. (Even though the report will be marked classified-for-fucking-ever because it's inconvenient)

There was no conspiracy by your imagined liberal enemies to discredit conservative god Ronald Ray Gun. If you catch 10% of nukes, we're all dead. If you catch 50%, we're all dead. If you catch 75%, we're probably all still dead and there's a chance the survivors get to play live action mad max for the next century or two.

That said:

We did learn a lot during SDI and it's now understood that within the next 20 years ballistic misses will become obsolete. We've come a looooooooong way since the 80s. (Also consider anything that can shoot down a ICBM can easily shoot down an aircraft. Or sink a warship. Yeah, things are gonna get interesting)

But SDI wasn't sold as a 40-50 year program. It was implied we'd be shooting down Rusky nukes before the new millenium.

Re:Might actually make some sense now

[obsess5]

You do realize Ivy-League "intellectuals" were also among those doing the research, however misguided, on SDI?

And Reagan was going to give the Star Wars technology to the USSR, presumably to prevent the "early use" problem? Is Cruz also going to give away this technology to North Korea et al?

Reagan, the man who brought battleships out of mothballs to shell Lebanon and then put them back in mothballs.

Lastly, if SDI had been completed under Reagan and had the Soviet Union launched an attack, the timing of our response probably would have been governed by Nancy's astrologer. A cheap shot? Yeah. Mocking? Yeah. True? Who knows. Go read Colin Powell's autobiography published in the 1990s. When he worked for Reagan, he noticed the strange timing of events; his colleagues clued him in to the reason why. Wow, a Hollywood astrologer had a significant influence on the most powerful nation on earth ... well, at least she probably wasn't a Hollywood liberal--they're the worst.

Re:Might actually make some sense now

[Anonymous Coward]

In traditional American nuclear doctrine, missile defense was to save missiles, not lives. It was meant to improve the surviability of our retaliatory capability and thus our deterrent. We gave up our original missile defense system because SLBMs made our force far more survivable. ICBMs, which at the same time started getting multiple warheads, turned into a counter-force capability, which doesn't really need to be particularly survivable.

Of course, this all relied on two things--our subs were undetectable and the Russians didn't want to lose their cities. There is some real fear that technology breakthroughs could be a danger to our subs. And when we are talking about places like NK, we aren't really sure they don't want to lose their cities. This is why we need to go back and visit nuclear doctrine and SDI is part of that.

As an aside, this is precisely why the USAF wanted to base ICBMs on the moon. A successful preemptive counter-force strike was impossible. We would literally see it coming for days. We could have pulled the bombers off alert and walked back from a nuclear hair-trigger. It would have actually been safer for all involved... .. which might explain renewed interest in the moon and space exploration by various nuclear powers.

Re:Might actually make some sense now

[cold fjord]

One of the key things that people are overlooking is the uncertainty that SDI injects into calculations. SDI makes the chances of a successful first strike or decapitation strike much more uncertain. That helps deterrence greatly.

Re:Might actually make some sense now

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey look at your user name. See anything in there? Now look at the bottom of your post. Exact same fucking thing, repeated! You're an idiot.

Re:Might actually make some sense now

[Anonymous Coward]

SSMEs can be controlled using analogue controllers, implemented in ICs. The digital computer isn't the differentiator, the integrated circuit is. Once you have an IC, digital is an obvious way to go, but there's nothing preventing an analog solution. We had good enough bipolar analog processes in the mid-70s, and plenty of know-how to design good analog controllers. That's not to say that those wouldn't have various discrete signal paths, either in terms of discrete set of values or time discretization (e.g. switched capacitor systems). The control equations for SSMEs are not all that hard to implement using analog computing elements.

Presumably so he can call them "Cruz Missiles"

[Jahta]

I'm here all week :-)

Re:Presumably so he can call them "Cruz Missiles"

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd rather see some gold plated TRUMP MISSILES go bomb the shit out of North Korea.

Re:Presumably so he can call them "Cruz Missiles"

[jez9999]

Lasers will Trump missiles anytime.

Where do you think the STEM jobs come from?

[Anonymous Coward]

Typical slashdotter -

Today:
Ohohoho - Cruz so funny with his backwater thinking and trying to build advanced defense technologies in space which is nothing more than a wet dream. He ate boogers too... I so smart.

Yesterday:
WHY R THERE NO STEM JOBS?!?! WHY NOT GOVERNMENT MAKE STEM JOBS?!? BERNIE SANDERS HELP ME MAK STEM JOBS!!!

Morons.

Re:Where do you think the STEM jobs come from?

[Beavertank]

Maybe the "morons" would like STEM jobs that contribute to the people, not ones that contribute to defense contractors at the expense of the people.

But no, you're probably right, those two positions are completely irreconcilable and only an idiot would ever decline to give up their principles in search of job growth.

Re:Where do you think the STEM jobs come from?

[Anonymous Coward]

STEM jobs that contribute to "the people"

Please, spare me your self-righteous claptrap - SDI is just as much for "the people" as GMO science and nuclear reactors are... oh wait, we can't have those either because those aren't for "the people" as you deem it.

