It never hurts, however, to repeat the message in as many venues as possible. The truth of an important issue can never be told too often. It’s a brief, but necessary retelling of a sad tale.
Well, what a surprise. If the government helps the poor the economy gains some additional participants. The link is only to the summary which I paste here:
“We use state and county level variation to examine the impact of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act on employment. A cross state analysis suggests that one additional job was created by each $170,000 in stimulus spending. Time series analysis at the state level suggests a smaller response with a per job cost of about $400,000. These results imply Keynesian multipliers between 0.5 and 1.0, somewhat lower than those assumed by the administration. However, the overall results mask considerable variation for different types of spending. Grants to states for education do not appear to have created any additional jobs. Support programs for low income households and infrastructure spending are found to be highly expansionary. Estimates excluding education spending suggest fiscal policy multipliers of about 2.0 with per job cost of under $100,000.”
“Did the Stimulus Stimulate? Real Time Estimates of the Effects of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act” Feyrer and Sacerdote
It also includes Obama’s announcement on the Defense Of Marriage Act (DOMA) as extraconstitutional. It asks: “What do we call a leader who acts as though he is neither accountable to Congress nor bound by court precedent?“ My answer Hugo Chavez-lite.
This may represent a political tipping point. congress is not powerless. “Thanks to the president’s dereliction of duty, the House now has a clear pathway to intervene in legal challenges. If the House does so, that would mean there will finally be lawyers in the courtroom, arguing before the judge, who actually want to uphold the statute and win their case.”
There is a growing call for impeachment, and this may veryy well be grounds. How can the Chief law Enforecment Officer, arbitratily ignore several laws and court rulings?
Times have certainly changed, and the silent majority is no longer silent, moreover, if necessary they can organize. The current Democrat Over Reach does not bode well for them in 2012.
In fact I would think it better to keep the WH far away from this crowd. No, not because there would be any danger, but because it, the WH, may soon learn that the people, the real American patriots, do not need a feckless leader to show them the way to their own better lives. Obama needs to see the spontaneity of progressive ideology unfold before his uninvolved self. Remember that the Jacobins in 18th century France did not start out as a reckless band until they ran up against a reckless, ruthless and obstinate opposition of royalists and their lackeys.
We are seeing that organization happening right now as the real silent majority begins to finally find its voice. Working Americans are beginning to understand that both parties, but especially the Republican Party, has been serving the interests of the wealthiest small fraction of the country. It is all too true that the government has not been serving the cause of Americans as a whole, but that is not to say that that government hasn’t been serving the interests of some. When we wake up to the need to focus on economics and finance rather than everyone else’s social morality we will see a better America.
No in Air Force or congress for that matter is concerned about the deficit.
Air refueling used to be for B-52’s, now anyone’s jet needs its aerial refueling tanker, for marginal value to anything but Boeing’s bottom line.
Announced 24 Feb 2011:Boeing has been awarded a $3.5 billion fixed-price incentive contract for engineering and manufacturing development and delivery of the first 18 aircraft by 2017.
The aircraft will be a B767-200, will 787 flight displays, and upgraded refueling hardware from the KC-10.
Looks like McCain is rumbling about fairness in his French connect won’t get US taxpayers’ war appending, for a much larger Airbus 330, which is far less mature than a KC-767.
Eventually, the US may have 179 pending overruns.Expected acquisition costs may total $35B, or $196M an airplane.I do not expect it to be that low.
About DOMA. I thought this was a good comment from Jason Kuznicki:
“ Liberals: If you think declining to defend DOMA is the right decision, how will you feel when a Republican administration declines to defend in a school prayer case? Or an abortion case? Or on Obamacare itself? There are two very, very distinct issues here. One concerns gays and lesbians. The other concerns the proper relationship among the three branches of the federal government. One is about policy; the other is about procedure. Deciding a procedural question based on what it means for a one-time policy outcome is just bad governance. The questions we should be asking are — How much power would this really give the president? Is this a particularly new power? (Arguably it’s not.) And in any case, are we comfortable with the president having it, even if he or she has radically different views about policy? When we look at it that way, there’s a near-perfect parallel to the perennial debate over the filibuster. Everyone hates it when they’re in the majority. Everyone loves it when they’re in the minority. Politics really is the mind-killer.”
Sometimes the best defense also includes a strong offense. To protect SS from efforts to weaken it, shouldn’t defenses like Baker’s be complemented by worthy proposals to strengthen SS, beyond preserving it? Similarly, for example, the Coberly/Webb/NW Plan, which would maintain current projected and planned benefits, could be a fall-back position for its proponents after losing battles and having to compromise. That’s often how the world works, as politicians know well. I’m not suggesting or recommending insincere bargaining positions. But if “strengthening” SS is defined by SS’s opponents, to mean keeping the level of security the same, I believe they’ve won.
Well, given the tea party congress members penchant for ‘my way or the highway’ are calls for a similar approach by a different base?? And the driving memes are…we shall see.
I suspect even the filibuster will survive as well in some form. I fear calls for impeachment are more revealing than you might wish they were Corev.
This is a tough time to serve as a governor or legislative member in many of the States.
There are 44 States facing budget deficits in FY2012, the total of which is roughly $125 billion. The budget shortfalls range from 2% (Indiana) to over 44% (Illinois and Nevada) of State budgets. The problem doesn’t stop there. There are already 22 States identified which face budget deficits totalling at least $70 billion in FY2013. The list is expected to grow, perhaps substantially. The only States that appear to have resolved their budget issues in FY2012 are Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, Delaware, North Dakota, and Wyoming. More info is available at CBPP.
Many States aren’t home free if they resolve their budget problems as they still face funding issues regarding their State pension and retiree healthcare plans. The Pew Center on the States calls the problem a $1 trillion gap while other research sources put the funding gap at up to $3 trillion.
If that wasn’t enough, the States still face requirements to finance any future unfunded mandates coming out of Washington, D.C.. This problem includes expansion or modification of existing Federal mandates. Unless Congress reduces the imposed burden, there is no expectation that these costs will be curtailed.
Throw on top of that pile of State fiscal issues the desires and efforts by many States to improve their economic support environment for businesses.
Make no mistake, this is a difficult time to serve in State elected office and the same applies to serving in local governments. I don’t envy those officials.
I support spending reductions in the national security and defense operations of the Federal Government. Regardless, there is the matter of what percentage such Federal spending outlays represent in comparison to other Federal outlays each fiscal year. If individuals and organizations want to complain about defense and/or all other national security spending, perhaps they should take a closer look at other Federal outlays as well. Many should pay closer attention to projected interest payment obligations on debt held by the public as such payments will crowd out discretionary spending. For the moment, though, there should a clear acknowledgement that payments for individuals represent the largest share of Federal Budget outlays today. And, yes, interest payments on debt held by the public are projected to increase substantially later this decade and climb rapidly in future decades.
Note the following comparison of Federal Budget outlays for national defense spending as compared to payments for individuals. Generally, Federal spending outlays have reversed positions as a percentage of GDP and percentage of outlays in comparing the period 1953-1960 to 2001-2008 as well as 2009-2016.
“Remember that the Jacobins in 18th century France did not start out as a reckless band until they ran up against a reckless, ruthless and obstinate opposition of royalists and their lackeys.”
That’s not how I remember it.
The French revoltion was a early cruder form of the color revolutions of our times. Towns through out France were inundated with revolutionary pamplits for months prior to the revolt. The pamphleteers incited the mob to attack the established order.
A royalists job is to protect the established order so royalists cannot be called reckless when they confront marauding mobs. French peasents expected ruthless opposition from the royalists. That is all they had ever known. So the peasents knew they were going to have to get rough if they intended to carrier out there plans. It was not the obstinate opposition that made the mob act like a dog with hydro phobia, rather it was a people who were victimized by a unjust system, who where subjected to a coordinated propaganda campiagn.
I don’t agree with the concept of accepting any form of compromise on this issue. Not until it can be proven that Social Security benefits can’t be covered by the FICA contributions with supplementation via the Trust Fund. If the Trust Fund is a creditor of the Treasury, as represented by the special Treasury notes held by the Fund, then so too are all other T-Bills and Notes. If repayment to one’s creditors is a drain on the budget then revenues have to be found to pay those debts. All of the claims and protestations that lump Social Security into a “unified” budget are contrary to current law and contrary to the concept of “full faith and credit” of the US government. The debtor doesn’t get to pick and choose which creditors to repay and in what order.
H,W&H You’re leaving out the entire process of negotiations that took place in the reconviened Estates-General and subsequent National Assembly early in 1789. The Terror didn’t get to a full head of steam until several years after the fall of the Bastille in July of 1789, and that only lasted about two years though bloody it was.
Jack I agree entirely with your position but you sound like Gov Walker (no compromise). Any negotiator knows that you demand more than what you will accept at the end of the day. Many assume that everyone does this. Your not at Target, you’re at the Chevy dealership.
On another subject why not start a US version of David Camerons campaign aginst middle managers in the UK. Essentially say that no manager may make more than the state, and encourage the state and local governments to reduce the number of these types by 1/2. That would at least share the sacrifice to beyond the front line workers. to those who just push paper around. (These types would threaten to leave, let them lets see if the private world has that many managment jobs, given that they are also being cut there)
i get your point, and to some extent agree with it. the pres is playing a dangerous game when he chooses not to enforce a law. but there is nothing new here. all pres. do it.
I agree MG. Gov. Patrickin MA is in the process of amending collective bargaining packages regarding healthcare insurance, for instance, in regard to type and number of packages offered. He is also looking at the pension plans. Hmmmm…I wonder if his approach is different than in WI. Worth a look.
RI is also active at the moment.
I have not seen research on the current approaches across the states to collective bargaining, state assets and selling (or not), and such.
Dan, I’m not abosolutely certain, but a lot depends on how strong are the collective bargaining laws. In many states they allow collective bargaining, but are lenient about joining the union, paying and collecting dues.
In that case I’ll suggest raising the employer contribution to make up for the recent reduction of the worker’s share. Obama is playing the good guy in a good guy bad guy drama that will assure the demise of SS as a worth while program. It’s slef funding and Obama is cutting the source of that revenue playing right into the hands of Deceit and Deception. Raise the stakes and bargain from there. Obama wants to start at par and accept a handicap.
CoRev – “What’s going on with Democrats? WI, IN, NJ, OH, CA all are facing serious state and more importantly local government shortfalls.
“How do Democrats in the Obama era respond when they lose elections? By making extraconstitutional end runs around the democratic process, if the disturbing pattern emerging across our nation is any indication.”
class tensions have been increasingly manifest for some time – i would expect protest is bipartisan and that neither party really prepared.
The national security appparatus comsumes at least 20% of US government outlays, has been nearly this much since 1999. Cash money for that waste, or at best opportunity cost away from a productive investment was raised from SS collections designed to be a bank account for the baby boomers’ retirement. The pentagon and the contractors’ have wasted the 2.4 trillion bucks accumulated for SS.
Get the story correct, spending the surplus SS receipts on guns and bombs took away productivity which is missing to cash the SS TF.
As Eisenhower said in 1953: ““Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.”
You need to think context. You should see the responses to Krugman taking youyr tack.
War profiteering idiomatically referred to as “defense” benefits a very few people, at the burden to many, while payments to individuals are to the needs of scores of millions on SS, receiving medicare and medicaid.
The need for the “defense” spending is negligible. It exists from “unwarranted influence”.
When you show those percentages, look at Europe. The Germans 3.4% for “defense”, the UK 6+ %.
You should know the 12 super carriers in the world 11 are in the US Navy, one in the UK Royal Navy to be extended in dry dock because they cannot afford steam it.
You seem to worry about the impact on a few war mongers of succor for 150M Americans.
