331–340 of 518 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Also, remember that the United States is bound by treaty to defend more than two dozen nations. That includes keeping bases in some of those nations. Those treaties will have to be renegotiated. Those nations will have to increase their own defense spending. Not having read the North Atlantic Treaty, I don't know that the US has any special obligation above and beyond the rest of the NATO members. Yes, the US is obli…
I could have sworn we have special obligations to Japan, as part of our demanding them to demilitarize.
(Reference: http://www.federalbudget.com/ ) Steps to recovery: 1) End all offensive military actions overseas. Finish winding down Iraq and abandon Afghanistan wholesale. These actions have cost several trillion dollars over the last 10 years. We can't get that money back, but we can stop spending more. 2) Defense spending is in the top 3 highest budget expenditures. Cut it by 1 third across the board. Maintain impor…
There are lots of things we could do to end the recovery. They won't happen because they are not in the best short term interest of the politicians making the decisions. Natural selection has weeded out the congressmen that make decisions contrary to their ability to raise campaign money. That is the root cause of the problem. Until that is solved, there's no point in dreaming up efficient solutions, because they won…
WOW....talk about CAJONES! I must tip my hat to S&P. This one...just WOW. I mean, I am not a conspiracy theorist by any stretch of the imagination, but I just never imagined that they would be able to pull the trigger. All it takes is some 'investigation' by the US Treasury into S&P and that's it....game over. Not that I think the US Treasury will retaliate....but WOW. I never thought they would take this step. Good…
It's not just US the whole world economy system is screwed. Look what happens in Europe. People should really make some radical improvements to the way economy and finance system work. The main things: it should be simplified and transparent. If only a few experts understand what happens how could the system be reliable and secure? Everyone also knows that the more complicated is the system the higher is the failure…
Would you rather fly in a 747, or something from 100 years ago? The latter is far, far simpler and easily understood by non-experts.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Tearing the healthcare system down to it's nuts and bolts would costs a lot more than to continue reforming. I spent some time consulting hospitals an implementing electronic medical record systems for hospitals. It costs a hospital millions of dollars and thousands of hours to install and train people for these systems. Too many hospitals are too deep in these EMR systems to start from scratch again. Their margins a…
By "sometimes" you mean, "nearly all the damn time". As an incrementalist coder, it frustrates me to see how non-incremental the approach to solving social problems often is. Decouple, solve one thing at a time, etc.
(Reference: http://www.federalbudget.com/ ) Steps to recovery: 1) End all offensive military actions overseas. Finish winding down Iraq and abandon Afghanistan wholesale. These actions have cost several trillion dollars over the last 10 years. We can't get that money back, but we can stop spending more. 2) Defense spending is in the top 3 highest budget expenditures. Cut it by 1 third across the board. Maintain impor…
Social security shouldn't be cut, it should be turned into a purely social program (and grandfathered in at that too). Instead of being an entitlement program, it should become like welfare and enabled for the bottom X % of the population. Specifically, the burden for retirement for the middle class should be placed on individuals rather than government. For too long, babyboomers have relied on social security as a s…
I don't think the Social Security program is at all broken; what's broken is that we've used the Social Security surplus over the last 20+ years to help fund a general fund spending deficit.
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I have my own opinions as to who's responsible and what amger is well placed, but I think one can draw their own conclusions.
Yes I know these are a limited sample set of people who have set their profiles to public. But still...
I find that this graph summarizes my thoughts on the US debt in relation to the world economy: http://www.china-mike.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/china-w... The United States produces so much more in terms of GDP than the next largest nations that it's a stretch to compare them. I think the fact that we produce more than 2X what the next largest single nation produces means that debt may function differently for us…