The fact of the matter is that SDI not only increased space and physics knowhow but funded tons of side-engineering projects (many of which didn't go to *gasp* teh evil defense contractors which, BTW, are also "people" but to pure research and development to experiment with).

All government funding - ALL GOVERNMENT FUNDING - goes to mega corps and political cronies. What - you actually think Obama and the Democrats massive funding expenditures were for "the people"? Hell no - all the money went to politically approved corps and groups (and states)

Crazy Cruz

[OzPeter]

A small government conservative proposing pork barrel politics to counter a non-realistic threat in order to seem like he is the big man on the international stage solely for the purpose of getting elected.

As has been mentioned a lot of times before Kim thrives on crazy threats, and China needs a relatively stable NK (that doesn't actually carry out stupid shit) in order to maintain a buffer.

Re:Crazy Cruz

[Anonymous Coward]

They don't mind if people starve in the streets or die from treatable conditions, as long as North Korea can't hurt them.

Re:Crazy Cruz

[Penguinisto]

...China needs a relatively stable NK (that doesn't actually carry out stupid shit) in order to maintain a buffer.

This brings up a fun question:

A "buffer" against... what? Puny South Korea? A Japan that is too demographically old/rich/disinterested in China to bother invading? The Philippines? Mongolia?

Historically, I get it - post-WWII, fears of Japan and such were rather justified. But it's been what, 70 years and a metric shitload of geopolitical changes? Pretty sure the whole buffer idea is a bit, shall we say, outdated.

Re:Crazy Cruz

[sumdumass]

I suppose you think you have made some sort of point by specifically mentioning small government conservative. I guess maybe you did but it isn't the one you think. Small government conservatives recognize constitutional powers and defense is a legitimate constitutional power. In other words, defense spending does not go against the small government conservative ideology.

So I guess if you had a point, it might be that you talk about stuff you don't understand.

Re:Crazy Cruz

[myowntrueself]

...China needs a relatively stable NK (that doesn't actually carry out stupid shit) in order to maintain a buffer.

This brings up a fun question:

A "buffer" against... what? Puny South Korea? A Japan that is too demographically old/rich/disinterested in China to bother invading? The Philippines? Mongolia?

Historically, I get it - post-WWII, fears of Japan and such were rather justified. But it's been what, 70 years and a metric shitload of geopolitical changes? Pretty sure the whole buffer idea is a bit, shall we say, outdated.

The main reason for the existance of NK was to break up Korea and prevent a unified Korea from being an economic powerhouse dominating North Asia.

People look at NK today and its a basket case. But if Korea hadn't been broken up and that unified Korea had been under an economic management such as developed in South Korea, the agricultural wealth of the south and the mineral wealth of the north would have resulted in a nation which would be able to challenge even China, would have dwarfed Japan and would have been seen by the Soviet Union as a threat to their Eastern maritimes. South Korea has been doing pretty well industrially, great shipbuilding and other heavy industries. But thats nothing compared to what Korea COULD have been.

Consequently it was in the interest of all the regional powers, including the USA, to ensure that Korea was broken up.

For the Chinese, NK isn't a buffer in the normal sense of the world; its a handicap they are imposing on Korea as a whole.

Re:Crazy Cruz

[OzPeter]

defense spending does not go against the small government conservative ideology.

Pork barrel spending on anythings is not small government ideology in any way shape or form.

Re:Crazy Cruz

[OzPeter]

A "buffer" against... what?

A buffer against a few million NK refugees is a probably a good place to start.

But it's been what, 70 years and a metric shitload of geopolitical changes? Pretty sure the whole buffer idea is a bit, shall we say, outdated.

But do you really think that the people who control china have a modern mindset?

Re:Crazy Cruz

[sumdumass]

Pork barrel spending is little more of an opinion. I dismissed that part after the small government conservative line.

And no. I do not consider it pork barrel spending. You may have a different opinion but it doesn't mean you are right.

Re:Crazy Cruz

[Anonymous Coward]

A buffer against the US.

A united Korea, means there's a HUGE possibility of the US being right on the border with China.

Re:Crazy Cruz

[bluegutang]

The main reason for the existance of NK was to break up Korea and prevent a unified Korea from being an economic powerhouse dominating North Asia. People look at NK today and its a basket case. But if Korea hadn't been broken up and that unified Korea had been under an economic management such as developed in South Korea, the agricultural wealth of the south and the mineral wealth of the north would have resulted in a nation which would be able to challenge even China, would have dwarfed Japan and would have been seen by the Soviet Union as a threat to their Eastern maritimes.

Really? 75 million North+South Koreans would have dwarfed 125 million Japanese, and challenged 1.3 billion Chinese? Hard to believe.

End sanctions?

[Anonymous Coward]

What about just ending sanctions against North Korea?

Great Idea

[Anonymous Coward]

Let's revive a weapons system viewed by the rest of the world as an attempt to immunize one of the only nuclear powers to refuse to agree to a non first strike treaty from the deterrent effect of mutually assured destruction. Nobody would view that as a design to give the United States the ability to launch a pre-emptive nuclear attack while immunizing them from retaliation. This can only de-escalate nuclear tensions.

I doubt SDI was ever really shelved

[dcavanaugh]

All Cruz proposes to do is admit that the research never really stopped, and take a look at deploying what we have. It would certainly be prudent to do SOMETHING to defend against rogue states (Iran, NK).