Be careful when using GDP numbers to make your point. GDP includes deficit spending by the Government and credit spending by individuals. These two factors are a huge contributors to the GDP number. Of course the Federal Spending outlays have reversed positions as a percentage of GDP…the Nation and individuals have spent more than ever on credit increasing the GDP data in the process…
ilsm, I stated in my opening remark that “I support spending reductions in the national security and defense operations of the Federal Government.” I put U.S. national security and defense spending in context…with other U.S. Government outlays. By 2020, national security and defense spending will pale in comparison to interest payment costs on debt held by the public based on OMB projections. The problem of interest payment costs grows much worse after 2020. Meanwhile, national security and defense spending in the U.S. is projected to decline considerably as a percentage of GDP and Federal outlays. I read both of Krugman’s recent blog pieces and the responses. No surprise considering who responded. Krugman is generally correct, by the way. Your approach to discussing national security and defense spending outlays is wrapped around all kinds of chatter that I do not find helpful. You appear to pretend that most citizens have not benefitted from a strong national defense or national security measures. That is pure nonsense. Your standard attack line about defense contractor profits and DoD cost management inefficiencies may have considerable merit, but there is more to national security than that. A few Open threads back, you stated that you would cut 66% of the FY2012 defense budget. I countered by asking you to lay it out in detail. You still haven’t attempted that effort. It’s easy to say that you would cut 66% out a fiscal year budget for DoD and quite another to do it. In my judgment, you wouldn’t be successful in accomplishing a 66% reduction within a single fiscal year budget. I don’t take you seriously when you say stuff like that. I am not concerned with the defense programs and costs of the UK or Germany. I have served with military organizations in both of those nations, and will take the U.S. defense programs and capabilities over either of those nations. Hands down. […]
ilsm, I stated in my opening remark that “I support spending reductions in the national security and defense operations of the Federal Government.” I put U.S. national security and defense spending in context…with other U.S. Government outlays. By 2020, national security and defense spending will pale in comparison to interest payment costs on debt held by the public based on OMB projections. The problem of interest payment costs grows much worse after 2020. Meanwhile, national security and defense spending in the U.S. is projected to decline considerably as a percentage of GDP and Federal outlays. I read both of Krugman’s recent blog pieces and the responses. No surprise considering who responded. Krugman is generally correct, by the way. Your approach to discussing national security and defense spending outlays is wrapped around all kinds of chatter that I do not find helpful. You appear to pretend that most citizens have not benefitted from a strong national defense or national security measures. That is pure nonsense. Your standard attack line about defense contractor profits and DoD cost management inefficiencies may have considerable merit, but there is more to national security than that. A few Open threads back, you stated that you would cut 66% of the FY2012 defense budget. I countered by asking you to lay it out in detail. You still haven’t attempted that effort. It’s easy to say that you would cut 66% out a fiscal year budget for DoD and quite another to do it. In my judgment, you wouldn’t be successful in accomplishing a 66% reduction within a single fiscal year budget. I don’t take you seriously when you say stuff like that. If you want to only tackle DoD weapon systems under procurement, try tackling the latest DoD Comptroller list for the FY2012 budget:
ilsm, I stated in my opening remark that “I support spending reductions in the national security and defense operations of the Federal Government.” I put U.S. national security and defense spending in context…with other U.S. Government outlays. By 2020, national security and defense spending will pale in comparison to interest payment costs on debt held by the public based on OMB projections. The problem of interest payment costs grows much worse after 2020. Meanwhile, national security and defense spending in the U.S. is projected to decline considerably as a percentage of GDP and Federal outlays. I read both of Krugman’s recent blog pieces and the responses. No surprise considering who responded. Krugman is generally correct, by the way. Your approach to discussing national security and defense spending outlays is wrapped around all kinds of chatter that I do not find helpful. You appear to pretend that most citizens have not benefitted from a strong national defense or national security measures. That is pure nonsense. Your standard attack line about defense contractor profits and DoD cost management inefficiencies may have considerable merit, but there is more to national security than that. A few Open threads back, you stated that you would cut 66% of the FY2012 defense budget. I countered by asking you to lay it out in detail. You still haven’t attempted that effort. It’s easy to say that you would cut 66% out a fiscal year budget for DoD and quite another to do it. In my judgment, you wouldn’t be successful in accomplishing a 66% reduction within a single fiscal year budget. I don’t take you seriously when you say stuff like that. If you want to only tackle DoD weapon systems under procurement, try tackling the latest DoD Comptroller list for the FY2012 budget:
Jesse – “Of course the Federal Spending outlays have reversed positions as a percentage of GDP…the Nation and individuals have spent more than ever on credit increasing the GDP data in the process…”
Federal spending outlays did not have change as percentages. The changes were intentional as the Congresses and Administrations ramped up support for individuals, States and local muncipalities. The change in priorities is reflected in the share changes in Federal outlays.
Jesse – “Of course the Federal Spending outlays have reversed positions as a percentage of GDP…the Nation and individuals have spent more than ever on credit increasing the GDP data in the process…”
Federal spending outlays did not have to change as percentages. The changes were intentional as the Congresses and Administrations ramped up support for individuals, States and local muncipalities. The change in priorities is reflected in the share changes in Federal outlays.
Juan, ?class tensions? Partisan politics? Yes. Extrconstitutional? Yes. Desperation politics? Perhaps. Arrogant politics? Perhaps. Only one party plays the class warfare card.
There has been a political sea change, and no one yet knows how strong and long it will continue.
Juan, ?class tensions? Partisan politics? Yes. Extraconstitutional? Yes. Desperation politics? Perhaps. Arrogant politics? Perhaps. Only one party plays the class warfare card.
There has been a political sea change, and no one yet knows how strong and long it will continue.
Yes, a lot of poor people during the period since WW II paid for the empire, and its burden.
“You still haven’t attempted that effort. It’s easy to say that you would cut 66% out a fiscal year budget for DoD and quite another to do it. In my judgment, you wouldn’t be successful in accomplishing a 66% reduction within a single fiscal year budget. I don’t take you seriously when you say stuff like that.”
One line: end the empire.
The chatter about % and not caring why the Germans are cutting to less than 170,000 soldiers (you still see s few at Ft Bliss) while EUCOM desires to stage 2 more brigades in Europe, explain that.
And explain why EUCOM needs $17B in new milcon but won’t figure out what it costs to sustain them. GAO says the EUCOM cannot figure out what it will cost for the two more brigabes to keep the Germany lobby of the Army pleased. http://www.gao.gov/new.items/d11131.pdf
ANd I am waiting for this years version of this thing to see how GAO sees the waste in pentagon welfare for industry called major weapon system acquisition. http://www.gao.gov/products/GAO-10-388SP Due end of Mar, again there year the DoD will not have data because they are not manging the 20% of expenditures wrung from the old, sick and poor.
In addition to ending the empire, my 66% includes fring the inept.
I have done military logistics including running TPFDLLs since Vietnam.
Consider changing the term entitlements to voluntary transfers.
Today entitlement means formulaic programs such as Social Security, Mecicare, Medicaid and the long list of etcs. They are considered with rare exceptions to be on budgetary auto autopilot. Historically they have been both expanded and received increased funding. These changes require Congressional action.
Voluntary transfers today means formulaic programs such as Social Security, Mecicare, Medicaid and the long list of etcs. They are considered with rare exceptions to be on budgetary auto autopilot. Historically they have been both expanded and received increased funding, but in rare instances they have also been cut. These changes require Congressional action.
Hmmm…no. It appears to come down to what is perceived as natural and true and what is not. One person’s class warfare is another’s equilibrium or proper workings of the economy.
From the point of view of the beneficiaries on discretionary side, every dollar that gives succor to the poor, sick and elderly is extracted from corporate welfare.
While I was hanging out with retired Colonels (in Navy they would be Captains) the conversation occasionally revolved around entitlements and discretionary spending this was during the low days before 2000 whence the US started spending more on war than during the Vietnam war in constant dollars.
I will call “entitlements” voluntary transfers to individuals, if you let me call discretionary spending “corporate welfare” (war profiteering being an older subset).
The general welfare has nothing to do with corporate welfare.
Co baby, First and foremost stop linking Social Security with Medicare and Medicaid as though their funding mechanisms are the same. They are not. Social Security has had a very stable benefits formula for many years with a totally dedicated funding stream that more often than not runs a surplus by design. That some would like to confuse the intention of that design and claim it to be a supplement to the general budget does not change the current law. If the Congress now wants to attempt to distort the relationship between the Social Security program, its debtor and its beneficiaries I suggest that each member does so at his/her own electoral peril. Once even the T-Baggers realize that they’re being fleeced out of their retirement safety net, that they’ve been paying for throughout their working lives, they too will “revolt” as are the public workers throughout the country.
That Medicare and Medicaid are financially unstable is only a sign of the archaic health care financing mechanism that this country has chosen to maintain. The poor can use the ER and cost their localities yet more money. The rest can go into bankruptcy when they come up with the need for one serious episode requiring extensive care. Nice way to offer health care in an advanced society with great wealth, though inadequately distributed.
On a bit of a different topic, here’s an interesting, if anecdotal, review of an alternative news source. Over at CJR they’re running a write in assessment thread concerning individual views of Al Jazeera Engliish. http://www.cjr.org/news_meeting/assessing_al_jazeera.php#comments The responses are very interesting to say the least. I haven’t read them all, but the first dozen are only substantial praise for a news source free of ideology, bias and fluff and described as being a better news source than currently available on MSM or cable. I haven’t seen their news show, but I will do so from now on: http://english.aljazeera.net/ Along a similar line, if you want to listen and watch debates on current political, social and economic topics that are intelligent and informative try the Doha Debates @ http://www.thedohadebates.com/ Excellent!!!
Quite a revealing array of percentages ou have going there. From 2001 to 2010; it appears payments to individuals is stagnant; while payments to Defense (does this this include Iraq and Afghanistan) goes up ~25%. Much of the outlays to individuals is probably the result of the declining percenatge of the population within the Civilian Labor Force who are either under employed or unemployed.
So is the solution to cut payments to individuals when the economy is “not” creating enough jobs? I don’t believe it is, the same as the attack on state and local employees is the answer to the state dilemas is either. Keeping people employed and getting them employed is by far the biggest issue this country has today.
no compromise is necessary. and setting out a bargaining postion that asks for too much might just add to the hysteria. if they are saying that SS is going to cause huge tax raises, and we threaten to “fix” SS… which doesn’t need to be fixed… by enacting a huge tax raise, we have just made their case for them.
meanwhile the 40 cents per week per year increase in the tax the workers pay for their own benefits will strengthen SS… by paying for a longer retirement at a the higher standard of living future retirees will need.
you are quite wrong about the “class warfare card.” The Republicans shout “class warfare” every time some poor Democrat points at the rising income inequality and the deficit, which can only be fixed by raising the taxes that were cut by the cut that was going to pay for itself but didn’t.
The problem is not collective bargaining. It is state budgets that do not plan for the inevitable downturns. This has something to do with the taxpayers not wanting to pay for the government services they need.
whatever “entitlements” used to mean, today it is a buzzword meaning “we have to cut it.” never mind that the people paid for it, directly in the case of Social Security, or indirectly in the case of Medicare-large or whatever other “entitlements” you have in mind.
There is no reason people can’t pay for the programs they need. But as long as your friends are dishonest about how they parse the budget and keep calling for tax cuts, we are going to have a deficit problem. Cutting “entitlement” will not fix the budget, but will impoverish America.
I asked: “What impact would a change of terms have? From the reponses no impact at all. The same cast of characters fall back onto the same argume3nts.
Yeah, entitlements arguments back and forth longer than I have lived.
The dichotomy of “discretionary” and “entitlements” is rooted in tax foundation and other right wing humbug factories.
I think David Walker when he was comptroller at pentagon used them, too.
The proponents of discretionary spending use %ages to argue back to the 1920’s economy with no social net, some of them are interested in how much the war industry gets, others in corporate welfare, and some are anti New Deal.
The argument boils down to spending for millions of human beings’ needs versus the good of a few.
Some see every guns and rocket as taking food and growth from the economy should be succor for the mases. As Lincoln said of the people and by the people and for the people.
Others see succor to the masses as taking away from the makers of guns and rockets. They limit the term people to a very few real serious people.
