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

To: geode00 who wrote (261858)	4/18/2008 5:14:39 PM
From: TimF	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

"These figures are from a faulty analysis of detailed tables in the “Analytical Perspectives” Corrected It seems they are taking out SS Which makes no sense at all, since its the biggest program. The debt portion isn't about actual outlays but the outlays plus the rolling over of debt and the increase in total interest payments because the debt did not go away. Of course, but since military spending is now 20%, and has never (with the possible exception of WWII) equaled 80% of spending, it doesn't make any sense to assign 80% of the debt to military spending. 20%, maybe 30%, but not 80%. They aren't treating entitlements (SS is not an entitlement program, it is a mandatory insurance program, corporate welfare is, however, an entitlement program) as zero, they are treating them (I can't tell if they are treating all of them as such) as outside of the budget Which means "they are treating them as zero". since they should be No they shouldn't since they should be (SS is) self funding/self sustaining entities 1 - That's irrelevant. Spending is spending. The SS tax doesn't reduce the amount spent on Social Security. Its just how that spending is paid for. 2 - It would only take one act of congress to make any type of spending a similar "self funding/self sustaining entity". If they renamed the US income tax into the "defense tax" would you argue that we shouldn't cut military spending because it produces a surplus?? 3 - Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, are accumulating future liabilities at a much faster rate than the actual spending levels. In other words, the government should return to the Al Gore LOCKBOX theory of SS. A real lockbox would require investment in something other than treasury bonds. In any case even such a "lockbox" wouldn't effect the spending amount. Every dollar spent by the federal government on these programs would still be a dollar spent on these programs. You can break the unified budget in to two, or a million different budgets if you want, but there is only one US federal government, and whatever budget the spending goes on, its spending by the US government.