It also gets fixed if the 1% are actually paying taxes to support the great system that made most of them their wealth in the first place. Warren Buffett wasn't BSing when he said his secretary paid more in taxes than he did. Not by percentage, by gross.
That windfall still doesn’t fix the issues though. Sure, let’s definitely do that, but it doesn’t fix terrible government spending.
Most of the current government spending actually supports things that need to be supported. You can't take away Social Security or Medicare, which are entitlements that people have *already* been taxed for. You don't want to take away Medicaid, which is a much lower expense, because the optics coming out of that would be hideous in a country as rich as we are. You can't lower Defense spending and really we should be raising that at this point if we want to have a prayer of beating China/Russia in WWIII in a few years. You can't lower infrastructure spending because we have bridges on the edge of falling down all over the country at this point as well as other backloaded costs coming due. We already cut Welfare to the bone in the 90's and there isn't much of anything left to cut. We can't cut NASA because that will break the contracting system for private Aerospace across the spectrum. Interest payments on the debt cannot be cut and in fact are quickly rising due to the anti-inflationary measures we're taking. There just aren't a lot of things that can be cut on a systemic basis without breaking something somewhere else.
You’re using broad categories without looking into the weeds of what all the money is for. The millions of dollars our government spends on DEI is just one example. The billions to prop up SVB is another. The trillions spent in 2021 that hasn’t even been used but is printed is one more. All of the pork in that is inclusive. Social security and Medicare is taboo for politicians to talk about because they instantly become a pariah. But simple math tells us the programs need to be restructured (not cut) or else they’re going to go broke in our lifetimes. Any financial expert that looks at the books can tell you that. No one can talk about it though because they get a black mark on their re-election campaign. We’ve dumped more money in Ukraine than nearly every other American war. Meanwhile our own strategic oil reserve has been depleted and we are falling massively behind in military recruitment goals. Some of that aid is paying for fucking pensions in Ukraine and that’s only the tip of the waste.
Social Security and Medicare is underfunded because we constantly took from those allocations for other purposes when the demographics favored that, i.e. when there were 5 payors for every retiree. I totally disagree that we need to cut those programs. What we need to do is figure how much we've stolen from the lock box over the years, adjusted for inflation, and raise taxes to cover that sum and make the fund whole again. The taboo part is because politicians rarely get positive attention for blatant theft and as soon as the GOP makes a real move on Social Security or Medicare the amount they stole to fund tax cuts will come out.
You took what I said and completely shoved words in my mouth. I just said we don’t need to cut it. But it needs to be looked at and fixed in whatever capacity that is. I literally said NOT CUT. Because as it presently stands, with all of the borrowing and stealing that was done as a result of things like the Middle East wars and economic collapses and bailouts in 2008-2010, the programs will go broke.
The theft started in the 70's and has been a decade over decade thing ever since. Al Gore's campaign in 2000 was about putting all the Soc Sec and Medicare funds in a lock box where they couldn't be touched. Then he lost and we fought two wars plus a war on terror plus the 2007-2008 shenanigans plus the bailouts afterwards plus the Fed making the new standard free money for people who already had lots of money. Then we got the pandemic... It's a total mess and it is only going to get resolved if we go back to tax and spend because cut and spend has been just a huge racket for the 1% and it has screwed the rest of us Royally.
There are so many conflicting opinions and potential flaws to what Al Gore proposed - almost 25 years ago - that to say it would’ve worked after the Covid era of spending, the Obama era government big bank/auto bailouts and dual Middle East wars, is truly silly.
Why do we have the biggest homeless population in the modern world but we’re paying for Ukrainian military pensions? Can anyone answer that honestly for me?
I'm not suggesting that it would have worked. Just pointing out that the problem was a known factor that nobody was acknowledging or working on two+ decades ago. Gore, BTW, would have been a great President. He had his mind wrapped around the issues that were going to bedevil us for the next few decades and the guy we elected just wanted to avenge his daddy.
Freedom. Literally. We let the mentally ill wander the streets and die at very young ages because they have the right not to be hospitalized until they potentially get better and can live a reasonable life.
That doesn’t explain why we’re shipping money overseas to pay for oligarchs to have great retirements instead of coming up with procedures to help the homeless in the US. Eh no argument here on George Bush. He was a terrible President and really fucked the country up for most people. As far as Gore is concerned, you wouldn’t be allowed to eat cheeseburgers if he was elected. So it’s hard to say he’d be a great President when he become a multimillionaire on a theory that is far from proven and would’ve put into action controls to quite literally make you happy with having nothing.
The procedures we would come up with are being managed in the places where the homeless are all over the place. They're being managed on an emergency basis because we ignored the problem until 2008 gave us no choice but to address it. They're being managed under conditions that are next to impossible because a substantial part of the homeless community is either drug addicted or mentally ill or both. The real solutions drive at the heart of what we think of as the American Way. If we provide decent housing, nutrition and medical care to the homeless the Right will immediately start screeching about self-reliance and welfare. They've done this without cessation for 50 years now and nothing suggests that will change. Also, particularly on housing if we provide decent housing that completely upsets the real estate market and the vested interests there who have lived off of people's misery since the founding of the Republic. If you want decent care for the homeless you're going to have to run a successful revolution to get there.
Welfare and low income housing exists. People can apply and live in nice places. They have to work. That’s the trade off. Living in a tent on the street is more appealing for whatever reason. The GOP hasn’t stopped low income housing from existing. Lyndon B. Johnson started the train of dumping billions into underserved communities and it hasn’t gotten better. I don’t disagree that we have a very bad inflated pricing of real estate and housing in this country. You still haven’t answered why Ukrainian generals retirements are more important financially for the United States than helping it’s citizens. Drugs wouldn’t be such an issue right now if the border wasn’t wide open either.
If the price of preventing Russia from conquering Ukraine is dealing with the after-effects of the Ukrainian oligarch's corruption then it's a price we have to pay. It's a hell of a lot cheaper than getting into the scruff of a full European war and that's what's next on the menu if Putin manages to take down Ukraine. Zelensky is doing a better job of firing the crooks recently. He really needs to have a few people shot but I'm pretty sure he wants to differentiate as much as possible from Putin at this point. We're always going to have a drug problem because the market is here and goods will always get to the market. There are parts of the country where the drug problem is mostly domestic product, namely the parts overrun by the opioid crisis.
A wall won't matter. Drugs are coming in by submarine at this point and a lot of the drugs are being manufactured in the USA.
What are you talking about? By feeding the beast without an end goal in site instead of trying to broker a peace deal, we inch closer and closer to entering the war you think we’re avoiding by doing what we’ve done. And we’ve driven our two biggest enemies together with the most commodity goods and energy in the world. While we cut our own production.
We can't broker a peace deal as long as Russia has gained territory for the third time via acts of aggression. That's just asking for them to keep attacking for gains, if not in Ukraine then elsewhere. Georgia (2008), Crimea (2014), Ukraine (2023), Moldova (202x), Estonia (202x), etc. It'll just keep happening if we let it and eventually it will hit a trigger line (Estonia) where we have to fight or give up NATO.
Weird that they decided to do these things with American Presidents and administrations that have weak foreign policy. The current one in place is more invested in making sure we get transgender folks into the cabinet for the first time than anything going on in the world.