75 years and still attacking the New Deal………………………….
I have been a character for a long time. Most people who know me say that.
CoRev, Because they are not merely arguments, they are statements of fact. Call the benefits of the SS program what you want they are still the result of FICA contributions made by working people throughout their working lives. The are entitled to the benefits that they contributed to in order to maintain the program which would then provide the benefits to those working people. Those retirement benefits are all the more significant in an economy that has been continuously destructive to the savings and pension plans of those same working people.
Are you satisfied to have your pension, paid for by the tax payers? You took part in a work program that made you an agreement in the past. Now that agreement is being upheld to your benefit. Why do you continuously argue that retirement benefits promised to others are subject to revision? Are other working people not as entitled to their expected benefits as you have been?
run75441 – “Well MG: Quite a revealing array of percentages ou have going there. From 2001 to 2010; it appears payments to individuals is stagnant; while payments to Defense (does this this include Iraq and Afghanistan) goes up ~25%. Much of the outlays to individuals is probably the result of the declining percenatge of the population within the Civilian Labor Force who are either under employed or unemployed.”
I recommend a closer look at the table.
Payments for individuals outlays increased $696.26 billion (61.7%) above the 2001 level of $1,128,380,000,000 from 2001 to 2008 resulting in a 2008 outlay of $1,824,647,000,000. Payments for individuals outlays increased $1.15 trillion (102%) above the 2001 level from 2001 to 2010 resulting in a 2010 outlay of $2,285,569,000,000.
National defense outlays increased $311.34 billion (102%) from $304.73 billion in 2001 to $616.07 billion in 2008.
Disbursements to human beings growing faster than the military industrial complex?
What is wrong with that?
Do you suppose US government Disbursements to human beings are growing fast because: the a) US is getting poorer; b) the US is growing older (I can start mine soon); c) medical insurance complex is pillaging d) the military industrial complex is becoming humane and giving to the poor?
Choose one or more and explain.
I prefer looking at charts in constant year dollars.
Doing that at 2012 historical chart 8-8 you will see that the military industrial complex had outlays in excess of half a trillion dollars during 10 years since 1962 (the start of that table). One was 1969, the other nine were after the Iraq occupation. You might recall that the Soveits collapsed in 1991, and the world is a lot different than in 1969.
My answer to the question I posed is a) US is getting poorer, my reasoning is that the military industrial complex has taken from the productivity of the US far too much and since 1991 a huge part of that ‘take’ has been unnecessary.
It is all unwarranted influence of privatized arsenals who buy their DoD bosses and congress.
And serious people worry about the political power of unions in Wisconsin…………………
And knock this off: “Kindly save your war monger chatter for the leftists and other anti-defense and anti-military crowd. You do such a disservice to those who serve.” Serving whom?
MG – “A few Open threads back, you stated that you would cut 66% of the FY2012 defense budget. I countered by asking you to lay it out in detail. You still haven’t attempted that effort. It’s easy to say that you would cut 66% out a fiscal year budget for DoD and quite another to do it. In my judgment, you wouldn’t be successful in accomplishing a 66% reduction within a single fiscal year budget. I don’t take you seriously when you say stuff like that.”
ilsm – “One line: end the empire.”
You may have some of the AB readers cheering your idea, but let’s do the math.
Let’s see how much of the DoD FY2012 budget proposal you would save by eliminating all OCONUS facilities other than ongoing war operations. The DoD Comptroller states that would result in an O&M savings of $21.5 billion for all current overseas operations excluding the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Costs include (1) Military Personnel, Operation and Maintenance, Family Housing Operations, Family Housing Construction, and Military Construction.
You have proposed saving $21.5 billion in O&M out of a proposed defense budget of $707.467 billion (DoD FY2012 base budget is $553 billion). Throw in another $3 billion for other operational taskings (at most) and you’re sitting at $24.5 billion of DoD savings. Most of the equipment would have to be redeployed to CONUS so that’s a cost, not a savings. And there would be other costs to closing the OCONUS facilities as well as time lags.
You want to claim 66% DoD budget savings by closing all OCONUS facilities? Not hardly. Even if you gut the U.S. Navy and kill off most global Navy missions, you’re still not close to capturing 66% of the DoD budget. Shutting down the war in Afghanistan won’t get you the 66% either.
You have a long way to go in your DoD budget cutting proposal. If you are including all other national security spending, you’re much further in the hole.
The point is simple. Let’s face the reality of the Federal Budget projections, and stop pretending.
Mandatory spending obligations do not require annual appropriations negotiations, and net interest costs on debt held by the public are the issues that the U.S. Government will have face by 2020 and beyond. That’s where the bulk of the expenditures will be. DoD’s budget will be pulled down significantly by the end of the decade.
Mandatory spending obligations go well beyond SS, Medicare, and Medicaid. The list is long. That’s another area of pretending, both on the blog and in the news media.
Discretionary spending will continue to be crowded out as funding demands for mandatory spending and net interest costs ramp up. That is where we are headed. The ongoing budget arguments barely touch the level of considerations that will need to be applied in order to deal with the projected higher levels of spending we will face. Net interest costs alone may reach $1 trillion per fiscal year no later than 2021 or 2022, and then ramp up from there for a few decades.
Moreover, there is no major discussion of what happens when we hit the next recession and what may drive it. There is a strong likelihood that we will encounter a major recession before the end of this decade. Crude oil prices may soar and that will crush the U.S. economy. The subsequent recovery may take much longer than many realize.
The U.S. Government is not on a sustainable fiscal course. That must change.
The major changes that have driven many of the economic problems we are facing is U.S. trade policy and concurrent growth in the cost of retirement and healthcare benefits paid out by States, counties, municipalities and private enterprises. Meanwhile, governments at all levels across the nation had been providing levels of support and services that many of their budgets can’t support indefinitely.
The point is simple. Let’s face the reality of the Federal Budget projections and stop pretending.
Mandatory spending obligations (which do not require annual appropriations negotiations), and net interest costs on debt held by the public are the issues that the U.S. Government will have face by 2020 and beyond. That’s where the bulk of the expenditures will be. DoD’s budget will be pulled down significantly by the end of the decade.
Mandatory spending obligations go well beyond SS, Medicare, and Medicaid. The list is long. That’s another area of pretending, both on the blog and in the news media.
Discretionary spending will continue to be crowded out as funding demands for mandatory spending and net interest costs ramp up. That is where we are headed. The ongoing budget arguments barely touch the level of considerations that will need to be applied in order to deal with the projected higher levels of spending we will face. Net interest costs alone may reach $1 trillion per fiscal year no later than 2021 or 2022, and then ramp up from there for a few decades.
There is no major discussion of what happens when we hit the next recession and what may drive it. There is a strong likelihood that we will encounter a major recession before the end of this decade. Crude oil prices may soar and that will crush the U.S. economy. The subsequent recovery may take much longer than many realize.
The U.S. Government is not on a sustainable fiscal course. That must change.
The major changes that have driven many of the economic problems we are facing is U.S. trade policy and concurrent growth in the cost of retirement and healthcare benefits paid out by States, counties, municipalities and private enterprises. Meanwhile, governments at all levels across the nation had been providing levels of support and services that many of their budgets can’t support indefinitely.
The U.S. Government will not be in a position to continue to bail out the States, counties, and municipalities going forward. The availability of grants will be reduced.
The point is simple. Let’s face the reality of the Federal Budget projections and stop pretending.
Mandatory spending obligations (which do not require annual appropriations negotiations), and net interest costs on debt held by the public are the issues that the U.S. Government will have face by 2020 and beyond. That’s where the bulk of the expenditures will be. DoD’s budget will be pulled down significantly by the end of the decade.
Mandatory spending obligations go well beyond SS, Medicare, and Medicaid. The list is long. That’s another area of pretending, both on the blog and in the news media.
Discretionary spending will continue to be crowded out as funding demands for mandatory spending and net interest costs ramp up. That is where we are headed. The ongoing budget arguments barely touch the level of considerations that will need to be applied in order to deal with the projected higher levels of spending we will face. Net interest costs alone may reach $1 trillion per fiscal year no later than 2021 or 2022, and then ramp up from there for a few decades.
Moreover, there is no major discussion of what happens when we hit the next recession and what may drive it. There is a strong likelihood that we will encounter a major recession before the end of this decade. Crude oil prices may soar and that will crush the U.S. economy. The subsequent recovery may take much longer than many realize.
The U.S. Government is not on a sustainable fiscal course. That must change.
The major changes that have driven many of the economic problems we are facing are U.S. trade policy and concurrent growth in the cost of retirement and healthcare benefits paid out by States, counties, municipalities and private enterprises.
Governments at all levels across the nation have been providing levels of support and services that many of their budgets can’t support indefinitely. The U.S. Government will not be in a position to continue to bail out the States, counties, and municipalities going forward. The availability of Federal grants will be reduced.
Federal net interest costs may very well crush many of the future fiscal year Federal Budgets. An upturn in interest rates driven by whatever reason(s) may very well alter the availability of funding for many Federal Budget needs.
ilsm – “The dichotomy of “discretionary” and “entitlements” is rooted in tax foundation and other right wing humbug factories.”
Bull. Those are U.S. Government defined words as used in Congress and the Federal Budget process. We have already posted the links that provide government definitions.
Stop playing the leftist card on this stuff. What a con job.
I’ll say it again. Kindly save your war monger chatter for the leftists and other anti-defense and anti-military crowd. You do such a disservice to those who serve. Your standard anti-military rants are wasted on me. You can spew out that junk for the young people and the leftists as you have always done, but it doesn’t provide any incentive for me to engage you in conversation.
You missed the part of cutting the empire which involves demobilizing force structure. That is the where the real bucks can be reprogrammed to actual needs.
Give PACOM and EUCOM one US Navy fleet each based on US soil. Centcom, shuttered. EUCOM AOR needs to take the land mass from the Vistula to Vladivistok off their map.
How can you take a conclusion from a report from a comptroller office which has not had a satisfactory audit since Grant and Sherman demobilized the Union Army? I will not address stuff from DoD comptroller any longer. Should anyone listen to DOD comptroller? no!
EUCOM is one lobby in the praetorium, there are many filled with schemes to build their string of feifdoms on foreign soil.
The GAO started with no one has figured out what it costs to maintain the $17B in new stuff EUCOM is trying to get to move two brigades in for the Germany lobby.
Leave the DoD comptroller stuff home until they pass an audit, and until the legacy of David Walker is wrung out. David Walker wanders the country for the Peterson’s telling much the same tale you do, and his budgets were premised on the battle between entitlements and corporate (discretionary) welfare for the cohorts of the military industrial complex.
I have been reading a string of GAO reports on how the fighter business in the US will mean the Navy and Air Force (US fighter inventory is only 3400 planes, down form 12,000 the lasttime DoD spent more than half a trillion a year) are short of fighters for their overseas fiefdoms because the industry cannot deliver 750 fighters but 183 for the F-22, 15 years after the need date, and F-35 is going same route. Maybe I can talk the trillions in the fighter business to keep the inept profitable.
Do suggest how anyone should rely on DoD comptroller reports or financial statements.
The military industrial congress complex does not serve the US.
You take the DoD comptroller as truth, when there has never been a clean audit of the DoD books.
From DoD we can only tell that the DoD handles 20% odd of the US government outlays.
There is no telling what it is worth. That is shown regularly by GAO which has reason to not certify the audits. Any accountant knows if the spec from a contract is not met, the value of the contract is not true. That is why I hit on DoD, lots of money and ‘good enough for DoD’ is very poor.
And that spending over the years has made it impossible to build super tankers in the US because aircraft carriers from socialized shipyards at cost plus raise the rates in US shipyards.
One issue is the harm DoD spending has done on the economy.
Do address DoD comptroller reports and how they can be taken as anything but justifying the take on the economy.
once more MG gives us numbers intended to deceive and tells us to “face reality.” Some of those “payments for individuals” are from a “tax” dedicated to pay for individuals and collected on the promise that they will be used to pay for those individuals themselves.
