The point is that the gap is so large, that inefficient spending is a minor help at best.
No the point is the Government spends too much. We could drop our Military spending by 75% and still spend twice as much as any other country. Pork Belly bills add up to BILLIONS every year. We just can’t keep adding on and not removing anything.
@MikeInNH, what would happen if we subtracted $380 billion from DoD expenditures? Pulling that much money out of the budget would create a big recession IMO. All of it pays wages eventually, Even at an average salary and benefits of $100,000, that would put almost 4 million people out of work. Are you ready for that?
Don’t have to do it all at once…but over time. One study I read a couple years ago…we spent almost 100 BILLION dollars on failed weapon projects. Some we continued to pay on for YEARS and YEARS until they finally cancelled it. They become pet projects for some congressman or senator because it’s in their own state. Sorry but I have no problem cutting doomed projects that cost tax payers BILLIONS…no matter how many people loose their jobs. That’s just stupid economics.
The only time I heard of a federal legislator discouraging a project to his home district is when John Boehner said that a second engine for the F-35 was a poor idea. It would have been built in his back yard.
A loss of those jobs would have the same net effect. Most of the people losing those jobs would never find a job that payed anything near what they were making before. You want fries with that?
Docnick: People use new credit cards to make minimum payments on their maxed out credit cards. The credit card companies (banks) love it.
@jtsanders - If jobs is our only concern - then let’s leafalize cocaine and heroin because of the drastic increase in jobs.
I didn’t think you were that socialist.
“Most of the people losing those jobs would never find a job that payed anything near what they were making before.”
I bet a lot of buggy whip makers had to take pay cuts too.
No pain no gain.
We could eliminate far, far more by eliminating subsidies to oil companies. And subsidies to multibillion dollar agricultural conglomerates . And NAACP subsidies. And countless, countless other subsidies to special interest groups that influence voting blocks. We lost $10 Billion on GM, in a bid to buy the union vote. And another $4 billion on “Cash4Cluunkers”… a definite clunker of a program. There are trillions of dollars spent on trying to influence voters.
And then there’s “porkbarrel” projects that benefit nobody but make powerful individuals with influence wealthy… and/or keep them in office Like bridges to nowhere. And can you say “Big Dig”?
How do we stop it? Beats the heck out of me.
The two biggest problems with this country are apathy and greed. But I don’t care, as long as I get my piece of the pie. 
I wonder if Tom found a 2000 Prius yet?
@mountainbike Yes, ethanol from corn bought a lot of Iowa votes without cutting greenhouse gasses very much.
the same mountainbike Why does the solution have to be a targeted economic nuclear bomb that hurts only the lower half of the economic strata? More taxes, higher fees, higher tolls, artificially rained prices.... we're in a sustained economic disaster already. Why is the solution to make it worse?Or, worse yet, people give up and move to Texas and in turn they change Texas into the Massachusetts, California, New Jersey, or New York that they fled from. It's like the saying, "it's not that Satan is in hell, but hell is in Satan and where ever he goes, there is hell".Yeah, make life unaffordable for half the population and they’ll stop driving. It’s parasitic; the host suffers greatly but the parasite thrives. In this case the parasite would be the government.
You ever notice that when socialist countries build a wall on their borders, the machine gun nests face inwards?
@db4690an online car magazine was saying that the automatic transmission “essentially” never wears out. I think it was autoinc.org . . . which is aimed squarely at independent shops
That’s because the “transmission” of a Prius is essentially just a differential with an asymmetrical torque spit between the two outputs. No clutch packs or any of the other components of a normal automatic transmission that usually are the source of most automatic transmission problems.
Some communist countries had walls and machine guns pointing inwards, to keep its citizens from leaving?
I don’t know WHY you attributed that to socialist countries
They are NOT the same thing, in spite of what ANYBODY might say
Sure, there’s some overlap, but they are NOT absolutely interchangeable
It sounds to me that “socialism” has become one of those nebulous terms that can be applied to any society that fits our ideals and not applied to any society that doesn’t. Sweden and Norway are called “socialist” when if fact the majority of industry in those countries is privately owned by “capitalists”.
Communism is the ultimate form of socialism. It comes from the root word “community”.
Democratic socialism is what many countries successfully practice today. It means leaving the “means of production” in private hands but have the state play the leading role in 1) health care, 2) education funding, 3) infrastructure 4) retirement pensions. Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Holland, France and others come to mind. All those countries spend about 2/3 as much per capita as Americans on health care, yet have universal access and their citizens live longer.
In Sweden over 85% of business is in private hands, a higher percentage than in Britain during most of the postwar years.
With communism the state does everything (very inefficiently) and owns everything. Don’t look for quality consumer goods in a communist country. Cuban cigars and rum would be a rare exception.
Before the fall of communism, some Russian bureaucrats toured the USA. They were completely dumbfounded by the American family farm. How could one family produce so much quality food reliably with so few people and no extra combines and tractors sitting around. At that time a typical Russian collective farm employed a whole village and they usually had up to 8 combines, only 3 of which would be in working order. And that’s with a live-in mechanic.
By that definition, the United States could be called “democratic socialism”. We have public education, infrastructure and social security, and medicare. And with a suicide rate of around 11 per year per 100,000 population (2002), the U.S. is apparently one of the less depressing places in the world to live in.
For comparison, Germany 13.0, Sweden 13.2, Denmark 13.6, Poland 15.9, Austria 16.9, Switzerland 17.4, France 18.0, and Japan 24.0.
http://www.suicide.org/international-suicide-statistics.html
@MikeInNH, I guess I am more concerned about what replaces the military industrial complex if it goes away. DoD projects have fueled technological innovation for half a century. The silicon industrial revolution is largely a product of military demands for remote sensing and communications. We have all these highly trained people without a task. Where will they end up? I realize that your desire for huge cuts in military spending won’t come from just technology, but a great deal of it has to. What projects do we stop funding, what overseas bases do we leave, what domestic bases to we shutter? Even at a slow pace, that is a revolutionary change. It won’t affect me much since I can retire anytime I want to. I guess that I’ve become to life as it is for me and I want it to continue this way for as long as I live.
With all due respect . . .
The US is most definitely NOT “democratic socialism”
It is WORLDS apart from those scandinavian countries which were mentioned
We could have theoretically elected Bernie Sanders, and it would still be worlds apart from those other places
In communism, the “state” owns everything and distributes all product to the citizens through the state.
In socialism, private ownership is a common, and the government take a huge amount of the gross domestic product and uses it to provide for the basic needs of its citizenry.
In a pure democracy, the citizens vote directly on everything. I don’t think there’s been one since Athens thousands of years ago.
The U.S. is a republic, a representative form of government. In the U.S. the government takes a huge portion of our income, uses some of it to provide some basic services, a little bit for national security, and uses the rest for bribes and to buy the support of voting blocks for elections.
Sorry, couldn’t resist.
Like I said, “socialism” is a nebulous (cloud like) term that can be applied or excluded to any place you wish depending on whether or not it supports your forgone conclusion. Also, those Scandinavian countries you refer to had a high standard of living before they implemented their socialist policies and many of them are starting to rethink the wisdom of those policies as the unintended consequences of those policies start to come to past.
So what went wrong in Venezuela? Oh let me guess, it’s not really “democratic socialism”.