Re:I doubt SDI was ever really shelved

[Beavertank]

...and, in deploying it, open the door to militarizing space. Because what we really need to do is extend the worst parts of our nature to space too, right?

Re:I doubt SDI was ever really shelved

[Anonymous Coward]

All Cruz is doing is lipservice to the public. With as much saber rattling as these rogue states have done, do you honestly think that the US, UK or other countries don't have some sort of plan to take them down?

Cruz is just trying to take advantage of some public fear by tying his name to something seen as "good".

Re:I doubt SDI was ever really shelved

[Anonymous Coward]

Has it occurred to you that the correct "something" that we should be doing is saying
"tsk tsk", while shaking our heads, whenever their craziness comes out?

Like shooting fish in a barrel: no fun

[Anonymous Coward]

When everyone knows the actual purpose of SDI (to redistribute wealth by taxing you and giving it to expensive contractors who just happen to be someone-in-government's-brother) it's kind of hard to muster up the energy to go for the zinger. *sigh* "A Subsidy-launched Cruz Missile?" Lame. I want to say I tried, but I didn't.

I think the big thing the Fear Party needs to worry about, is becoming too transparent and obvious. Cruz is basically telling Fear Party voters, "Since I know you're a coward, that gives me a way to get you to spend more money." The Bleeding Heart Party has that kind of transparency too but nobody gets insulted by being called a bleeding heart, so it doesn't work against them quite as badly.

Either way, though, I am tired of these basically non-political parties. We need to get the Libertarians and Socialists more into the limelight so somebody out there will give enough of a fuck to bother voting in November. Right now, it looks like conservatives and liberals might not have anyone on their ballots to vote for, and it's not like people are going to write in.

The threats have grown since Reagan

[Anonymous Coward]

It would be wise to restart the program given the aggression to the DPRK, China, and Russia. Denying them a first strike capability opens up options.

SDI as part of the nuclear arms race

[Anonymous Coward]

The more we invest in defending against a first strike the more we chip away at MAD... Be careful what you wish for.

Launch phase

[mdsolar]

The threat is against South Korea and US forces in Japan. Seems like launch phase rather than ballistic phase interception would be best. Star wars wouldn't work. Need Navy or Air Force systems.

Re:Launch phase

[Fire_Wraith]

We already have capable enough defenses for countering North Korea, both in terms of vs South Korea and Japan, as well as Guam/Hawaii and theoretical attacks on the US west coast. The only thing left to do is to deploy them to cover places (like South Korea) where we don't have them yet, and we're in talks with South Korea on it right now. These include THAAD, Aegis Cruisers/Destroyers armed with the SM-3 missile, both ours and the ones we've sold to Japan. South Korea has Aegis Destroyers, but is still using the SM-2 which isn't as useful against ballistic missiles.

And that's before we get to the stuff the Missile Defense Agency has based in Alaska.

We already HAVE the most cost effective stuff that's leftover from SDI, and it's more than enough to protect against North Korea. Anything else is just more pork being tossed at defense contracting firms, unless you think we should be building it to counter China/Russia, and that's going to be ridiculously expensive, nevermind destabilizing.

Re:Launch phase

[mdsolar]

Alaska seem too distant to defend Japan from North Korea.

Waiting for the reaction

[CanadianMacFan]

When China says go ahead, that's a great idea to militarize space, and we might just build one ourselves. Thanks for opening the door Ted.

Re:Waiting for the reaction

[Beavertank]

As if Ted Cruz ever thinks through a single one of his awful policy proposals to their logical conclusion...

A Informática

[samoliveira]

SOLUÇÕES PARA WEB

Desenvolvedor Web é o termo utilizado para descrever o desenvolvimento de sites, na Internet ou numa intranet. Este é o profissional que trabalha na Criação de Sites, podendo ser um Web Designer (Desenvolvedor do Layout), ou Web Developer(Desenvolvedor de sistemas).

Criação de Sistemassão fundamentais quando a necessidade é concentrar e disponibilizar informações na Web ou em rede corporativa, através de acesso restrito ou público pelos usuários via internet utilizando um Browser (Navegador de Internet), de qualquer lugar do mundo, a qualquer hora do dia e da noite, através de um computador pessoal, tablet ou smartphone, de forma simples, rápida e segura.

Hotsites são projetos para a internet utilizados em ações de marketing como promoções, lançamentos de produtos e eventos. A Criação de HotSitesenvolve, prazos de produção reduzidos, grande apelo visual e chamadas de conversão como cadastros, inscrições e compartilhamento em mídias sociais.

Loja Virtualdesigna uma página na Internet com um software de gerenciamento de pedidos (carrinho de compras ou cesto de compras) na qual empresas oferecem e vendem seus produtos. Os clientes acessam o site, escolhem os produtos para aquisição e recebem estes produtos em casa.

Prover o site de constantes atualizações é algo de muita importância, pois desperta o interesse de novas visitas, atrai novos visitantes e aumenta a popularidade de seu site.Parte importante do serviço de atualização e Manutenção de Sitesão estratégias de atualização do conteúdo visando tornar o site mais atrativo para seu público alvo.