MG is very much in the position of a person with a growing family who insists the family food budget should remain a constant, and small, percent of his sports car budget.
Let us imagine a world in which there are only two nations, more or less “at war” with each other. One of those nations happens to own a lot of good farm land and its population grows to one hundred times the size of the other nation. By MG’s reckoning the “defense budget” of the larger nation should grow to be a hundred times the size of the smaller nation. INstead he points with alarm at the growing food budget. Look, look, he shrieks. Look at all the money we spend on food.. “individual payments.” This can’t go on!
coberly – “once more MG gives us numbers intended to deceive and tells us to “face reality.””
That is a lie.
coberly – “MG is very much in the position of a person with a growing family who insists the family food budget should remain a constant, and small, percent of his sports car budget.”
That is a lie.
coberly – “By MG’s reckoning the “defense budget” of the larger nation should grow to be a hundred times the size of the smaller nation.”
That is a lie.
coberly – “INstead he points with alarm at the growing food budget. Look, look, he shrieks. Look at all the money we spend on food.. “individual payments.” This can’t go on.”
That is a lie. —-
coberly’s continual string of outright lies, personal attacks, and other phony allegations are wrapped around a poor read of materials on this blog, an acknowledged lack of knowledge of the U.S. Government’s Federal Budget, and whatever else affects his thinking.
The purpose of my original comment was explained.
These are not the 1950s whereby national defense spending represented 52% to 70% of Federal spending outlays. Instead, national defense spending now represents roughly 20% of Federal spending outlays. Such spending is projected to decline to 15.2% by FY2020. National defense may be reduced further, representing an even smaller share of Federal outlays. I support further reductions in national defense spending.
The primary issues going forward are Federal interest payment obligatons on debt held by the public, the growing levels of all mandatory spending which go well beyond SS, Medicare, and Medicaid, and the resulting impact on discretionary spending. Federal interest payment obligations are projected to increase rapidly later this decade and soar much higher thereafter.
Discretionary spending will continue to be crowded out as funding demands for mandatory spending and net interest costs ramp up. That is where we are headed. The ongoing budget arguments barely touch the level of considerations that will need to be applied in order to deal with the projected higher levels of spending we will face. Net interest costs alone may reach $1 trillion per fiscal year no later than 2021 or 2022, and then ramp up from there for a few decades.
Moreover, there is no major discussion of what happens when we hit the next recession and what may drive it. There is a strong likelihood that we will encounter a major recession before the end of this decade. Crude oil prices may soar and that will crush the U.S. economy. The subsequent recovery may take much longer than many realize.
The U.S. Government is not on a sustainable fiscal course. That must change.
Federal net interest costs may very well crush many of the future fiscal year Federal Budgets. An upturn in interest rates driven by whatever reason(s) may very well alter the availability of funding for many Federal Budget needs.
That is the thrust of most of my message.
I have no idea what the Congresses and Administrations of the U.S. Government intend to do in addressing these problems, but solutions must be found in order to avoid not only the destruction of needed discretionary spending but also the many other mandatory […]
One nuclear strike by any group or other nation in the world will demonstrate that you’re out to lunch on gutting DoD. You act as though there are no threats on the planet that the U.S. should be concerned about now or in the future.
The Russians, we still have MAD/TRIAD against them, it works for the Chinese and maybe even Pakistan.
How does impoverishing the country increase security against a nuclear strike from anyone?
How has paying $150B for star wars done anything? None, of the staged tests show it could stop any one threat that exists today. And the industry gets its 10 or so billion a year every year to play and deploy stuff that don’t work.
What does steaming the 11 largest super carriers around the world do for a nuclear threat?
What does having anyone stationed in EUCOM, PACOM or Centcom do for your fictions?
There is no track to for this generations MacArthurs to race their multi trillion dollar built by lowest quality producer systems on.
See the works of Seymour Melman of late of Columbia University.
Here is DD Eisenhower in 1953:
“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.”
Personal observations of weapon system acquisition for over 26 years. The waste, mismanagement and receiving defective stuff, to meet the policy to keep the industry “healthy”.
Navy ships the only large ships built in US shipyards…………………….
Airplane business Boeing and Airbus both semi nationalized and both show overruns and quality issues similar to socialized industry in delivering military systems and commercial transports. A Chinese aircraft industry would close both of them. Like US shipyards attempting to compete for super tankers.
Yes, the money flowing through DoD to the industry is harming the US economy and is a reason, along with the debt the spending caused that SS Trust Funds is going to be a burden to pay off.
US productivity has been harmed by 60 years of perpetual and excess mobilization, the last 20 of which wholely unjustifed.
To say that we are closer to victory today is to believe, in the face of the evidence, the optimists who have been wrong in the past. To suggest we are on the edge of defeat is to yield to unreasonable pessimism. To say that we are mired in stalemate seems the only realistic, yet unsatisfactory, conclusion. On the off chance that military and political analysts are right, in the next few months we must test the enemy’s intentions, in case this is indeed his last big gasp before negotiations. But it is increasingly clear to this reporter that the only rational way out then will be to negotiate, not as victors, but as an honorable people who lived up to their pledge to defend democracy, and did the best they could.
I assume that you haven’t read Tom Woods’ new book, Rollback. Woods goes after everything. He doesn’t stop with national security spending. He spares nothing. The Woods’ article that you cited was drafted from the book. Some of the article’s content is on solid ground, but certainly not all of it.
Tom Woods is no friend of Federal social spending. Here’s a small sample from last week:
“The success of the book owes something to its extremely creative organization. Woods begins with the general theme and jumps straight into the big issues that are being debated right now.
The first target is health care, and here he goes back to the beginning of government involvement and takes us straight up to the present, showing that the entire sector is half-socialized as it is and it is precisely because of this that there are so many problems. Then he demonstrates the gross error of proceeding further down the socialist path, and argues for repealing the existing apparatus, not in the way that Republicans are imagining but in a way that goes beyond what anyone in public life is willing to say.
This sets up the model for the book, and this model is then applied to the economic stimulus packages and counter-cyclical policies the government has used to deal with the great recession. Here we see the full Austrian perspective in glorious display. This pattern is extended to the chapter on the Fed, which ends up being a sweeping attack on all forms of central banking and government monetary policy.
From here we move into the surprising area that is sadly neglected in reformist literature: the military. He treats the bureaucracies, programs, and policies as another species of interventionist practice, no different in its operations, dynamics, and effects than any other government program. It lives parasitically off the productivity of the people, draining capital and killing innovation, plus wrecking lives. He adds an interesting twist here by demonstrating that there does exist an anti-militarist strain within American conservative thought; his goal here is simply to extend and apply that strain.
After this, we come to the real meat of the book, and the most challenging part. Woods debunks the myth of good government and makes clear that the goal of all reform must not be to make government work better but to disengage it completely from society and economic life. Whereas the previous sections might have educated many readers on facts that they did not know, this section, the largest of the book, deals with the core of the American civic religion.
This is also where the scales being to fall from the eyes. His point is that there is nothing that the government does that improves our lives relative to how freedom might handle the same issue, that there is nothing that needs to be done in society that freedom cannot do better than bureaucracies. Now, obviously, this section represents a dramatic departure from every political convention. It takes us out of the framework of “limiting government” and into the area of radical freedom.”
true. but they won’t be found by wooden headed recitations of numbers with no understanding of their meaning. or a basic recognition that social security is entirely self funding, and medicare ought to be.
even your rant against ilsm… “one nuclear strike…” ignores the fact that the kind of defense we are paying for is not going to prevent that one nuclear strike, which is going to come in a cargo ship.
you petrify your brain with scare stories and then you me a liar when i try to begin to sort through the details so we can hope to find a solution.
i am all in favor of life without government. how do we get there?
how do we keep the bad guys from becoming the new government?
you see, if a person begins with an idiotic premise he can prove anything. of course government is dangerous, of course it is a drag, of course it is inefficient. worse than anything you can think of except chaos and the next group of thugs that would come along and impose THEIR idea of government.
Woods is good at taking on military industrial complex, benefitting the few, corporate welfare where the libertarian opinion of the opportunity costs of ripping off the masses is obvious, taken with the waste fraud and abuse in the DoD closed system.
I diverge when the libertarians attack every public good as interference.
You should rather refute Frederic Bastiat, Seymour Melman, and Eisenhower as well as tell me what is defensable about the GAO 10-388sp and the recent GAO High Risk Series, where GAO persists in annually describing the high risk of waste, fraud and abuse in a trillion dollars or so of DoD acquisitions that are going down, like thieves in the night in the next 5 years. http://www.gao.gov/new.items/d11394t.pdf
Most of us may already agree with Dean Baker’s analysis of, “The Power of Incompetence: The Attack on Social Security
By DEAN BAKER
http://www.counterpunch.com/baker02232011.html
It never hurts, however, to repeat the message in as many venues as possible. The truth of an important issue can never be told too often. It’s a brief, but necessary retelling of a sad tale.
Well, what a surprise. If the government helps the poor the economy gains some additional participants. The link is only to the summary which I paste here:
“We use state and county level variation to examine the impact of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act on employment. A cross state analysis suggests that one additional job was created by each $170,000 in stimulus spending. Time series analysis at the state level suggests a smaller response with a per job cost of about $400,000. These results imply Keynesian multipliers between 0.5 and 1.0, somewhat lower than those assumed by the administration. However, the overall results mask considerable variation for different types of spending. Grants to states for education do not appear to have created any additional jobs. Support programs for low income households and infrastructure spending are found to be highly expansionary. Estimates excluding education spending suggest fiscal policy multipliers of about 2.0 with per job cost of under $100,000.”
“Did the Stimulus Stimulate? Real Time Estimates of the Effects of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act” Feyrer and Sacerdote
The full article is behind a pay wall at NBER:
http://www.nber.org/papers/w16759.pdf?new_window=1
Dean Baker discusses the significance here:
http://www.counterpunch.com/baker02252011.html
What’s going on with Democrats? WI, IN, NJ, OH, CA all are facing serious state and more importantly local government shortfalls.
“How do Democrats in the Obama era respond when they lose elections? By making extraconstitutional end runs around the democratic process, if the disturbing pattern emerging across our nation is any indication.” From here: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2011/02/24/AR2011022405033.html
It also includes Obama’s announcement on the Defense Of Marriage Act (DOMA) as extraconstitutional. It asks:
“What do we call a leader who acts as though he is neither accountable to Congress nor bound by court precedent?“
My answer Hugo Chavez-lite.
This may represent a political tipping point. congress is not powerless.
“Thanks to the president’s dereliction of duty, the House now has a clear pathway to intervene in legal challenges. If the House does so, that would mean there will finally be lawyers in the courtroom, arguing before the judge, who actually want to uphold the statute and win their case.”
There is a growing call for impeachment, and this may veryy well be grounds. How can the Chief law Enforecment Officer, arbitratily ignore several laws and court rulings?
Times have certainly changed, and the silent majority is no longer silent, moreover, if necessary they can organize. The current Democrat Over Reach does not bode well for them in 2012.
If i were a Democrat i would be really unhappy with the White House right now.
In fact I would think it better to keep the WH far away from this crowd. No, not because there would be any danger, but because it, the WH, may soon learn that the people, the real American patriots, do not need a feckless leader to show them the way to their own better lives. Obama needs to see the spontaneity of progressive ideology unfold before his uninvolved self. Remember that the Jacobins in 18th century France did not start out as a reckless band until they ran up against a reckless, ruthless and obstinate opposition of royalists and their lackeys.
We are seeing that organization happening right now as the real silent majority begins to finally find its voice. Working Americans are beginning to understand that both parties, but especially the Republican Party, has been serving the interests of the wealthiest small fraction of the country. It is all too true that the government has not been serving the cause of Americans as a whole, but that is not to say that that government hasn’t been serving the interests of some. When we wake up to the need to focus on economics and finance rather than everyone else’s social morality we will see a better America.
