But, the government get's to change the law, so it get's to adjust how much they cost.
So, do you really imagine that you can find enough Senators to vote themselves out of office by voting cuts in Social Security? Or Representatives willing to do the same thing?
As to eliminating the debt, all we need to do is reduce the growth of the debt to below that of inflation, or even inflation adjusted GDP. If it's growing by 1% a year that's actually a good thing and our economy can quickly outpace that growth over the long term.
No, a debt is never a good thing. It can be an acceptable thing, but it won't ever be a good thing.
As to stimulus spending that's only a problem if it lasts for several years, the real question is if we can avoid stimulus spending once things improve.
That's the trillion dollar question, isn't it? Once Congress gets used to having an extra trillion to bribe voters with every year, convincing them to stop will be hard.
PS: All government money comes from the same pool, US. Washington has many sacred cows, DoD, SS, Medicare, but they can all be sacrificed.
Umm, no. For all practical purposes, SS and Medicare are untouchable. Medicaid somewhat less so, since it's partially paid by the States. But note that bribing Senators by offering to cover their State's share of Medicaid costs is quite popular right now.
If we put SS and Medicare on the chopping block along with the discretionary budgets, we can eliminate the deficit (not the debt) by lowering all federal budget items by about 45%. Are you really so out-of-touch with reality as we know it to think that reducing the piece of the Federal pie given to the over 65 crowd (who are most likely to vote, and who get peeved whenever the subject of SS/Medicare cuts are mentioned) will actually happen short of the Federal government collapsing?
I guess my point is that if you're looking at the business-end of a gun, there are plenty of.22 pistols that look very similar to larger-caliber guns.
Not unless you're in panic-mode. A.22 is so much smaller than any other pistol caliber (except.25, which is also a weeny round) that it can't be mistaken for much else from the front.
Now, if it's not pointed at you, you might be forgiven for making the mistake of not recognizing a.22 - there are.22 adapters for the M1911, for example. But not if you're looking down the barrel.
And if you're being threatened with one, you may not really be paying enough attention to determine the caliber, aside from the fact that it could be a deadly encounter, regardless.
When you're being threatened with a firearm, it focuses your attention marvelously. That's when you're MORE likely to notice little things like that tiny hole in front.
insurance liabilities are whats really hampering nuclear
No, the lawsuits are what's really hampering nuclear. You get all your permissions lined up, you borrow a metric buttload of money to build, you start digging the foundation, and you get sued by Greenpeace (or the Sierra Club, or PETA, or whoever can come up with a reason). Then you have to stop working (but not stop paying back that loan) till the lawsuit is settled.
A few years pass, the lawsuit is settled, and you resume work.
Then you get sued again.
Repeat until you go bankrupt or you just give up.
Note that Solar in the desert is likely to go the same way. There are already people lining up to stop that facility someone wants to build in the southwestern desert - over a dozen or so turtles....
No comment on the technical legality of Amazon's de-listing, but it's certainly an abuse of power by conventional standards.
No. Amazon sells eBooks for less than $10. MacMillan doesn't like that idea, and wants $15. Amazon is under no obligation to sell MacMillan's books if MacMillan won't agree to Amazon's terms.
I don't even like the idea of a $10 eBook, much less a $15 one, so I guess I won't be buying any MacMillan eBooks either....
What is it with you americans that you're so fascinated with this stuff? For a member of a normal civilian society in peace, these things are just bad and repulsive.
Well, frankly, it's a hell of a lot of fun to take a few targets out into the desert and spend an afternoon shooting holes in them.
Or down to the range, if you don't have a convenient desert.
*: Pink Goo is mankind. It replicates relatively slowly, but some people think it will nevertheless fill any amount of space given enough time.
Note that all other lifeforms try to do this as well. Most of them don't succeed because something eats them (or they starve to death after eating all their own prey). As the apex predator on this planet (as well as an omnivorous agriculturalist), we don't usually have that issue.
Note also that the total mass of beetles on Earth is greater than the total mass of humans. Which suggests that we're not terribly successful (so far) at filling all the space on this planet, much less elsewhere.
Between galaxies in a few months??? I dare say you're presuming a bit much there. Just for reference, the nearest galaxy is 2.5 million light-years away.
Let's see...
2.5 Mly in, say, four months...that'll require a constant acceleration of about 100g.
Of course, that's still 2.5 million years as far as the rest of the universe is concerned....
I believe the target market here is peace officers; so their guns cannot be taken from them and used against them. Not you and me.
