On Thu, Aug 14, 2008 at 10:26 PM, Matthew Copple [email protected] wrote:
On 8/13/08 10:56 PM, "Jim Herrmann" [email protected] wrote:
What has busted the budget is an illegal war entered into using known lies by an administration that should be tried in the Hague for war crimes and crimes against humanity. Eliminate the war spending, which is borrowed from China, and you eliminate about half of the deficit. Eliminate another 20% of a military budget that is larger than all the rest of the world combined, and we have a balanced budget. Unfortunately, the next president, Obama, has been doing a bunch of sabre rattling about Afghanistan. That won't be cheap. So, I don't hold out much hope for that 20% reduction I'm talking about, but at least he'll get us out of Iraq soon.
Naturally, Medicare and Social Security wouldn't have anything to do with the deficit, right? Why make hard decisions when you can sit comfortably in the armchair and blame everything on a nasty little war?
I think both of you are inaccurate, but both of these inaccuracies work to mask the real size of the budget deficit. First, it is my understanding that the war spending isn't part of the budgetary process, in-so-much as the WH numbers and its budget projection never include it, it just gets ignored. I don't think any of the appropriations bills consider it. I guess because the WH doesn't ask for it as part of their budget request, congress isn't going to fund it as part of the ongoing budget. It is always an "emergency" spending measure paired with a resolution to raise the debt ceiling. When budget short fall estimates come out, the WH will not have war spending included and the press is left to report the WH numbers Then they may or may not qualify what has been left out.
Rhetorically inferring that social security is a contributing factor to the budget deficit is just blatantly wrong. (Maybe I misunderstood. Were you trying to use satire to infer the opposite?) Social security pulls in much more money from payroll taxes than what is paid out in benefits. This SS surplus is figured into the budget deficit numbers, without it the budget deficit would look much worse. This surplus has been in effect at least since the large payroll tax increases of 1983. President Bush as a candidate and early in his first term stated that he would balance the budget without using the SS surplus. The projections are for this surplus to continue until late in the next decade at which point the promised benefits per month will outstrip the taxes collected per month. Some are referring to this as a crisis point and must not be allowed to happen. The implication is that excess payroll taxes will be used for upwards of 35 years to pay for items that should have been financed primarily with income taxes. Once this positive cash flow is gone and SS has to call in its IOUs many of our elected officials won't want to ask income tax payers to fund their spending, and they certainly don't want to ask them to pay back the monies borrowed from SS. Without any changes to the system SS will still have enough IOU's to run just fine well into the mid 2040's (date from memory, I didn't check this).
Note, I didn't bring up Medicare because I don't know its funding mechanism.
-Rod