No in Air Force or congress for that matter is concerned about the deficit.
Air refueling used to be for B-52’s, now anyone’s jet needs its aerial refueling tanker, for marginal value to anything but Boeing’s bottom line.
Announced 24 Feb 2011: Boeing has been awarded a $3.5 billion fixed-price incentive contract for engineering and manufacturing development and delivery of the first 18 aircraft by 2017.
The aircraft will be a B767-200, will 787 flight displays, and upgraded refueling hardware from the KC-10.
Looks like McCain is rumbling about fairness in his French connect won’t get US taxpayers’ war appending, for a much larger Airbus 330, which is far less mature than a KC-767.
Eventually, the US may have 179 pending overruns. Expected acquisition costs may total $35B, or $196M an airplane. I do not expect it to be that low.
More waste for war profits.
Why is the 5th Fleet still in Bahrain?
“There is a growing call for impeachment, and this may veryy well be grounds.” CoRev
You usually pepper your pronouncements with a list of supposedly supportive references. Here there are none. Is this just CoRev dreaming out loud? If so I’d suggest that you study Executive legal action history a bit more comprehensively. Here is a starting place:
http://blogs.findlaw.com/law_and_life/2011/02/defense-of-marriage-act-dropped-by-obama.html?=features
CoRev,
About DOMA. I thought this was a good comment from Jason Kuznicki:
“
Liberals: If you think declining to defend DOMA is the right decision, how will you feel when a Republican administration declines to defend in a school prayer case? Or an abortion case? Or on Obamacare itself?
There are two very, very distinct issues here. One concerns gays and lesbians. The other concerns the proper relationship among the three branches of the federal government. One is about policy; the other is about procedure. Deciding a procedural question based on what it means for a one-time policy outcome is just bad governance. The questions we should be asking are — How much power would this really give the president? Is this a particularly new power? (Arguably it’s not.) And in any case, are we comfortable with the president having it, even if he or she has radically different views about policy?
When we look at it that way, there’s a near-perfect parallel to the perennial debate over the filibuster. Everyone hates it when they’re in the majority. Everyone loves it when they’re in the minority. Politics really is the mind-killer.”
Link: http://www.cato-at-liberty.org/the-non-defense-of-doma/
Islam will change
Sometimes the best defense also includes a strong offense. To protect SS from efforts to weaken it, shouldn’t defenses like Baker’s be complemented by worthy proposals to strengthen SS, beyond preserving it? Similarly, for example, the Coberly/Webb/NW Plan, which would maintain current projected and planned benefits, could be a fall-back position for its proponents after losing battles and having to compromise. That’s often how the world works, as politicians know well. I’m not suggesting or recommending insincere bargaining positions. But if “strengthening” SS is defined by SS’s opponents, to mean keeping the level of security the same, I believe they’ve won.
Well, given the tea party congress members penchant for ‘my way or the highway’ are calls for a similar approach by a different base?? And the driving memes are…we shall see.
I suspect even the filibuster will survive as well in some form. I fear calls for impeachment are more revealing than you might wish they were Corev.
buff,
ambivalent, about anything inside the beltway and the numerous state captols.
dictatorship of the billionaires’ mob on the hill.
attacking the wall st men in the white house.
huh?
ilsm will not change
ilsm,
I have no idea what your talking about….
Islam will change
This is a tough time to serve as a governor or legislative member in many of the States.
There are 44 States facing budget deficits in FY2012, the total of which is roughly $125 billion. The budget shortfalls range from 2% (Indiana) to over 44% (Illinois and Nevada) of State budgets. The problem doesn’t stop there. There are already 22 States identified which face budget deficits totalling at least $70 billion in FY2013. The list is expected to grow, perhaps substantially. The only States that appear to have resolved their budget issues in FY2012 are Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, Delaware, North Dakota, and Wyoming. More info is available at CBPP.
Many States aren’t home free if they resolve their budget problems as they still face funding issues regarding their State pension and retiree healthcare plans. The Pew Center on the States calls the problem a $1 trillion gap while other research sources put the funding gap at up to $3 trillion.
If that wasn’t enough, the States still face requirements to finance any future unfunded mandates coming out of Washington, D.C.. This problem includes expansion or modification of existing Federal mandates. Unless Congress reduces the imposed burden, there is no expectation that these costs will be curtailed.
Throw on top of that pile of State fiscal issues the desires and efforts by many States to improve their economic support environment for businesses.
Make no mistake, this is a difficult time to serve in State elected office and the same applies to serving in local governments. I don’t envy those officials.
I support spending reductions in the national security and defense operations of the Federal Government. Regardless, there is the matter of what percentage such Federal spending outlays represent in comparison to other Federal outlays each fiscal year.
If individuals and organizations want to complain about defense and/or all other national security spending, perhaps they should take a closer look at other Federal outlays as well. Many should pay closer attention to projected interest payment obligations on debt held by the public as such payments will crowd out discretionary spending. For the moment, though, there should a clear acknowledgement that payments for individuals represent the largest share of Federal Budget outlays today. And, yes, interest payments on debt held by the public are projected to increase substantially later this decade and climb rapidly in future decades.
Note the following comparison of Federal Budget outlays for national defense spending as compared to payments for individuals. Generally, Federal spending outlays have reversed positions as a percentage of GDP and percentage of outlays in comparing the period 1953-1960 to 2001-2008 as well as 2009-2016.
Federal Budget Spending as a Percentage of GDP
1953-1960
National defense spending 14.2 13.1 10.8 10.0 10.1 10.2 10.0 9.3
Payments for individuals 2.9 3.3 3.6 3.6 3.8 4.6 4.6 4.7
2001-2008
National defense spending 3.0 3.3 3.7 3.9 4.0 3.9 4.0 4.3
Payments for individuals 11.0 11.8 12.1 12.0 12.0 12.0 12.2 12.7
2009-2016
National defense spending 4.7 4.8 5.1 4.7 4.0 3.7 3.6 3.4
Payments for […]
“Remember that the Jacobins in 18th century France did not start out as a reckless band until they ran up against a reckless, ruthless and obstinate opposition of royalists and their lackeys.”
That’s not how I remember it.
The French revoltion was a early cruder form of the color revolutions of our times. Towns through out France were inundated with revolutionary pamplits for months prior to the revolt. The pamphleteers incited the mob to attack the established order.
A royalists job is to protect the established order so royalists cannot be called reckless when they confront marauding mobs. French peasents expected ruthless opposition from the royalists. That is all they had ever known. So the peasents knew they were going to have to get rough if they intended to carrier out there plans. It was not the obstinate opposition that made the mob act like a dog with hydro phobia, rather it was a people who were victimized by a unjust system, who where subjected to a coordinated propaganda campiagn.
I don’t agree with the concept of accepting any form of compromise on this issue. Not until it can be proven that Social Security benefits can’t be covered by the FICA contributions with supplementation via the Trust Fund. If the Trust Fund is a creditor of the Treasury, as represented by the special Treasury notes held by the Fund, then so too are all other T-Bills and Notes. If repayment to one’s creditors is a drain on the budget then revenues have to be found to pay those debts. All of the claims and protestations that lump Social Security into a “unified” budget are contrary to current law and contrary to the concept of “full faith and credit” of the US government. The debtor doesn’t get to pick and choose which creditors to repay and in what order.
H,W&H
You’re leaving out the entire process of negotiations that took place in the reconviened Estates-General and subsequent National Assembly early in 1789. The Terror didn’t get to a full head of steam until several years after the fall of the Bastille in July of 1789, and that only lasted about two years though bloody it was.
Jack I agree entirely with your position but you sound like Gov Walker (no compromise). Any negotiator knows that you demand more than what you will accept at the end of the day. Many assume that everyone does this. Your not at Target, you’re at the Chevy dealership.
On another subject why not start a US version of David Camerons campaign aginst middle managers in the UK. Essentially say that no manager may make more than the state, and encourage the state and local governments to reduce the number of these types by 1/2. That would at least share the sacrifice to beyond the front line workers. to those who just push paper around. (These types would threaten to leave, let them lets see if the private world has that many managment jobs, given that they are also being cut there)
pjr
i can’t agree. you can compromise yourself right into hell.
the bad man comes into your house and threatens to rape your wife and daughter. you compromise with him and he only rapes your daughter.
buff
i get your point, and to some extent agree with it. the pres is playing a dangerous game when he chooses not to enforce a law. but there is nothing new here. all pres. do it.
Lyle
i suspect your plan would meet with the same fate as perestroika.
I agree MG. Gov. Patrickin MA is in the process of amending collective bargaining packages regarding healthcare insurance, for instance, in regard to type and number of packages offered. He is also looking at the pension plans. Hmmmm…I wonder if his approach is different than in WI. Worth a look.
RI is also active at the moment.
I have not seen research on the current approaches across the states to collective bargaining, state assets and selling (or not), and such.
Dan, I’m not abosolutely certain, but a lot depends on how strong are the collective bargaining laws. In many states they allow collective bargaining, but are lenient about joining the union, paying and collecting dues.
In that case I’ll suggest raising the employer contribution to make up for the recent reduction of the worker’s share. Obama is playing the good guy in a good guy bad guy drama that will assure the demise of SS as a worth while program. It’s slef funding and Obama is cutting the source of that revenue playing right into the hands of Deceit and Deception. Raise the stakes and bargain from there. Obama wants to start at par and accept a handicap.
CoRev –
“What’s going on with Democrats? WI, IN, NJ, OH, CA all are facing serious state and more importantly local government shortfalls.
“How do Democrats in the Obama era respond when they lose elections? By making extraconstitutional end runs around the democratic process, if the disturbing pattern emerging across our nation is any indication.”
class tensions have been increasingly manifest for some time – i would expect protest is bipartisan and that neither party really prepared.
The national security appparatus comsumes at least 20% of US government outlays, has been nearly this much since 1999. Cash money for that waste, or at best opportunity cost away from a productive investment was raised from SS collections designed to be a bank account for the baby boomers’ retirement. The pentagon and the contractors’ have wasted the 2.4 trillion bucks accumulated for SS.
Get the story correct, spending the surplus SS receipts on guns and bombs took away productivity which is missing to cash the SS TF.
As Eisenhower said in 1953: ““Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.”
Some ‘people’ figure with figures!
You need to think context. You should see the responses to Krugman taking youyr tack.
War profiteering idiomatically referred to as “defense” benefits a very few people, at the burden to many, while payments to individuals are to the needs of scores of millions on SS, receiving medicare and medicaid.
The need for the “defense” spending is negligible. It exists from “unwarranted influence”.
When you show those percentages, look at Europe. The Germans 3.4% for “defense”, the UK 6+ %.
You should know the 12 super carriers in the world 11 are in the US Navy, one in the UK Royal Navy to be extended in dry dock because they cannot afford steam it.
You seem to worry about the impact on a few war mongers of succor for 150M Americans.
buff,
Imagine,……………………….that!
Be careful when using GDP numbers to make your point. GDP includes deficit spending by the Government and credit spending by individuals. These two factors are a huge contributors to the GDP number. Of course the Federal Spending outlays have reversed positions as a percentage of GDP…the Nation and individuals have spent more than ever on credit increasing the GDP data in the process…
Jesse
ilsm,
I stated in my opening remark that “I support spending reductions in the national security and defense operations of the Federal Government.” I put U.S. national security and defense spending in context…with other U.S. Government outlays. By 2020, national security and defense spending will pale in comparison to interest payment costs on debt held by the public based on OMB projections. The problem of interest payment costs grows much worse after 2020. Meanwhile, national security and defense spending in the U.S. is projected to decline considerably as a percentage of GDP and Federal outlays.
I read both of Krugman’s recent blog pieces and the responses. No surprise considering who responded. Krugman is generally correct, by the way.