Servidor de Hospedagemé um serviço que possibilita a pessoas ou empresas com sistemas online a guardar informações, imagens, vídeo, ou qualquer conteúdo acessível por Web. Provedores de Hospedagem de Sites tipicamente são empresas que fornecem um espaço em seus servidores e conexão à internet a estes dados aos seus clientes.

SOLUÇÕES PARA WEB: Criação de Sites, Sistemas e Hotsites, Criação de Loja Virtual, Criação de Aplicativos, Manutenção de Site, Servidor de Hospedagem

Riding the corpse of Zombie Reagan

[Beavertank]

I know the GOP is the party of pimping out Zombie Reagan, and they're favorite past-time is cherry picking things about the man to back up what they want to do now, but reviving Star Wars? Really? They're not even trying to pretend they didn't jump the shark now.

Re:Riding the corpse of Zombie Reagan

[ausekilis]

Another prime example of this pimping was back in 2012. Even Colbert called them out when referring to Romney. "They love Ronald Reagan so much they nominated his haircut for President!"

Re:Riding the corpse of Zombie Reagan

[phantomfive]

It could be worse. If Trump becomes popular as a president (notice I didn't say good), then we'll have to keep hearing about him and how great he was for the next 30 years.

Re:Riding the corpse of Zombie Reagan

[cold fjord]

I guess that the US deployment of a working ballistic missile defense system slipped right by you? The portion based on the Aegis air defense system works particularly well.

You seem to know a lot about zombies.

Re:Riding the corpse of Zombie Reagan

[dywolf]

the mistake here is in thinking that SDI ever actually went away.
It didn't.

It changed names several times, but the research has continued this entire time.

Re:Riding the corpse of Zombie Reagan

[Anonymous Coward]

Even Colbert?

Wow, that's......predictable.

rescue the people of North Korea . . .

[swell]

A tiny smart bomb, aimed at the Supreme Commander's location could save the lives and well-being of countless deprived citizens of N. Korea. It might be the greatest humanitarian action of this century. It would cost almost nothing to accomplish. Or we could do what we always do and kill citizens and soldiers by the thousands while leaving evil kings and dictators to continue their course. Even if our smart bomb missed the little guy it would give him something to think about and an incentive for him to change his attitude.

Re:rescue the people of North Korea . . .

[myowntrueself]

A tiny smart bomb, aimed at the Supreme Commander's location could save the lives and well-being of countless deprived citizens of N. Korea. It might be the greatest humanitarian action of this century. It would cost almost nothing to accomplish. Or we could do what we always do and kill citizens and soldiers by the thousands while leaving evil kings and dictators to continue their course. Even if our smart bomb missed the little guy it would give him something to think about and an incentive for him to change his attitude.

Ok lets see.

Millions of starving people kept in check by an oppressive regime. Remove repressive regime. Whats millions of starving people, who now have no overwhelming political or military control directing their lives, going to do? What could possibly go wrong? My guess is they'd eat one another. Then eat the South Koreans, Chinese and Russians.

Re:rescue the people of North Korea . . .

[Locke2005]

That's an interesting question... can you launch a smart missile that can't ultimately be traced back to it's source country? Is it possible to commit and act of war that cannot be retaliated for because the victim can't prove who is responsible for the act in the first place? Sounds like a good plot for the next Mission Impossible movie...

Not surprised...

[Jawnn]

...because Republican presidential politics has become all about dick size. Heaven forbid they actually address real issues, that affect real Americans, every day. No. They think we'd rather hear about ways to beat down a noisy, but ultimately inconsequential petty dictator.

Re:Not surprised...

[iggymanz]

you are so funny since the Democrat admin doesn't address real foreign policy issues with anything substantial or effective.

NK dictator is NOT inconsequential, we have allies that are threatened by them (SK and Japan)

Re:Not surprised...

[Locke2005]

Strangely enough, on the Democrat side, Hillary is winning the dick size contest... I always suspected there was something special about her!

SDI.NET Part Deux

[Anonymous Coward]

Cuckoo eggs always on the menu.

Too much high tech

[NotQuiteReal]

We should just build a wall around NK.

And get MX to pay for it.

What?

[s.petry]

Maybe in your Utopian view welfare is great for an economy, but to many of us it is a method of redistributing some wealth to a poverty class. This has the effect of primarily getting support from that class. It further ensures that the people in poverty remain in poverty and dependent on the political class for support.

Milton Friedman lays this out very well. Time for you to do some homework.

Re:What?

[Bartles]

Shut up. If you're opposed to welfare, you hate poor people.

Re:What?

[s.petry]

Unfortunately it's quite the opposite. As a person who came from extreme poverty, as well as being a student of Economics and Philosophy, I am not blind to the game.

Re:What?

[Bartles]

I forgot the sarcasm tags. I'm totally on your side.

Re:What?

[dywolf]

Friedman is an idiot.

You know why the Great Recession wasn't the Second Great Depression, even though that actual crash was much worse?
Because of all those public assistance programs kept money flowing in the economy.
That's what safety net programs do: they arrest a crashing economy, slowing its fall, and reducing its impact.

Re:What?

[JackieBrown]

Friedman is an idiot.

