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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Road Walker who wrote (367119)	1/16/2008 2:31:17 PM
From: tejek	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 1573344

Maybe it's the start of the "unwinding" of US debt that all have said was inevitable but all hoped would be a slow process. I am not sure what unwinding of the debt means. If it means reducing the debt down to a low level or even zero, its unlikely to happen.....or if it does happen, its because we have entered a depression. No scratch that.....if we go into a depression, debt is likely to worsen. And of course, there are two kinds of debt....the debts incurred by gov'ts and the debts incurred by corporations and consumers. There is no question that Americans have poor saving habits......esp. compared to the Japanese. However, in my lifetime, I have never seen a situation where most Americans can't handle their debt. The worst time was in S. CA in the early '90s when 'a lot' of people filed for bankruptcy. That 'a lot' was a small percentage of the population but it was noticeable. That's the worse. Most times Americans manage to struggle through. Corporations are a separate issue that I don't want to get into......which leaves gov't debt. Yes, the US has a lot of debt. However, Tim F. is right. As a percentage of GDP we are doing better than the Europeans but not as a good as the Japanese. I suspect we are not in danger at this point. However, we can't afford to continue with budget deficits year after year. Having said that, we have a serious problem in this country. We have a segment of the population that is seriously paranoid. They are obsessively focused on defense and military preparedness. It is why US defense spending is the largest in the world. It is why we have more nukes than anyone else; more spy satellites, larger military forces, more ships, more fighter jets etc. As an aside, wait til it becomes common knowledge that the Chinese took out one of our spy satellites with a laser. In any case, I don't know why they are the way they are...but what's clear is that they are the less educated, less sophisticated, more conservative members of this community. And they have extraordinary power....greater than the size of their population warrants. And its not just defense that they impact.......because their communities are poorer and less developed...they rely more on pork spending.....further exacerbating gov't deficits. So until this 'problem' is dealt with....and frankly, I don't know how you deal with it......there is always going to be problems with spending and deficits when it comes to the federal budgets. Its why I don't understand what appears to be a general complacency and inevitability when talking about "unwinding the deficit". Even if it doesn't mean what I think it means we don't want it to happen and we need to be doing whatever it takes to prevent it from happening. This business of tough loving our way through economic problems is BS. You maintain your style living in the best way you can; otherwise many people will suffer some serious pain.