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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices

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To: bentway who wrote (531244)	11/23/2009 12:34:31 PM
From: TimF	of 1575712

All you right wingers are up in arms about the TEN YEAR cost of health care - which wouldn't cover TWO YEARS of the acknowledged military budget. The ten year cost of the health care reform effort will actually be higher than the estimates. New government health care programs almost always cost far more than the original estimates (this is also true outside of health care but not to the same extent). Also even if you buy the estimates, they get the ten year cost down by only including 5 to 7 years of the program in the 10 year estimate, the costs don't really start right away, even though extra taxes do. Also the costs keep going up, even in the estimate. The year 10 costs is well over the early year costs. Beyond that its all new additional costs. And whether the federal government should be involved in a big way at all in health care could reasonably be debated. The amount of money we spend on defense could as well, but not the existence of a military. Much of the TRUE cost of our military is hidden in other budgets -Dept. of Energy - atomic weapons, Intelligence services, etc. Dept. of energy atomic weapons program costs aren't large compared to the actual defense budget. Intelligence services are not military costs. They are somewhat related, but that's like calling the costs of all government social entitlements part of the cost of health care "reform". The military is the biggest chunk of government PORK out there. Pork can be defined in different ways so as to make any of the large government programs in to "the biggest chunk of pork". Already we have noticeably more government spending on health care than on the military, and that's before all the additional spending from new programs. Military spending has been on a downtrend as a portion of the federal budget since WWII. Social entitlements have been on an uptrend since around the same time, while federal medical spending has been on a solid uptrend at least since the 60s. If your looking to contain costs the main place to look is in the areas that are growing the most. That doesn't mean that cuts in defense might not also be made, but there is no way they would save as much as restraint in federal medical spending would save. Cut the defense budget by two thirds and your still talking a lot less money then future government spending on health care.

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