You know why the Great Recession wasn't the Second Great Depression, even though that actual crash was much worse?
Because of all those public assistance programs kept money flowing in the economy.
That's what safety net programs do: they arrest a crashing economy, slowing its fall, and reducing its impact.

Except the government interface is what led to that recession

Re:What?

[operagost]

I love when some amateur internet "economist" dismisses a great economist as an idiot and, as proof, holds up public assistance programs as if they are net wealth creators.

Re:What?

[Anonymous Coward]

While I don't have any attachment to the particular structuring of the current US welfare schemes, the general idea of giving money to the poor seems like a good idea. Either way the poor need food, shelter, and medical attention. You can either leave them to die, which results in turning them in to beggars and thieves which is good for no one or have some sort of welfare.

Re:What?

[Megol]

And for you to do yours. Hint: the world isn't black and white. There are grays too. If you view any issue either positively or negatively you don't understand it at all. An utopia isn't reality as anybody with a sense and ability to see, hear, read what people think and do.

Many people are helped to move from a piss-poor environment to a better one. Not becoming rich (which seems to be what you think is important given the emphasis on wealth distribution?) but being able to eat better, study better and work better. Is that worth nothing? Is that hindering them from improving further to the riches you think are essential? Nope. But the real reasons poor people stay poor are complex socially and politically - this space is limited.

Some people have zero ambition and welfare will not help them, in some cases it can even stop them making the effort otherwise necessary to improve their lives. Those are those that stay poor and will always stay poor. Welfare have nothing to do with it, ambition is the key. Reduce/remove welfare and they will move out into the streets begging for their next meal instead.

Re:What?

[Megol]

And I like someone that thinks economics is something one can be great at. The majority of economic theory isn't connected to reality and that doesn't change whether their cheerleaders are left wing or right wing (or something in between).

Re:What?

[Anonymous Coward]

Milton Friedman was a fraud

https://unlearningeconomics.wordpress.com/2012/11/27/milton-friedmans-distortions/

His bull is still taught in business school and it leads to poor ethics, destruction of the middle class and outsourcing of critical infrastructure

Re:What?

[Anonymous Coward]

So your means of undermining someone is to say that the field that they are good at doesn't exist. Despite all evidence to the contrary.

Noted.

Re:What?

[Anonymous Coward]

"interface"? You are too stupid to have an opinion.

Less Expensive Alternative

[EvilSS]

How about we get the rest of the world to agree to begin to deorbit their old sats onto Pyongyang instead of a parking orbit or into the ocean.

Missiles Aren't the Threat

[headkase]

Oh noes! North Korea is building missiles to launch one at us! Yeah, don't be stupid. Missiles are costly and take a ramp up to deploy over years and many tests. There is no threat from North Korea or any other developing nation concerning missiles that won't be seen years in advance.

The actual threat is not missiles, but nuclear weapons themselves. Smuggled in in a shipping container or in the boot of a car. You think it is any accident that people getting radiation treatment for cancer are, fact, setting off radiation detectors as they drive down highways and then getting stopped and searched? The USA is already ahead of the real threat, smuggled warheads, talk of North Korea or other fanatics building missiles just makes good TV for the masses.

Re:Missiles Aren't the Threat

[micahraleigh]

They're launching satellites now.

If they can launch satellites they can launch any payload of the equivalent weight.

North Korea not a big threat to US

[Anonymous Coward]

Unless Kim makes a crazy decision to launch a nuke at South Korea. Which is possible, but highly unlikely, because in reality his defenses cannot possible match
what the US could do in a counter strike. China although loyal to North Korea would not risk losing a big trade partner to defend Kim. I would be more worried in general about ISIS controlling more land, terrorists attacks on the US, and Iran's plans for a nuclear and ballistic missile program. Russia is a concern but mostly Putin is interested in what surrounds Russia it's not about the US. Cruz is simply overreacting to make himself look tough and it does not really take much to look tougher than Obama. If anyone is going to challenge the US it will be before Obama's term ends. Everyone knows Obama does not want to get involved in a deep and lengthy conflict just before his term ends.

MDA?

[jasnw]

So, has Senator Cruz not heard of the Missile Defense Agency (MDA)? Still alive and kicking, although they do have their own problems. However, one very big reason for MDA and its presence in Alaska is our good buddies in North Korea.

Re:MDA?

[Lije Baley]

Too bad this wasn't first post. Could have saved much pointless reading.

it'll never work...

[yodleboy]

since we'd have to get past the giant sun beam focusing parasol satellite that NK has in orbit. does homeland security screen for asians with diamonds embedded in them yet?

A working SDI is impossible to build.

[Anonymous Coward]

The system would have to track and successfully destroy 100% of all ballistic missiles, their decoy warheads and their real warheads. It has to work perfectly the first time it is used. And the reason for the 100% is that a single H bomb exploding over NYC would kill 12 million people. 99% of 3000+ warheads leaves 30 1Megaton H bombs exploding over the USA. The casualties would be about 150 million dead.

Re:A working SDI is impossible to build.

[NoOneInParticular]

If an adversary has 3000+ warheads, they can simply explode all of them on their own territory. The following nuclear winter will take out the rest of the planet. You don't need missiles for a MAD defense. Just blow yourself up when attacked. Mutually assured destruction, guarenteed.