Your approach to discussing national security and defense spending outlays is wrapped around all kinds of chatter that I do not find helpful. You appear to pretend that most citizens have not benefitted from a strong national defense or national security measures. That is pure nonsense. Your standard attack line about defense contractor profits and DoD cost management inefficiencies may have considerable merit, but there is more to national security than that. A few Open threads back, you stated that you would cut 66% of the FY2012 defense budget. I countered by asking you to lay it out in detail. You still haven’t attempted that effort. It’s easy to say that you would cut 66% out a fiscal year budget for DoD and quite another to do it. In my judgment, you wouldn’t be successful in accomplishing a 66% reduction within a single fiscal year budget. I don’t take you seriously when you say stuff like that.
I am not concerned with the defense programs and costs of the UK or Germany. I have served with military organizations in both of those nations, and will take the U.S. defense programs and capabilities over either of those nations. Hands down. […]
ilsm,
I stated in my opening remark that “I support spending reductions in the national security and defense operations of the Federal Government.” I put U.S. national security and defense spending in context…with other U.S. Government outlays. By 2020, national security and defense spending will pale in comparison to interest payment costs on debt held by the public based on OMB projections. The problem of interest payment costs grows much worse after 2020. Meanwhile, national security and defense spending in the U.S. is projected to decline considerably as a percentage of GDP and Federal outlays.
I read both of Krugman’s recent blog pieces and the responses. No surprise considering who responded. Krugman is generally correct, by the way.
Your approach to discussing national security and defense spending outlays is wrapped around all kinds of chatter that I do not find helpful. You appear to pretend that most citizens have not benefitted from a strong national defense or national security measures. That is pure nonsense. Your standard attack line about defense contractor profits and DoD cost management inefficiencies may have considerable merit, but there is more to national security than that. A few Open threads back, you stated that you would cut 66% of the FY2012 defense budget. I countered by asking you to lay it out in detail. You still haven’t attempted that effort. It’s easy to say that you would cut 66% out a fiscal year budget for DoD and quite another to do it. In my judgment, you wouldn’t be successful in accomplishing a 66% reduction within a single fiscal year budget. I don’t take you seriously when you say stuff like that.
If you want to only tackle DoD weapon systems under procurement, try tackling the latest DoD Comptroller list for the FY2012 budget:
ilsm,
I stated in my opening remark that “I support spending reductions in the national security and defense operations of the Federal Government.” I put U.S. national security and defense spending in context…with other U.S. Government outlays. By 2020, national security and defense spending will pale in comparison to interest payment costs on debt held by the public based on OMB projections. The problem of interest payment costs grows much worse after 2020. Meanwhile, national security and defense spending in the U.S. is projected to decline considerably as a percentage of GDP and Federal outlays.
I read both of Krugman’s recent blog pieces and the responses. No surprise considering who responded. Krugman is generally correct, by the way.
Your approach to discussing national security and defense spending outlays is wrapped around all kinds of chatter that I do not find helpful. You appear to pretend that most citizens have not benefitted from a strong national defense or national security measures. That is pure nonsense. Your standard attack line about defense contractor profits and DoD cost management inefficiencies may have considerable merit, but there is more to national security than that. A few Open threads back, you stated that you would cut 66% of the FY2012 defense budget. I countered by asking you to lay it out in detail. You still haven’t attempted that effort. It’s easy to say that you would cut 66% out a fiscal year budget for DoD and quite another to do it. In my judgment, you wouldn’t be successful in accomplishing a 66% reduction within a single fiscal year budget. I don’t take you seriously when you say stuff like that.
If you want to only tackle DoD weapon systems under procurement, try tackling the latest DoD Comptroller list for the FY2012 budget:
Jesse – “Of course the Federal Spending outlays have reversed positions as a percentage of GDP…the Nation and individuals have spent more than ever on credit increasing the GDP data in the process…”
Federal spending outlays did not have change as percentages. The changes were intentional as the Congresses and Administrations ramped up support for individuals, States and local muncipalities. The change in priorities is reflected in the share changes in Federal outlays.
Jesse – “Of course the Federal Spending outlays have reversed positions as a percentage of GDP…the Nation and individuals have spent more than ever on credit increasing the GDP data in the process…”
Federal spending outlays did not have to change as percentages. The changes were intentional as the Congresses and Administrations ramped up support for individuals, States and local muncipalities. The change in priorities is reflected in the share changes in Federal outlays.
Juan, ?class tensions? Partisan politics? Yes. Extrconstitutional? Yes. Desperation politics? Perhaps. Arrogant politics? Perhaps. Only one party plays the class warfare card.
There has been a political sea change, and no one yet knows how strong and long it will continue.
Juan, ?class tensions? Partisan politics? Yes. Extraconstitutional? Yes. Desperation politics? Perhaps. Arrogant politics? Perhaps. Only one party plays the class warfare card.
There has been a political sea change, and no one yet knows how strong and long it will continue.
Which party is that, in which conversation?? Corev, that is confusing. I see class statements all the time in the news.
MG,
Yes, a lot of poor people during the period since WW II paid for the empire, and its burden.
“You still haven’t attempted that effort. It’s easy to say that you would cut 66% out a fiscal year budget for DoD and quite another to do it. In my judgment, you wouldn’t be successful in accomplishing a 66% reduction within a single fiscal year budget. I don’t take you seriously when you say stuff like that.”
One line: end the empire.
The chatter about % and not caring why the Germans are cutting to less than 170,000 soldiers (you still see s few at Ft Bliss) while EUCOM desires to stage 2 more brigades in Europe, explain that.
And explain why EUCOM needs $17B in new milcon but won’t figure out what it costs to sustain them. GAO says the EUCOM cannot figure out what it will cost for the two more brigabes to keep the Germany lobby of the Army pleased. http://www.gao.gov/new.items/d11131.pdf
And fighter aircraft procurements demolished by ineptitude of the industry: http://www.gao.gov/new.items/d11323r.pdf and uncertainty where the US’ inventory of fighter planes is going because the MIC is useless and inept, money sinks. http://www.gao.gov/products/GAO-10-789
ANd I am waiting for this years version of this thing to see how GAO sees the waste in pentagon welfare for industry called major weapon system acquisition. http://www.gao.gov/products/GAO-10-388SP Due end of Mar, again there year the DoD will not have data because they are not manging the 20% of expenditures wrung from the old, sick and poor.
In addition to ending the empire, my 66% includes fring the inept.
I have done military logistics including running TPFDLLs since Vietnam.
MG,
So, without the Soviets the war profiteers need a growth industry to keep the percentages the same………………..
You’re kidding aren’t you????
What impact would a change of terms have?
Consider changing the term entitlements to voluntary transfers.
Today entitlement means formulaic programs such as Social Security, Mecicare, Medicaid and the long list of etcs. They are considered with rare exceptions to be on budgetary auto autopilot. Historically they have been both expanded and received increased funding. These changes require Congressional action.
Voluntary transfers today means formulaic programs such as Social Security, Mecicare, Medicaid and the long list of etcs. They are considered with rare exceptions to be on budgetary auto autopilot. Historically they have been both expanded and received increased funding, but in rare instances they have also been cut. These changes require Congressional action.
Hmmm…no. It appears to come down to what is perceived as natural and true and what is not. One person’s class warfare is another’s equilibrium or proper workings of the economy.
From the point of view of the beneficiaries on discretionary side, every dollar that gives succor to the poor, sick and elderly is extracted from corporate welfare.
While I was hanging out with retired Colonels (in Navy they would be Captains) the conversation occasionally revolved around entitlements and discretionary spending this was during the low days before 2000 whence the US started spending more on war than during the Vietnam war in constant dollars.
I will call “entitlements” voluntary transfers to individuals, if you let me call discretionary spending “corporate welfare” (war profiteering being an older subset).
The general welfare has nothing to do with corporate welfare.
Co baby,
First and foremost stop linking Social Security with Medicare and Medicaid as though their funding mechanisms are the same. They are not. Social Security has had a very stable benefits formula for many years with a totally dedicated funding stream that more often than not runs a surplus by design. That some would like to confuse the intention of that design and claim it to be a supplement to the general budget does not change the current law. If the Congress now wants to attempt to distort the relationship between the Social Security program, its debtor and its beneficiaries I suggest that each member does so at his/her own electoral peril. Once even the T-Baggers realize that they’re being fleeced out of their retirement safety net, that they’ve been paying for throughout their working lives, they too will “revolt” as are the public workers throughout the country.
That Medicare and Medicaid are financially unstable is only a sign of the archaic health care financing mechanism that this country has chosen to maintain. The poor can use the ER and cost their localities yet more money. The rest can go into bankruptcy when they come up with the need for one serious episode requiring extensive care. Nice way to offer health care in an advanced society with great wealth, though inadequately distributed.
On a bit of a different topic, here’s an interesting, if anecdotal, review of an alternative news source. Over at CJR they’re running a write in assessment thread concerning individual views of Al Jazeera Engliish. http://www.cjr.org/news_meeting/assessing_al_jazeera.php#comments
The responses are very interesting to say the least. I haven’t read them all, but the first dozen are only substantial praise for a news source free of ideology, bias and fluff and described as being a better news source than currently available on MSM or cable. I haven’t seen their news show, but I will do so from now on: http://english.aljazeera.net/
Along a similar line, if you want to listen and watch debates on current political, social and economic topics that are intelligent and informative try the Doha Debates @
http://www.thedohadebates.com/ Excellent!!!
Well MG:
Quite a revealing array of percentages ou have going there. From 2001 to 2010; it appears payments to individuals is stagnant; while payments to Defense (does this this include Iraq and Afghanistan) goes up ~25%. Much of the outlays to individuals is probably the result of the declining percenatge of the population within the Civilian Labor Force who are either under employed or unemployed.
So is the solution to cut payments to individuals when the economy is “not” creating enough jobs? I don’t believe it is, the same as the attack on state and local employees is the answer to the state dilemas is either. Keeping people employed and getting them employed is by far the biggest issue this country has today.
jack
no compromise is necessary. and setting out a bargaining postion that asks for too much might just add to the hysteria. if they are saying that SS is going to cause huge tax raises, and we threaten to “fix” SS… which doesn’t need to be fixed… by enacting a huge tax raise, we have just made their case for them.
meanwhile the 40 cents per week per year increase in the tax the workers pay for their own benefits will strengthen SS… by paying for a longer retirement at a the higher standard of living future retirees will need.
CoRev
you are quite wrong about the “class warfare card.” The Republicans shout “class warfare” every time some poor Democrat points at the rising income inequality and the deficit, which can only be fixed by raising the taxes that were cut by the cut that was going to pay for itself but didn’t.
The problem is not collective bargaining. It is state budgets that do not plan for the inevitable downturns. This has something to do with the taxpayers not wanting to pay for the government services they need.
CoRev
whatever “entitlements” used to mean, today it is a buzzword meaning “we have to cut it.” never mind that the people paid for it, directly in the case of Social Security, or indirectly in the case of Medicare-large or whatever other “entitlements” you have in mind.
There is no reason people can’t pay for the programs they need. But as long as your friends are dishonest about how they parse the budget and keep calling for tax cuts, we are going to have a deficit problem. Cutting “entitlement” will not fix the budget, but will impoverish America.
I asked: “What impact would a change of terms have? From the reponses no impact at all. The same cast of characters fall back onto the same argume3nts.
including you, CoRev, including you.
CoRev,
Yeah, entitlements arguments back and forth longer than I have lived.
The dichotomy of “discretionary” and “entitlements” is rooted in tax foundation and other right wing humbug factories.
I think David Walker when he was comptroller at pentagon used them, too.
The proponents of discretionary spending use %ages to argue back to the 1920’s economy with no social net, some of them are interested in how much the war industry gets, others in corporate welfare, and some are anti New Deal.
The argument boils down to spending for millions of human beings’ needs versus the good of a few.
Some see every guns and rocket as taking food and growth from the economy should be succor for the mases. As Lincoln said of the people and by the people and for the people.
Others see succor to the masses as taking away from the makers of guns and rockets. They limit the term people to a very few real serious people.
75 years and still attacking the New Deal………………………….
I have been a character for a long time. Most people who know me say that.