It's a.22. Peace officers really don't have much use for a.22. This is aimed at the loons who think that the phrase "safe guns" means something (as opposed to "safe gunners").
SS and Medicare are just another type of spending that can be reduced like any other.
Umm, no. SS and Medicare are what are called "entitlements". Which means that the payout through these programs is not what's actually budgeted for them, but what is required to meet the law's requirements.
However, the major cause of that 1.3 trillion $ deficit a weakening economy and two wars both of which should be short lived. It took 10 years to go from reducing the deficit to a 1.3 trillion $ one, and the trip back can be faster than you might think.
Yes and no. The stimulus packages are a huge part of the deficit. Over half.
But the wars aren't actually covered under the "deficit". They're paid for differently than the DoD itself. Costs of the war are IN ADDITION to that $1.3 trillion figure.
In order to eliminate the deficit (which is not quite the same as reducing the debt), we have to increase revenues from current taxes by about 50% (assuming we've overcome the urge to do any more stimulus packages - since I know that a couple more are in the works, I don't think that's going to happen this year) without increasing spending at all. Since SSA and Medicare and Medicaid (all entitlements, not limited by the budgets allocated to them) and servicing the debt (which will increase as prosperity returns, since the Fed won't be able to keep interest rates down to essentially zero then) WILL increase every year, it's fairly safe to say that we must raise taxes. A lot.
Note that the above was the requirement to eliminate the deficit, not to reduce the debt. It'll take a bit more to reduce the debt, since there are still a fair number of things that aren't part of the "budget" but that still require us to spend money.
Note also that if we manage to rearrange things so we're taking in $100 billion a year more than we're spending, we can eliminate the Debt in just a century. Well, less than two centuries anyway.
And finally, note that Congressmen aren't known for restraint when unspent money is just sitting there, and there's pork to be had for their districts.
Bush was certainly not fiscally conservative. But he didn't actually start with a surplus. The National Debt increased every year of Clinton's two terms. The "surplus" that he produced was entirely illusionary.
We could remove tax breaks, or reduce spending, but long term the tax rate is about as high as is feasible.
Reducing spending is not a meaningful option. Our current taxes just about cover the entitlements in the Federal budget. Even if we zeroed the rest of the budget, we'd not be reducing the debt any. At best, we'd be breaking even for a few years (ultimately, SSA and Medicare taxes WILL be increased, or SSA and Medicare will sink us) until the SSA reaches the point of taking in less than it's paying out (2017 or 2018, last I checked).
Removing tax breaks is pretty much the same as increasing taxes, it's just more selective. Alas, there aren't enough tax breaks in the US Tax Code to do anything meaningful to $1.35 trillion deficits.
Debt is the present. If we don't take care of that, we will stagnate and disappear much more quickly. This is good, pay down debt first then invest.
If we were to zero NASA's budget, it would reduce the current deficit by a bit more than 1%.
This isn't going to "pay down debt", it's going to "slow the rate of increase of debt by a miniscule amount".
Though, for all the talk of fiscal responsibility I don't see anyone mentioning that the US's military budget is about the same as the rest of the worlds military budgets combined. And 9 times that of China's. It would make sense to cut that first.
If we were to zero the military budget, we'd reduce the deficit to about $700 billion. Note, for reference, that $700 billion deficit is larger than any deficit we've ever had, other than the 2008, 2009, 2010 (and all future deficits).
At this point in time, like it or not, the only way we can get our deficit under control is to raise taxes. A lot. Double them across the board, for a start. If we're actually serious about the deficit, we need to go back to a tax structure like we had immediately post-WW2.
Keep in mind that doubling taxes would cause a serious plunge in our living standard for at least a few decades. I don't spend all my paycheck, but entirely too many people do, and everyone's paycheck would be smaller by a considerable amount. And it's not like we have the bonus of providing the industry for the rest of the world that we had in the late 40's and 50's. This time we'd have to sink or swim on our own....
One administration official said the budget will send a message that it's time members of Congress recognize that NASA can't design space programs to create jobs in their districts. "That's the view of the president," the official said.
That....is disturbing, if that is their view. Maybe next they need to have a war on science again?
Sounds like he's getting revenge for that Alabama Rep who switched from Democrat to Republican.
I should note, for reference, that if we were to double NASA's budget, we'd increase the current deficit by just over 1%.
Those attempting it should be jailed and prosecuted. If that action proves untenable, President Obama has a clear option for dealing with the US members of such conspiracies.
