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Politics : GOPwinger Lies/Distortions/Omissions/Perversions of Truth -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Lizzie Tudor who wrote (143078)	10/24/2008 6:22:54 PM
From: TimF	1 Recommendation Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 173976

the 5 trillion consists of projections, 1 - Unrealistic projections, unless you either assume the war will go on for decades, or your considering all the spending for the war to have been borrowed and counting all the interest for a very long time with no discount rate (and if you do that for say Social Security, you would get numbers so large most people wouldn't understand them) 2 - Projections including anticipated future costs which have not been spent yet, and thus are not part of our current national debt. 3 - Once again its irrelevant to the claim you want to defend. If you want to concede on the "reverse robin hood" idea and change the topic to something you consider more important or interesting than fine, but don't pretend that your defending your original point. We have paid about 600 billion thus far for Iraq Thank you for conceding the point. Most people aren't gracious enough to do so. Medicare part D is estimated to cost 1 trillion between the 2006-2015 period That could even be an underestimate. Look at the way the original Medicare program exceeded its estimates after the program started. So what's your point? If your trying to say "Bush spent a lot of money", well I must have said that hundreds of times on SI. But none of that supports your "reverse robin hood" claim. BTW I am not a fan of Medicare part D. Taking all these massive expenditures into account and calling this a payout to the poor is a colossal stretch. Some of the Iraq expenses go to the poor (esp. if you consider Iraqi poor, but I would not in this context). A lot of the Medicare part D money will go to poor people. But I'm not calling any specific program "a payout to the poor". If you come up with a list of 10 big programs and 50,000 small ones and show that "none of this money goes to the poor", it wouldn't matter. The issue is not "program X, and program Y, and program Z. The issue is the whole government. Take all the money the government spend on the poor, subtract the revenue it receives from the poor. The result is a positive number. Take all the money the government spends on the rich. Subtract all the revenue it receives from the rich. The result is a negative number. That's the simple bottom line, we have "Robin Hood", not "reverse Robin Hood".