CoRev,
Because they are not merely arguments, they are statements of fact. Call the benefits of the SS program what you want they are still the result of FICA contributions made by working people throughout their working lives. The are entitled to the benefits that they contributed to in order to maintain the program which would then provide the benefits to those working people. Those retirement benefits are all the more significant in an economy that has been continuously destructive to the savings and pension plans of those same working people.
Are you satisfied to have your pension, paid for by the tax payers? You took part in a work program that made you an agreement in the past. Now that agreement is being upheld to your benefit. Why do you continuously argue that retirement benefits promised to others are subject to revision? Are other working people not as entitled to their expected benefits as you have been?
run75441 – “Well MG: Quite a revealing array of percentages ou have going there. From 2001 to 2010; it appears payments to individuals is stagnant; while payments to Defense (does this this include Iraq and Afghanistan) goes up ~25%. Much of the outlays to individuals is probably the result of the declining percenatge of the population within the Civilian Labor Force who are either under employed or unemployed.”
I recommend a closer look at the table.
Payments for individuals outlays increased $696.26 billion (61.7%) above the 2001 level of $1,128,380,000,000 from 2001 to 2008 resulting in a 2008 outlay of $1,824,647,000,000. Payments for individuals outlays increased $1.15 trillion (102%) above the 2001 level from 2001 to 2010 resulting in a 2010 outlay of $2,285,569,000,000.
National defense outlays increased $311.34 billion (102%) from $304.73 billion in 2001 to $616.07 billion in 2008.
Table 6.1 — Composition of Outlays: 1940–2016
Federal Budget, FY2012
http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/omb/budget/fy2012/assets/hist06z1.xls
Payments for individuals
(in millions)
2001-2008
1,128,380
1,241,658 +113,278
1,331,823 +90,165
1,397,521 +65,698
1,490,183 +92,662
1,591,931 +101,748
1,689,378 +97,447
1,824,647 +135,269
Total increase 696,267
Total increase through 2010 1,157,189
2009-2016
2,092,967 +268,320
2,285,569 +192,602
2,410,732 +125,163
2,342,002 -68,730
2,447,958 +105,956
2,604,996 +157,038
2,745,988 +140,992
2,933,817 +187,820
Total increase 1,079,161
MG,
What is the point?
Disbursements to human beings growing faster than the military industrial complex?
What is wrong with that?
Do you suppose US government Disbursements to human beings are growing fast because: the a) US is getting poorer; b) the US is growing older (I can start mine soon); c) medical insurance complex is pillaging d) the military industrial complex is becoming humane and giving to the poor?
Choose one or more and explain.
I prefer looking at charts in constant year dollars.
Doing that at 2012 historical chart 8-8 you will see that the military industrial complex had outlays in excess of half a trillion dollars during 10 years since 1962 (the start of that table). One was 1969, the other nine were after the Iraq occupation. You might recall that the Soveits collapsed in 1991, and the world is a lot different than in 1969.
My answer to the question I posed is a) US is getting poorer, my reasoning is that the military industrial complex has taken from the productivity of the US far too much and since 1991 a huge part of that ‘take’ has been unnecessary.
See: http://www.amconmag.com/blog/less-bang-for-the-buck/
It is all unwarranted influence of privatized arsenals who buy their DoD bosses and congress.
And serious people worry about the political power of unions in Wisconsin…………………
And knock this off: “Kindly save your war monger chatter for the leftists and other anti-defense and anti-military crowd. You do such a disservice to those who serve.”
Serving whom?
MG – “A few Open threads back, you stated that you would cut 66% of the FY2012 defense budget. I countered by asking you to lay it out in detail. You still haven’t attempted that effort. It’s easy to say that you would cut 66% out a fiscal year budget for DoD and quite another to do it. In my judgment, you wouldn’t be successful in accomplishing a 66% reduction within a single fiscal year budget. I don’t take you seriously when you say stuff like that.”
ilsm – “One line: end the empire.”
You may have some of the AB readers cheering your idea, but let’s do the math.
Let’s see how much of the DoD FY2012 budget proposal you would save by eliminating all OCONUS facilities other than ongoing war operations. The DoD Comptroller states that would result in an O&M savings of $21.5 billion for all current overseas operations excluding the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Costs include (1) Military Personnel, Operation and Maintenance, Family Housing Operations, Family Housing Construction, and Military Construction.
You have proposed saving $21.5 billion in O&M out of a proposed defense budget of $707.467 billion (DoD FY2012 base budget is $553 billion). Throw in another $3 billion for other operational taskings (at most) and you’re sitting at $24.5 billion of DoD savings. Most of the equipment would have to be redeployed to CONUS so that’s a cost, not a savings. And there would be other costs to closing the OCONUS facilities as well as time lags.
You want to claim 66% DoD budget savings by closing all OCONUS facilities? Not hardly. Even if you gut the U.S. Navy and kill off most global Navy missions, you’re still not close to capturing 66% of the DoD budget. Shutting down the war in Afghanistan won’t get you the 66% either.
You have a long way to go in your DoD budget cutting proposal. If you are including all other national security spending, you’re much further in the hole.
Sources:
DOD OPERATION AND MAINTENANCE OVERVIEW FISCAL YEAR 2012
FY 2012 DoD Appropriations
Pdf page 214
DoD Comptroller
Published February 2011
http://comptroller.defense.gov/Budget2012.html
and
http://comptroller.defense.gov/defbudget/fy2012/fy2012_OM_Overview.pdf
DoD Budget total
http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/omb/budget/fy2012/assets/defense.pdf
ilsm,
The point is simple. Let’s face the reality of the Federal Budget projections, and stop pretending.
Mandatory spending obligations do not require annual appropriations negotiations, and net interest costs on debt held by the public are the issues that the U.S. Government will have face by 2020 and beyond. That’s where the bulk of the expenditures will be. DoD’s budget will be pulled down significantly by the end of the decade.
Mandatory spending obligations go well beyond SS, Medicare, and Medicaid. The list is long. That’s another area of pretending, both on the blog and in the news media.
Discretionary spending will continue to be crowded out as funding demands for mandatory spending and net interest costs ramp up. That is where we are headed. The ongoing budget arguments barely touch the level of considerations that will need to be applied in order to deal with the projected higher levels of spending we will face. Net interest costs alone may reach $1 trillion per fiscal year no later than 2021 or 2022, and then ramp up from there for a few decades.
Moreover, there is no major discussion of what happens when we hit the next recession and what may drive it. There is a strong likelihood that we will encounter a major recession before the end of this decade. Crude oil prices may soar and that will crush the U.S. economy. The subsequent recovery may take much longer than many realize.
The U.S. Government is not on a sustainable fiscal course. That must change.
The major changes that have driven many of the economic problems we are facing is U.S. trade policy and concurrent growth in the cost of retirement and healthcare benefits paid out by States, counties, municipalities and private enterprises. Meanwhile, governments at all levels across the nation had been providing levels of support and services that many of their budgets can’t support indefinitely.
ilsm,
The point is simple. Let’s face the reality of the Federal Budget projections and stop pretending.
Mandatory spending obligations (which do not require annual appropriations negotiations), and net interest costs on debt held by the public are the issues that the U.S. Government will have face by 2020 and beyond. That’s where the bulk of the expenditures will be. DoD’s budget will be pulled down significantly by the end of the decade.
Mandatory spending obligations go well beyond SS, Medicare, and Medicaid. The list is long. That’s another area of pretending, both on the blog and in the news media.
Discretionary spending will continue to be crowded out as funding demands for mandatory spending and net interest costs ramp up. That is where we are headed. The ongoing budget arguments barely touch the level of considerations that will need to be applied in order to deal with the projected higher levels of spending we will face. Net interest costs alone may reach $1 trillion per fiscal year no later than 2021 or 2022, and then ramp up from there for a few decades.
There is no major discussion of what happens when we hit the next recession and what may drive it. There is a strong likelihood that we will encounter a major recession before the end of this decade. Crude oil prices may soar and that will crush the U.S. economy. The subsequent recovery may take much longer than many realize.
The U.S. Government is not on a sustainable fiscal course. That must change.
The major changes that have driven many of the economic problems we are facing is U.S. trade policy and concurrent growth in the cost of retirement and healthcare benefits paid out by States, counties, municipalities and private enterprises. Meanwhile, governments at all levels across the nation had been providing levels of support and services that many of their budgets can’t support indefinitely.
The U.S. Government will not be in a position to continue to bail out the States, counties, and municipalities going forward. The availability of grants will be reduced.
ilsm,
The point is simple. Let’s face the reality of the Federal Budget projections and stop pretending.
Mandatory spending obligations (which do not require annual appropriations negotiations), and net interest costs on debt held by the public are the issues that the U.S. Government will have face by 2020 and beyond. That’s where the bulk of the expenditures will be. DoD’s budget will be pulled down significantly by the end of the decade.
Mandatory spending obligations go well beyond SS, Medicare, and Medicaid. The list is long. That’s another area of pretending, both on the blog and in the news media.
Discretionary spending will continue to be crowded out as funding demands for mandatory spending and net interest costs ramp up. That is where we are headed. The ongoing budget arguments barely touch the level of considerations that will need to be applied in order to deal with the projected higher levels of spending we will face. Net interest costs alone may reach $1 trillion per fiscal year no later than 2021 or 2022, and then ramp up from there for a few decades.
Moreover, there is no major discussion of what happens when we hit the next recession and what may drive it. There is a strong likelihood that we will encounter a major recession before the end of this decade. Crude oil prices may soar and that will crush the U.S. economy. The subsequent recovery may take much longer than many realize.
The U.S. Government is not on a sustainable fiscal course. That must change.
The major changes that have driven many of the economic problems we are facing are U.S. trade policy and concurrent growth in the cost of retirement and healthcare benefits paid out by States, counties, municipalities and private enterprises.
Governments at all levels across the nation have been providing levels of support and services that many of their budgets can’t support indefinitely. The U.S. Government will not be in a position to continue to bail out the States, counties, and municipalities going forward. The availability of Federal grants will be reduced.
Federal net interest costs may very well crush many of the future fiscal year Federal Budgets. An upturn in interest rates driven by whatever reason(s) may very well alter the availability of funding for many Federal Budget needs.
ilsm – “The dichotomy of “discretionary” and “entitlements” is rooted in tax foundation and other right wing humbug factories.”
Bull. Those are U.S. Government defined words as used in Congress and the Federal Budget process. We have already posted the links that provide government definitions.
Stop playing the leftist card on this stuff. What a con job.
ilsm,
I’ll say it again. Kindly save your war monger chatter for the leftists and other anti-defense and anti-military crowd. You do such a disservice to those who serve.
Your standard anti-military rants are wasted on me.
You can spew out that junk for the young people and the leftists as you have always done, but it doesn’t provide any incentive for me to engage you in conversation.
MG,
You missed the part of cutting the empire which involves demobilizing force structure. That is the where the real bucks can be reprogrammed to actual needs.
Give PACOM and EUCOM one US Navy fleet each based on US soil. Centcom, shuttered. EUCOM AOR needs to take the land mass from the Vistula to Vladivistok off their map.
How can you take a conclusion from a report from a comptroller office which has not had a satisfactory audit since Grant and Sherman demobilized the Union Army? I will not address stuff from DoD comptroller any longer. Should anyone listen to DOD comptroller? no!
You should read what GAO says about EUCOM. http://www.gao.gov/new.items/d11131.pdf
Also: http://www.gao.gov/products/GAO-10-745R Which was discussed here last autumn.
EUCOM is one lobby in the praetorium, there are many filled with schemes to build their string of feifdoms on foreign soil.
The GAO started with no one has figured out what it costs to maintain the $17B in new stuff EUCOM is trying to get to move two brigades in for the Germany lobby.
Leave the DoD comptroller stuff home until they pass an audit, and until the legacy of David Walker is wrung out. David Walker wanders the country for the Peterson’s telling much the same tale you do, and his budgets were premised on the battle between entitlements and corporate (discretionary) welfare for the cohorts of the military industrial complex.