Given that he's the President and that ACTA is being treated as an Executive Agreement (a deal between the President and other head of state), it seems pretty clear that he approves of both the process and the eventual outcome.
In other words, I doubt seriously he'd add his own name to a KoS list....
(or in many countries, lower taxes, with much less military spending!).
Note that if the US military budget were zeroed, the budget deficit would drop to about $700 billion per year.
Note further that this year, mandatory spending (SSA, Medicare, Medicaid, interest on the national debt, that sort of thing) is approximately equal to income from ALL taxes.
So if we were to zero out the entire discretionary federal budget, we might reduce the deficit to zero.
This year.
Next year, SSA and Medicare expenses will be higher (and it's possible that debt servicing will be higher as well, since we're at historically low rates right now).
Read a regular newpaper story in an area where you're an expert. Notice how sloppy they are? How careless with the facts?
As a nearly irrelevant sidenote, have you ever noticed that pretty much everyone agrees that the news is horribly bollixed up in regards to their own expertise...
But on the other hand, these same people assume that the news is pretty much accurate in every other field....
I can see that this might be plausible in the early stages of life on this planet where microbes would acquire genes from other microbes.
I saw an article recently about a species of snail that has acquired the genes for making chlorophyll from the algae it eats. It hasn't yet acquired the genes to make chloroplasts, so it has to eat algae to get enough chloroplasts from the algae to allow photosynthesis to work, but after that it is capable of living with no food other than light.
So, obviously this is still ongoing, and on larger scales than microbes.
The disturbing thing about that historical ratio wasn't how small it was, but how large. By all rights, people who don't have any rights, and especially who aren't permitted to vote shouldn't have been counted at all when determining relative representation in congress.
States shouldn't have been encouraged to create non-voting populations.
True enough. They should never have done it. But...
The 3/5th of a person thing was done because Virginia wasn't going to ratify the Constitution without it - the very first example of horse-trading for votes in US History....
For example, a human with a pocket calculator is effectively more intelligent than the same human without the calculator; and our pocket calculators are getting much more capable.
No, a human with a calculator can do basic math quicker than a human without one. Basic math skills are not, in and of themselves, indicative of level of intelligence.
BLOCKQUOTE>I + Internet > just me.
You plus internet are capable of searching for things you already know are important and relevant. Or that someone else has already decided are important and relevant. You and the internet, in and of itself, is not indicative of level of intelligence.
Ultimately, the quest for "higher intelligence" through design as opposed to evolution is limited by the ability of people to decide what "higher intelligence" really means. I am reminded of a quotation (paraphrased):
If a congress of gorillas were to get together to design the "super-gorilla", would they have the imagination to discard the size and strength that are hallmarks of gorillas in favour better hands and more intelligence?
We have the same problem. We can decide that doing some particular thing that we already do faster is the same as "higher intelligence". But is it really? If it is, then computers are already smarter than humans, since they can do anything they're programmed to do faster and more accurately than any human.
Oh yeah, I forgot, the US IS THE WORLD...nothing else exists.
Grow up and face the propaganda....we are not alone.
So, what you're saying is that crime is on the decline in the USA (with all its massive prison population), but on the rise in the rest of the world (with fewer prisons and prisoners).
Gotcha, makes perfect sense. Of course, it goes against conventional wisdom (and likely your intent, and certainly the OP's intent), but that's life.
because let's face it, crime is at an all time high,
A commonly held misbelief.
According to the FBI's Uniform Crime Report, crime levels are at about 79% of what they were in 2006. Or about 84% of what they were in 2005. There was an uptick in crime in 2001, but other than that, crime has been declining pretty steadily since 1986.
Slashdot Mirror
So, do you really imagine that you can find enough Senators to vote themselves out of office by voting cuts in Social Security? Or Representatives willing to do the same thing?
No, a debt is never a good thing. It can be an acceptable thing, but it won't ever be a good thing.
That's the trillion dollar question, isn't it? Once Congress gets used to having an extra trillion to bribe voters with every year, convincing them to stop will be hard.
Umm, no. For all practical purposes, SS and Medicare are untouchable. Medicaid somewhat less so, since it's partially paid by the States. But note that bribing Senators by offering to cover their State's share of Medicaid costs is quite popular right now.
If we put SS and Medicare on the chopping block along with the discretionary budgets, we can eliminate the deficit (not the debt) by lowering all federal budget items by about 45%. Are you really so out-of-touch with reality as we know it to think that reducing the piece of the Federal pie given to the over 65 crowd (who are most likely to vote, and who get peeved whenever the subject of SS/Medicare cuts are mentioned) will actually happen short of the Federal government collapsing?
