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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: carranza2 who wrote (123104)	1/12/2004 9:18:54 PM
From: GST	Respond to of 281500

Skyrocketing Deficits If Bush is serious about missions to the moon and Mars, he must say how to pay for them. January 12, 2004 So, the president wants to send expeditions to the moon and Mars. It's a grand vision, one sure to fire America's passion for adventure. And injecting a bit of space dreaming into an otherwise earthbound election-year conversation about deficits, debt, war and terrorism won't hurt George W. Bush's re-election prospects But it will be hard to take Bush's celestial vision seriously if he doesn't include in the speech planned for next week some notion of how he expects taxpayers to pay for this ultimate road trip . He probably won't, because realistically he can't. Not while piling up deficits of $1 billion a day, as Washington did in 2003. Or while paying almost $1 billion a day in interest on the $7 trillion national debt. The White House has been unnervingly sanguine about this ocean of red ink. It has blithely pushed huge tax cuts into law while insisting that the deficit is manageable, even though the cost of Social Security and Medicare will skyrocket when the huge baby-boom generation begins to retire. Not to worry, the White House says: Economic growth and spending restraint will halve the red ink in five years. A half-billion dollar a day deficit is better than $1 billion a day. But that's a best-case scenario, and it isn't all that good. Even the International Monetary Fund weighed in recently, alarmed that sustained federal deficits will lower national savings, fuel inflation globally and crowd out private investment. The eventual cost? Lower global productivity and income growth. Economic growth alone isn't likely to be enough to right the nation's fiscal ship, a view shared by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office and any number of outside budget analysts. And federal spending restraint, though desirable, will be hard to come by with war and homeland security needs to be met. All nondefense discretionary spending controlled by Congress will total $381 billion in 2004. Washington could cut every dime of that and the budget would still be in the red. Washington needs to get serious about paying as it goes, including any multibillion dollar tab for grand trips into outer space. newsday.com

To: carranza2 who wrote (123104)	1/12/2004 9:55:33 PM
From: marcos	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

Were the french to declare they had a carte blanche to rule the Rest of Us because whackos had flown a plane into a structure, my position would remain the same - No you don't, now just sit back down at that table and let's negotiate up some semi-reasonable attempt at a better way to settle issues of national sovereignty .... meantime our police and intelligence services would be working away on the criminal element involved, which has been happening in any case - we all have clear laws against crimes of violence, on something of this scale we cooperate as a matter of course, this applies not only to democracies but near- and non-democracies as well, with very few notable exceptions There was wide agreement on invading Afghanistan ... right now there are german and canadian troops together there, i support that as do most of our populations .... you know i am among those who would like México to start coming out of total isolationism diplomatically, gain a little confidence, it will happen eventually ... but there were many contributing to that effort, and no significant opposition, because it was clearly hot pursuit of criminals The US was alone on invading Iraq - that 'coalition' was phoney, no point in pretending otherwise, even Blair and Aznar didn't have their populations behind them, the rest were bullied and/or bribed into 'joining' .... so what is the difference here, is it enough to say 'the french and germans yada yada'? .... maybe for the US domestic market it is, but it's not even close to adequate outside ...... the french foiled that attempt to fly into the Eiffel tower, by the way, they've been battling terrorism for many years, their police cooperate with ours and yours quite fully [there was a fellow from Québec on the radio about this, talking about how security liaison was being refined, especially with the euros, he had criticism for aspects of every nation's approach, the fractured nature of some made the french look quite efficient by comparison, i forget the details] We're not a monolith out here, all thinking the same .... many could have been sold on a joint effort for regime change in Iraq, if an attempt had been made, but it never was, only the neocons shouting Roll Them Tanks and WMD! bla bla bla ..... it won't turn out this time to be easier for them to get forgiveness than permission, some lasting damage has been done, they've rejected not only an opportunity to improve rule of law but rejected any notion that the law applies to themselves [and sure, you could go from there to descending spirals of international legalspeak - nobody's interested, they could have had a quorum of independent democracies, they said screw all you people, so screw em] Can't read the usatoday.com, they've elected to have their site shut down my browser ... sigh, there are so many of those lately Here is one of the Steven Rogers pieces that is on boondocksnet.com also, story about two radically different cultures, bunch of varying individuals and belief structures, sin sex danger and filthy lucre, all on a lovely piece of real estate, standard political stuff - smssagada.netfirms.com And another, story of a small battle, in a small war [less than 1,000,000 casualties, by some accounts] - boondocksnet.com Google lists Granma Internacional as having an opinion on the bracero programme, lol - news.google.com .... all our presidentes are in Monterrey right now - cbc.ca