I have been reading a string of GAO reports on how the fighter business in the US will mean the Navy and Air Force (US fighter inventory is only 3400 planes, down form 12,000 the lasttime DoD spent more than half a trillion a year) are short of fighters for their overseas fiefdoms because the industry cannot deliver 750 fighters but 183 for the F-22, 15 years after the need date, and F-35 is going same route. Maybe I can talk the trillions in the fighter business to keep the inept profitable.
Do suggest how anyone should rely on DoD comptroller reports or financial statements.
The military industrial congress complex does not serve the US.
You take the DoD comptroller as truth, when there has never been a clean audit of the DoD books.
From DoD we can only tell that the DoD handles 20% odd of the US government outlays.
There is no telling what it is worth. That is shown regularly by GAO which has reason to not certify the audits. Any accountant knows if the spec from a contract is not met, the value of the contract is not true. That is why I hit on DoD, lots of money and ‘good enough for DoD’ is very poor.
And that spending over the years has made it impossible to build super tankers in the US because aircraft carriers from socialized shipyards at cost plus raise the rates in US shipyards.
One issue is the harm DoD spending has done on the economy.
Do address DoD comptroller reports and how they can be taken as anything but justifying the take on the economy.
MG,
I am not a CONservative.
Do address DoD comptroller reports and how they can be taken as anything but justifying the take on the economy.
Ad hominem rejected.
MG
two problems: “government definitions” may or may not reflect the reality.
you may not understand the government definitions.
Well
once more MG gives us numbers intended to deceive and tells us to “face reality.” Some of those “payments for individuals” are from a “tax” dedicated to pay for individuals and collected on the promise that they will be used to pay for those individuals themselves.
MG is very much in the position of a person with a growing family who insists the family food budget should remain a constant, and small, percent of his sports car budget.
Let us imagine a world in which there are only two nations, more or less “at war” with each other.
One of those nations happens to own a lot of good farm land and its population grows to one hundred times the size of the other nation. By MG’s reckoning the “defense budget” of the larger nation should grow to be a hundred times the size of the smaller nation. INstead he points with alarm at the growing food budget. Look, look, he shrieks. Look at all the money we spend on food.. “individual payments.” This can’t go on!
Thank you!
I would dare add one thing to your analogy: MG no longer has a track (US has no peer adversaries) where he can race his sports car.
Thank you!
coberly – “once more MG gives us numbers intended to deceive and tells us to “face reality.””
That is a lie.
coberly – “MG is very much in the position of a person with a growing family who insists the family food budget should remain a constant, and small, percent of his sports car budget.”
That is a lie.
coberly – “By MG’s reckoning the “defense budget” of the larger nation should grow to be a hundred times the size of the smaller nation.”
That is a lie.
coberly – “INstead he points with alarm at the growing food budget. Look, look, he shrieks. Look at all the money we spend on food.. “individual payments.” This can’t go on.”
That is a lie.
—-
coberly’s continual string of outright lies, personal attacks, and other phony allegations are wrapped around a poor read of materials on this blog, an acknowledged lack of knowledge of the U.S. Government’s Federal Budget, and whatever else affects his thinking.
The purpose of my original comment was explained.
These are not the 1950s whereby national defense spending represented 52% to 70% of Federal spending outlays. Instead, national defense spending now represents roughly 20% of Federal spending outlays. Such spending is projected to decline to 15.2% by FY2020. National defense may be reduced further, representing an even smaller share of Federal outlays. I support further reductions in national defense spending.
The primary issues going forward are Federal interest payment obligatons on debt held by the public, the growing levels of all mandatory spending which go well beyond SS, Medicare, and Medicaid, and the resulting impact on discretionary spending. Federal interest payment obligations are projected to increase rapidly later this decade and soar much higher thereafter.
Discretionary spending will continue to be crowded out as funding demands for mandatory spending and net interest costs ramp up. That is where we are headed. The ongoing budget arguments barely touch the level of considerations that will need to be applied in order to deal with the projected higher levels of spending we will face. Net interest costs alone may reach $1 trillion per fiscal year no later than 2021 or 2022, and then ramp up from there for a few decades.
Moreover, there is no major discussion of what happens when we hit the next recession and what may drive it. There is a strong likelihood that we will encounter a major recession before the end of this decade. Crude oil prices may soar and that will crush the U.S. economy. The subsequent recovery may take much longer than many realize.
The U.S. Government is not on a sustainable fiscal course. That must change.
Federal net interest costs may very well crush many of the future fiscal year Federal Budgets. An upturn in interest rates driven by whatever reason(s) may very well alter the availability of funding for many Federal Budget needs.
That is the thrust of most of my message.
I have no idea what the Congresses and Administrations of the U.S. Government intend to do in addressing these problems, but solutions must be found in order to avoid not only the destruction of needed discretionary spending but also the many other mandatory […]
ilsm,
I could care less whether you’re a conservative or not.
You are now indicating that national defense spending does not contribute to the U.S. economy. On what basis do you think this is the case?
ilsm,
One nuclear strike by any group or other nation in the world will demonstrate that you’re out to lunch on gutting DoD. You act as though there are no threats on the planet that the U.S. should be concerned about now or in the future.
MG,
Be specific.
Whom will strike at the US with a nuke?
The Russians, we still have MAD/TRIAD against them, it works for the Chinese and maybe even Pakistan.
How does impoverishing the country increase security against a nuclear strike from anyone?
How has paying $150B for star wars done anything? None, of the staged tests show it could stop any one threat that exists today. And the industry gets its 10 or so billion a year every year to play and deploy stuff that don’t work.
What does steaming the 11 largest super carriers around the world do for a nuclear threat?
What does having anyone stationed in EUCOM, PACOM or Centcom do for your fictions?
There is no track to for this generations MacArthurs to race their multi trillion dollar built by lowest quality producer systems on.
Then they get mad………………..
And you win!
MG who said that?
I did not expect you to care, I am a bit Buddhist, I am who I am today and I do not judge myself.
Better to bury the $1.6T in DoD major weapon systems in the ground and pay poor people to dig the money up and keep it.
Check here.
http://www.amconmag.com/blog/less-bang-for-the-buck/ Thomas E Woods works for Mises. He wrote a similar peice several years ago.
See the works of Seymour Melman of late of Columbia University.
Here is DD Eisenhower in 1953:
“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.”
Personal observations of weapon system acquisition for over 26 years. The waste, mismanagement and receiving defective stuff, to meet the policy to keep the industry “healthy”.
Navy ships the only large ships built in US shipyards…………………….
Airplane business Boeing and Airbus both semi nationalized and both show overruns and quality issues similar to socialized industry in delivering military systems and commercial transports. A Chinese aircraft industry would close both of them. Like US shipyards attempting to compete for super tankers.
Yes, the money flowing through DoD to the industry is harming the US economy and is a reason, along with the debt the spending caused that SS Trust Funds is going to be a burden to pay off.
US productivity has been harmed by 60 years of perpetual and excess mobilization, the last 20 of which wholely unjustifed.
You should get this book, although I find these guys do not know much about how messed up DoD acquisitioins are:
http://chuckspinney.blogspot.com/2011/02/celebrate-release-of-pentagon-labyrinth.html
27 Feb 1968:
Walter Kronkite goes against the Vietnam War.
https://facultystaff.richmond.edu/~ebolt/history398/Cronkite_1968.html
Sounds like Afghanistan don’t it?
https://facultystaff.richmond.edu/~ebolt/history398/Cronkite_1968.html
To say that we are closer to victory today is to believe, in the face of the evidence, the optimists who have been wrong in the past. To suggest we are on the edge of defeat is to yield to unreasonable pessimism. To say that we are mired in stalemate seems the only realistic, yet unsatisfactory, conclusion. On the off chance that military and political analysts are right, in the next few months we must test the enemy’s intentions, in case this is indeed his last big gasp before negotiations. But it is increasingly clear to this reporter that the only rational way out then will be to negotiate, not as victors, but as an honorable people who lived up to their pledge to defend democracy, and did the best they could.
This is Walter Cronkite. Good night.
Is this Afghanistan?
ilsm,
I assume that you haven’t read Tom Woods’ new book, Rollback. Woods goes after everything. He doesn’t stop with national security spending. He spares nothing. The Woods’ article that you cited was drafted from the book. Some of the article’s content is on solid ground, but certainly not all of it.
Tom Woods is no friend of Federal social spending. Here’s a small sample from last week:
Drones: More Social Security and Medicare Spending!
by Tom Woods
21 Feb 2010
http://www.tomwoods.com/blog/drones-more-social-security-and-medicare-spending/#
I assume also that you have not listened to the following 52 minute video or read the lead in commentary:
Rollback
http://mises.org/store/Rollback-P10449.aspx
Narrative excerpt:
“The success of the book owes something to its extremely creative organization. Woods begins with the general theme and jumps straight into the big issues that are being debated right now.
The first target is health care, and here he goes back to the beginning of government involvement and takes us straight up to the present, showing that the entire sector is half-socialized as it is and it is precisely because of this that there are so many problems. Then he demonstrates the gross error of proceeding further down the socialist path, and argues for repealing the existing apparatus, not in the way that Republicans are imagining but in a way that goes beyond what anyone in public life is willing to say.
This sets up the model for the book, and this model is then applied to the economic stimulus packages and counter-cyclical policies the government has used to deal with the great recession. Here we see the full Austrian perspective in glorious display. This pattern is extended to the chapter on the Fed, which ends up being a sweeping attack on all forms of central banking and government monetary policy.
From here we move into the surprising area that is sadly neglected in reformist literature: the military. He treats the bureaucracies, programs, and policies as another species of interventionist practice, no different in its operations, dynamics, and effects than any other government program. It lives parasitically off the productivity of the people, draining capital and killing innovation, plus wrecking lives. He adds an interesting twist here by demonstrating that there does exist an anti-militarist strain within American conservative thought; his goal here is simply to extend and apply that strain.
After this, we come to the real meat of the book, and the most challenging part. Woods debunks the myth of good government and makes clear that the goal of all reform must not be to make government work better but to disengage it completely from society and economic life. Whereas the previous sections might have educated many readers on facts that they did not know, this section, the largest of the book, deals with the core of the American civic religion.
This is also where the scales being to fall from the eyes. His point is that there is nothing that the government does that improves our lives relative to how freedom might handle the same issue, that there is nothing that needs to be done in society that freedom cannot do better than bureaucracies. Now, obviously, this section represents a dramatic departure from every political convention. It takes us out of the framework of “limiting government” and into the area of radical freedom.”
On Friday, Woods cranked out this piece, […]
MG
“solutions must be found”
true. but they won’t be found by wooden headed recitations of numbers with no understanding of their meaning. or a basic recognition that social security is entirely self funding, and medicare ought to be.
even your rant against ilsm… “one nuclear strike…” ignores the fact that the kind of defense we are paying for is not going to prevent that one nuclear strike, which is going to come in a cargo ship.
you petrify your brain with scare stories and then you me a liar when i try to begin to sort through the details so we can hope to find a solution.
MG
i am all in favor of life without government. how do we get there?
how do we keep the bad guys from becoming the new government?
you see, if a person begins with an idiotic premise he can prove anything. of course government is dangerous, of course it is a drag, of course it is inefficient. worse than anything you can think of except chaos and the next group of thugs that would come along and impose THEIR idea of government.
MG,
Woods is good at taking on military industrial complex, benefitting the few, corporate welfare where the libertarian opinion of the opportunity costs of ripping off the masses is obvious, taken with the waste fraud and abuse in the DoD closed system.
I diverge when the libertarians attack every public good as interference.
You should rather refute Frederic Bastiat, Seymour Melman, and Eisenhower as well as tell me what is defensable about the GAO 10-388sp and the recent GAO High Risk Series, where GAO persists in annually describing the high risk of waste, fraud and abuse in a trillion dollars or so of DoD acquisitions that are going down, like thieves in the night in the next 5 years. http://www.gao.gov/new.items/d11394t.pdf