Not unless you're in panic-mode. A .22 is so much smaller than any other pistol caliber (except .25, which is also a weeny round) that it can't be mistaken for much else from the front.
Now, if it's not pointed at you, you might be forgiven for making the mistake of not recognizing a .22 - there are .22 adapters for the M1911, for example. But not if you're looking down the barrel.
When you're being threatened with a firearm, it focuses your attention marvelously. That's when you're MORE likely to notice little things like that tiny hole in front.
No, the lawsuits are what's really hampering nuclear. You get all your permissions lined up, you borrow a metric buttload of money to build, you start digging the foundation, and you get sued by Greenpeace (or the Sierra Club, or PETA, or whoever can come up with a reason). Then you have to stop working (but not stop paying back that loan) till the lawsuit is settled.
A few years pass, the lawsuit is settled, and you resume work.
Then you get sued again.
Repeat until you go bankrupt or you just give up.
Note that Solar in the desert is likely to go the same way. There are already people lining up to stop that facility someone wants to build in the southwestern desert - over a dozen or so turtles....
No. Amazon sells eBooks for less than $10. MacMillan doesn't like that idea, and wants $15. Amazon is under no obligation to sell MacMillan's books if MacMillan won't agree to Amazon's terms.
I don't even like the idea of a $10 eBook, much less a $15 one, so I guess I won't be buying any MacMillan eBooks either....
Well, frankly, it's a hell of a lot of fun to take a few targets out into the desert and spend an afternoon shooting holes in them.
Or down to the range, if you don't have a convenient desert.
Your first link is to a .40 caliber, not a .22. Probably the "Glock 22" name fooled you, but Glock's numbering scheme as nothing to do with caliber.
In general, you don't have to be an expert to tell the difference between a .22 and a 9mm - the hole in the front is way smaller on the .22
Note that all other lifeforms try to do this as well. Most of them don't succeed because something eats them (or they starve to death after eating all their own prey). As the apex predator on this planet (as well as an omnivorous agriculturalist), we don't usually have that issue.
Note also that the total mass of beetles on Earth is greater than the total mass of humans. Which suggests that we're not terribly successful (so far) at filling all the space on this planet, much less elsewhere.
Let's see...
2.5 Mly in, say, four months...that'll require a constant acceleration of about 100g.
Of course, that's still 2.5 million years as far as the rest of the universe is concerned....
It's a .22. Peace officers really don't have much use for a .22. This is aimed at the loons who think that the phrase "safe guns" means something (as opposed to "safe gunners").
Umm, no. SS and Medicare are what are called "entitlements". Which means that the payout through these programs is not what's actually budgeted for them, but what is required to meet the law's requirements.
Yes and no. The stimulus packages are a huge part of the deficit. Over half.
But the wars aren't actually covered under the "deficit". They're paid for differently than the DoD itself. Costs of the war are IN ADDITION to that $1.3 trillion figure.
In order to eliminate the deficit (which is not quite the same as reducing the debt), we have to increase revenues from current taxes by about 50% (assuming we've overcome the urge to do any more stimulus packages - since I know that a couple more are in the works, I don't think that's going to happen this year) without increasing spending at all. Since SSA and Medicare and Medicaid (all entitlements, not limited by the budgets allocated to them) and servicing the debt (which will increase as prosperity returns, since the Fed won't be able to keep interest rates down to essentially zero then) WILL increase every year, it's fairly safe to say that we must raise taxes. A lot.
Note that the above was the requirement to eliminate the deficit, not to reduce the debt. It'll take a bit more to reduce the debt, since there are still a fair number of things that aren't part of the "budget" but that still require us to spend money.
Note also that if we manage to rearrange things so we're taking in $100 billion a year more than we're spending, we can eliminate the Debt in just a century. Well, less than two centuries anyway.
And finally, note that Congressmen aren't known for restraint when unspent money is just sitting there, and there's pork to be had for their districts.
Bush was certainly not fiscally conservative. But he didn't actually start with a surplus. The National Debt increased every year of Clinton's two terms. The "surplus" that he produced was entirely illusionary.
Reducing spending is not a meaningful option. Our current taxes just about cover the entitlements in the Federal budget. Even if we zeroed the rest of the budget, we'd not be reducing the debt any. At best, we'd be breaking even for a few years (ultimately, SSA and Medicare taxes WILL be increased, or SSA and Medicare will sink us) until the SSA reaches the point of taking in less than it's paying out (2017 or 2018, last I checked).