North Korea

[Anonymous Coward]

does not have the ability to deliver its atomic bombs to the USA. They are bluffing. There is a good chance they don't even have atomic weapons.

They already have a defense system

[Anonymous Coward]

The space based over the horizon electronic warfare system was perfected and has been in use for some time. They can scan any objects and blow them up or remotely control them using cybernetic warfare.

Ted Cruz is a nut sack out of touch retard.

Better than SDI capabilities are already deployed. DrRobertDuncan .com

Americans always piss themselves

[Anonymous Coward]

when there is any chance of they becoming 'collateral' damage due to their enterprises in foreign lands!

The Japan trump card

[unixisc]

Actually, China is the key to this particular issue - North Korea playing w/ nukes. While I'm not against space based missile programs in principle, I'm not convinced that it's the necessary solution for this particular case.

I agree w/ Charles Krauthammer on the solution to this one. What do you do when you have such a weak hand? Play your trump. The US trump vis a vis China is JAPAN. The Chinese are still obsessed w/ their centuries old domination of the region, and their old enemies. Their main enemy in their mind is Japan. Nothing would make them take notice more than Japan suddenly reasserting its power.

Here is what the proposed solution is. Since WWII, Japan was forcibly de-militarized, and it's not a nuclear power. One thing that the US could do is get together w/ Japan and re-define that treaty, and DROP the requirement that Japan be de-militarized. Nothing would get Beijing's attention more than Japan being re-asserted as a military competitor to China - the way it was in the 1930s. They have their memories of Nanjing, and such a move would really cause a meltdown in Beijing.

So if THAT is done, China will stop at nothing - would even march into North Korea and dethrone Kim to get the US to stop re-arming Japan. But that won't likely be necessary - North Korea survives purely b'cos of China. China doesn't want a unified Korea - that would potentially give South Korea a work force even cheaper than what China can provide. Which is why they tolerate, if not encourage, every one of Kim's antics. But if they suddenly saw the re-emergence of Japan, that would cause a major panic in Beijing, and they'd do everything they could to rein in Pyongyang

Re:The Japan trump card

[djinn6]

That's already in progress, see Abe's reinterpretation of the Japanese constitution. It doesn't work however. Japan can only remilitarize a little bit at a time, and even if it does get there eventually, there's no guarantee it'll have the result you intended. Why is remilitarization hard? Well first, there's strong political opposition from within Japan. The majority of people don't want the change, and we're not even talking about a real expansion of the military, just a self-imposed rule about when Japan can become involved in a military conflict. They simply don't see a reason for it.

Second, Japan is in a bad spot economically. Abenomics isn't working. The economic boost all that deficit spending was supposed to bring didn't appear and all it did was devalue the Yen. Now they've even lowered their interest rate into the negatives to hopefully generate more investments. They're already spending $40 billion a year on military, but to build something that could stand up to China, they'll need at least another $100 billion a year, possibly more since costs are higher in Japan than it is in China. Where would the money come from? Will the US subsidize them?

And finally, China is Japan's largest trade partner. Despite all the saber rattling over the Senkaku / Diaoyu islands, neither side did anything to hurt their economic ties, because neither side can afford to. As soon as the whole thing blew over, they went right back to talking trade deals. The Japanese government, however dependent on the US, is still held accountable by their electorate, and they can only go as far as the Japanese people (and their wallet) can go.

So even if all of those problems were solved. Even if Japan magically overcame their economic woes and remilitarizes. Is that beneficial to US interests? Well, first of all, the tension between China and Japan will be felt worldwide. Prices will rise, investments will stall, and unemployment would go up. All business that depend on Sino-Japanese trade, directly or indirectly, will be impacted. Given how much trade goes on between them and the US, the US would obviously feel those effects too.

And second, would remilitarization really cause China to invade North Korea? Well consider this: did ISIS's threats cause the US to pull out of the Middle East? No? Why not? Do Americans not realize they might be killed by terrorists if they keep messing with them? Of course they do, but people also have a sense of justice, and if you threaten them, they'll much sooner fight you than obey you. The Chinese aren't going to react all that differently from Americans. The nation's pride will be on the line, and if their government capitulates to the threat, they'll have a revolt on their hands. So rather than doing that, China will threaten to invade Japan instead. It worked for Taiwan after all.

So after all that work, you not only would have done nothing to depose of Kim Jung Un, you would've also damaged the global economy and replaced the threat of North Korean nukes with the threat of WWIII.

Re:The Japan trump card

[unixisc]

What you said is right - in a vacuum. The Japanese people don't and won't have an appetite for militarization - by itself. However, the recent North Korean belligerence and sabre-rattling is aimed at not just Seoul, but Tokyo as well. As it is, the Koreans and Japanese have always had a historical enmity, and North Korea has often tried to gain support from South Koreans by dinging Japan. With all the recent missile launches by them, the Japanese HAVE to be worried - they are already within range of North Korean missiles. And if the US tells them - 'hey, you know that treaty we signed in 1945? Things are different now, and you have a real threat, so it's okay for you to have a nuclear deterrent. We'll back you on that one.'