Removing tax breaks is pretty much the same as increasing taxes, it's just more selective. Alas, there aren't enough tax breaks in the US Tax Code to do anything meaningful to $1.35 trillion deficits.
If we were to zero NASA's budget, it would reduce the current deficit by a bit more than 1%.
This isn't going to "pay down debt", it's going to "slow the rate of increase of debt by a miniscule amount".
If we were to zero the military budget, we'd reduce the deficit to about $700 billion. Note, for reference, that $700 billion deficit is larger than any deficit we've ever had, other than the 2008, 2009, 2010 (and all future deficits).
At this point in time, like it or not, the only way we can get our deficit under control is to raise taxes. A lot. Double them across the board, for a start. If we're actually serious about the deficit, we need to go back to a tax structure like we had immediately post-WW2.
Keep in mind that doubling taxes would cause a serious plunge in our living standard for at least a few decades. I don't spend all my paycheck, but entirely too many people do, and everyone's paycheck would be smaller by a considerable amount. And it's not like we have the bonus of providing the industry for the rest of the world that we had in the late 40's and 50's. This time we'd have to sink or swim on our own....
Sounds like he's getting revenge for that Alabama Rep who switched from Democrat to Republican.
I should note, for reference, that if we were to double NASA's budget, we'd increase the current deficit by just over 1%.
Given that he's the President and that ACTA is being treated as an Executive Agreement (a deal between the President and other head of state), it seems pretty clear that he approves of both the process and the eventual outcome.
In other words, I doubt seriously he'd add his own name to a KoS list....
Post WW2. There were texts of secret treaties captured by the Germans in the fall of France. Made for some great propaganda, I understand.
Note that if the US military budget were zeroed, the budget deficit would drop to about $700 billion per year.
Note further that this year, mandatory spending (SSA, Medicare, Medicaid, interest on the national debt, that sort of thing) is approximately equal to income from ALL taxes.
So if we were to zero out the entire discretionary federal budget, we might reduce the deficit to zero.
This year.
Next year, SSA and Medicare expenses will be higher (and it's possible that debt servicing will be higher as well, since we're at historically low rates right now).
As a nearly irrelevant sidenote, have you ever noticed that pretty much everyone agrees that the news is horribly bollixed up in regards to their own expertise...
But on the other hand, these same people assume that the news is pretty much accurate in every other field....
I saw an article recently about a species of snail that has acquired the genes for making chlorophyll from the algae it eats. It hasn't yet acquired the genes to make chloroplasts, so it has to eat algae to get enough chloroplasts from the algae to allow photosynthesis to work, but after that it is capable of living with no food other than light.
So, obviously this is still ongoing, and on larger scales than microbes.
True enough. They should never have done it. But...
The 3/5th of a person thing was done because Virginia wasn't going to ratify the Constitution without it - the very first example of horse-trading for votes in US History....
No, a human with a calculator can do basic math quicker than a human without one. Basic math skills are not, in and of themselves, indicative of level of intelligence.
BLOCKQUOTE>I + Internet > just me.
You plus internet are capable of searching for things you already know are important and relevant. Or that someone else has already decided are important and relevant. You and the internet, in and of itself, is not indicative of level of intelligence.
Ultimately, the quest for "higher intelligence" through design as opposed to evolution is limited by the ability of people to decide what "higher intelligence" really means. I am reminded of a quotation (paraphrased):
If a congress of gorillas were to get together to design the "super-gorilla", would they have the imagination to discard the size and strength that are hallmarks of gorillas in favour better hands and more intelligence?
We have the same problem. We can decide that doing some particular thing that we already do faster is the same as "higher intelligence". But is it really? If it is, then computers are already smarter than humans, since they can do anything they're programmed to do faster and more accurately than any human.
So, what you're saying is that crime is on the decline in the USA (with all its massive prison population), but on the rise in the rest of the world (with fewer prisons and prisoners).
Gotcha, makes perfect sense. Of course, it goes against conventional wisdom (and likely your intent, and certainly the OP's intent), but that's life.
Motherland. "Fatherland" is Germany, and Germany didn't do no stinking commies.
I really hope you meant "Aleutian Islands"...
Every day on /., I get a new insight into the quality of education in this country....
A commonly held misbelief.
According to the FBI's Uniform Crime Report, crime levels are at about 79% of what they were in 2006. Or about 84% of what they were in 2005. There was an uptick in crime in 2001, but other than that, crime has been declining pretty steadily since 1986.