Do that, and there's no way Beijing won't respond.

Not *again*

[whitroth]

They still can't hit a target most of the time, and that's when they *know* when and where the launch will be, and they put a radio tracking beacon on the missile to be hit.

This time, can we please use the correct name - it's Battlestar America, not Star Wars. (Yes, there was an episode of the original Battlebarf where they found a world with two superpowers, and when they pushed The Button, the Galactica zapped all 30,000 nuclear missles....)

Maybe Ted Cruz could lead a rag-tag band of idiots looking for where they came from.... I'd say the seventh planet in the solar system would be about right.

            mark

Re:Not *again*

[whitroth]

The episode was "Experiment in Terra"

          mark

Nuke The Wearisome Fuckers

[Anonymous Coward]

Fuck'em.

North Korea has been a giant pustule on the butt of the Earth. Its people are ruined and will never be useful in a work force. So let's do the right thing: a full first strike: "rods from god" + B-52-launched cruise missiles to shut down their 0-hour strike capability and then follow-up as needed with our old nukes (we need to get rid of them anyway).

Let China do clean-up.

Re:Nuke The Wearisome Fuckers

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh, shut up, Donald.

we dont have to wait for Ted

[peter303]

Pongyang will be ashes even under Obama if Kim launches a nuke.

Except you're wrong. Hilariously. As in ROFL.

[denzacar]

From your sources:

In FY 2013, we:
- Paid over $850 billion to almost 65 million beneficiaries;

So that's where your 850 billion dollar figure comes from.
Only problem is, your confirmation bias prevented you from actually reading that document.
You know... like actually looking for understanding (what those numbers actually mean) instead of just fishing for BigMcHuge numbers to lean your bias on.
Or you would have noticed this bit:

Old-Age and Survivors Insurance
Created in 1935, the Old-Age and Survivors Insurance (OASI) program provides retirement and survivors benefits to qualified workers and their families.
In FY 2015, we will pay about $744 billion in OASI benefits to approximately 49 million beneficiaries per month, including 89 percent of the population aged 65 and over.

Disability Insurance
Established in 1956, the Disability Insurance (DI) program provides benefits for workers with disabilities and their families.
In FY 2015, we will pay about $147 billion in DI benefits to approximately 11 million workers with disabilities and their family members per month.

Supplemental Security Income
Established in 1972, the Supplemental Security Income (SSI) program provides financial support to adults and children with disabilities and adults who are aged or blind, and have limited income and resources.
In FY 2015, we will pay about $60 billion in Federal benefits and State supplementary payments to approximately 8.5 million recipients per month.

OASI and DI trust funds are collected from payroll taxes.
It's insurance that working stiffs pay for themselves and their families.
Not "public assistance". Or welfare.
That's that last bit - SSI. Paid out to eligible "adults and children with disabilities and adults who are aged or blind, and have limited income and resources".

SSA is NOT "public assistance". Or welfare as some like to call it.
But I'm sure you already know that - as you've listed both, separately. From that "better website".
Where only SSI is listed under "welfare".

Now, if you'd bother to look up the SSA budget overview for 2013 (since that is what you're basing your $850 billion numbers on) you'd notice that those same programs were projected as follows:
- about $672 billion in OASI benefits,
- about $143 billion in DI benefits and,
- about $58 billion in Federal and State Supplementation benefits.
"About" $873 billion projected, all together.

I.e. Those $850 billion SSA paid out was mostly INSURANCE. Not "public assistance".
Both you and the GP are off by orders of magnitude cause you don't understand the numbers you're quoting.
Because bias.

But the bit I find the most hilarious is how you've looked at that chart where defense spending is just a notch or two under pensions and came up with that 62% nonsense out of your ass.
Yet at the same time it just doesn't reach from that same source, to your mind, that pensioners don't actually drive around in tanks, maintain bases in foreign countries, stockpile ICBMs in their back yard, fly jets...
You know... express that overwhelming opulence in some way which would rival the feed and care of the world's largest military force.

Ted Cruz is a fool who should not be president.

[Anonymous Coward]

All we need to do is park one SSBN off North Korea and let North Korea know
via diplomatic channels that they can expect to become a smoking crater at
the first sign of launch. There is no new expenditure required for such a show
of force.

I'm so fucking sick of idiots like Reagan and Cruz I could puke. These fucktards
couldn't even run a used car lot well, let alone a country.

SDI never stopped

[Karmashock]

Look at the advances we've made in active missile intercepts. The project never stopped.

Re:SDI never stopped

[oh_my_080980980]

Actually it did stop. The program was about developing lasers to shoot down ICBMs. Never worked. Later programs were about theater missile defense, not national missile defense and focused on interceptors or kill vehicles - which also do not work.

Re:SDI never stopped

[Karmashock]

Actually SDI had many methods. The point was to stop ICBMs.

As to it working, the development never stopped. That was my point. I didn't say they deployed a working system. Don't goal post with me... it is a waste of time.

Hawaii

[Tablizer]

It seems to me a ground-based system located on or near Hawaii would be cheaper and possibly more effective because it's easier to test & maintain, and can use volume to compensate for accuracy difficulties.

Re:Hawaii

[riverat1]

Anchorage is about 800 miles closer to North Korea than Honolulu is.

No, It Doesn't

[Anonymous Coward]

The proposed technology behind SDI never worked and in the past 30 years, some of the SDI proponents have even admitted it never worked. I don't mean in the "we just didn't try hard enough" way, I mean in the "it could not work, ever, no matter how much time, energy and money we threw at it" way.

X-Ray pumped lasers were the poster boy for this problem. They wanted to create a laser system that had a nuclear weapon in the center. The nuclear explosion creates X-Rays and that was supposed to power the laser. The problem? You've got nanoseconds until the nuclear blast destroys the laser itself. There isn't enough time to do anything meaningful in this window and the entire design means it is a one-shot weapon at best.

IIRC there was only one solitary SDI weapons proposal that had even a ghost of a chance of working. The rest were all science fiction fantasies, used to scare the Soviets and as cover for political pork at home.

Clueless

[kriston]

Ted Cruz doesn't realize that SDI never really went away. The entire thing has been operational for decades except for the so-called "space-based" laser and missile platforms.

Republican boners!

[Anonymous Coward]

I can't believe you chumps fell for lines like:

The war will pay for itself

and

Honest, I won't shoot my load on your face.

typical moron GOP

[WindBourne]

THis is about nothing but throwing money at his friends.
Right now, the DOD is focused on railguns and lasers. These will start being deployed over the next couple of years. The naval railgun alone has the ability to fire over 100 miles into the air. And army's new changes to the M1 will allow it to carry a railgun that will shoot over 60 miles into the air. USAF is working on putting lasers into its aircrafts that can shoot down missiles of all sorts.

And yet, cruz wants to give MASSIVE tax breaks to his friends, while increasing the spending on projects that are worthless, but also to his friends.
And ppl wonder why Trump is looking so good in the GOP.

Sure....

[Locke2005]

Yeah, Ted, that would be a great idea.. if SDI actually worked. All tests done demonstrated that it didn't work reliably at stopping missiles. Republicans: still offering imaginary solutions to real problems. What do you expect from people that still think the earth is only 6000 years old?

It will never work,

[dsmatthews9379]

All NK has to do is put men in it's rockets and call them peaceful astronauts. Who just happen to take a nuclear lunch box with them.

There are so many reasons why SDI can't give 100% protection and even one failure would be economically devastating.

Better to cure the disease than just treat the symptoms.

Ted tax and spend cruz.

[Anonymous Coward]

What a fuctard.

My father was an engineer on SDI in the 80s

[Ixpath]

Specifically, he worked with the group tasked with evaluating the feasibility of the project. They found it to be completely unrealistic. Reagan went ahead a decided to do it anyway and now it's a political thing. They tried everything, hydrofluoric-acid lasers mounted on 747s, lasers on satellites, intelligent pebbles. Didn't work.

The reality is MIRV, post-boost phase evasive maneuvers, and decoys are all fairly trivial to implement. Even now, these tests you see with 30-60% success rates assume the launch site and trajectory are known before hand.

Oh no, not again

[MoarSauce123]

Reagan was a major disaster! SDI was one of the biggest federal money wasters of all time. Who in their right mind is so ridiculously stupid to propose reviving SDI again? Oh yes, Republican tea party presidential candidates who run on a platform that wants to cut down federal spending. Only shows how moronic Cruz and his tea baggers are. Other than blocking everything (including their own proposals) and shutting down the government they have not accomplished anything. I hope these losers get voted out of office again.

Defense Is Good.

[kenwd0elq]

It's not as if Strategic Defense needs to be "revived"; they've made great progress in the last dozen years or so. And frankly, SDI seems especially well designed to counter the NORK threat. The Norks have ... "few" may be too generous... only a few rockets, they may or may not be able to loft their somewhat primitive nuclear weapons with them, and if they tried to aim one at a city, their chances of actually hitting THAT city are somewhat iffy.

But yes, SDI needs to be put back on the front burner, and we need to begin actually deploying it. A launching site in South Korea and a couple in Japan would seem to be sufficient to counter the NORK threat.

The big SDI debate back in the 1980s and early '90s was that the Soviets had SO MANY missiles, we couldn't hope to intercept them ALL, so it was better not to try. This notion was childishly brain-dead even then; nuclear missiles against hardened silos aren't a guaranteed kill, so you'd launch three missiles against each target. Intercept ONE of the three, and the probability of kill goes down a LOT, and would give the Soviet planners a reason to think that a first disarming strike might not be entirely successful. SDI + MAD gives any relatively sane warplanner on either side a reason to hold off.

The NORKS are not "relatively sane", and probably aren't even CLOSE to being sane, but even a small SDI deployment would pull their fangs - especially if the US and Japan make it clear to the Chinese and the Russians that even one nuclear launch would invite a massive response and the annihilation of North Korea. The Chinese especially could order Kim to stand down or be deposed.

Of course, the Chinese are doing a lot of their OWN saber-rattling, so it's not as if we can sit back and do nothing. After 24 years of letting our military forces decay, it's going to take some effort to restore the balance.

Political platform of irrational fear

[Anonymous Coward]

Trillions of $ to address a non-threat. That's brilliant republicans! Congrats on staying true to form.