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Strategies & Market Trends : 2026 TeoTwawKi ... 2032 Darkest Interregnum -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: paul61 who wrote (78105)	8/21/2011 6:52:51 PM
From: 2MAR$	2 Recommendations Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 217830

It is sad to see no one mentions cutting the Military/Industrial Complex(MIC); ENDING ALL WARS immediately....bring ALL U.S. Troops HOME It was something i noted here 1rst of july that as the defense index $DXS was kiting up to big 2yr highs right into the debt ceiling debates to follow later that month ....this was setting up as a perfect short all the way and those bets have all paid off in spades with that index falling the most . You could have bought Gold or shorted Defense , one was as good as the other. Message 27469468 For how were they going to even begin to pay down the debt without extensive spending cuts in the military budget with both wars winding down & in also healthcare ? These are always the first to get cut and the ones that are always the most expensive , for we have both the most costly budgets of each in the world . These were perfect shorts going into the hot potatoe political Debt debates . Just posted earlier today on "The Sad Statistic that Trumps all Others" Message 27583674 The overlooked piece of news came this month from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. In the second quarter this year, it reported, nonfarm business labor productivity fell by 0.3 percent, the second quarterly drop in a row. And it turns out that it rose only 0.8 percent from the second quarter of 2010. Over the last year, hourly wages have risen more quickly than productivity. These factors have helped to keep the labor market sluggish and have thwarted a potential recovery. Health Care Yet these numbers don’t capture the entire issue, and are themselves plagued by an array of problems. One bias in the economic statistics — which never shows up in published revisions — is embedded in the health care sector, where third-party payments, subsidies and care quality are hard to monitor and measure. A result is that a dollar spent on health care does not necessarily mean a true dollar’s worth of value added. The United States spends more per capita on health care than any other country, yet without producing measurably superior results. To the extent that some of these expenditures are wasteful, the gross domestic product and productivity numbers overstate economic growth. Defense Here’s another problem: Expenditures on the military and domestic security have risen since 9/11, but those investments are intended to neutralize external threats. Even if you agree with this spending, it generally doesn’t produce useful goods and services that raise our standard of living. For all that $8 Trillion spent on MIC base budgets, Home Security & the Wars themselves in the last 10yrs the moment we leave Afghanistan the Taliban can step in the next day & declare victory . If we leave Iraq at any time , we leave with the largest standing Militia there comprised of Shia muslims and loyal to the Ayatolla of Iran our arch enemy , so after 10yr of occupation leaves Iraq at risk of rapidly falling back into new chaos the moment we leave. There's another side of the story as well , is what do you do with all those returning personel and reitroducing into the weak jobs market ? Let's start with the three basic post-9/11 numbers that Washington's addicts need to know: 1. US$5.9 trillion: That's the sum of taxpayer dollars that's gone into the Pentagon's annual "base budget" from 2000 to today. Note that the base budget includes nuclear weapons activities, even though they are overseen by the Department of Energy, but - and this is crucial - not the cost of our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Nonetheless, even without those war costs, the Pentagon budget managed to grow from $302.9 billion in 2000 to $545.1 billion in 2011. That's a dollar increase of $242.2 billion or an 80% jump ($163.6 billion and 44% if you adjust for inflation). It's enough to make your head swim, and we're barely started. 2. $1.36 trillion: That's the total cost of the Iraq and Afghan wars by this September 30, the end of the current fiscal year, including all moneys spent for those wars by the Pentagon, the State Department, the US Agency for International Development, and other federal agencies. Of this, $869 billion will have been for Iraq, $487.6 billion for Afghanistan. Add up our first two key national security spending numbers and you're already at $7.2 trillion since the September 11 attacks. And even that staggering figure doesn't catch the full extent of Washington spending in these years. So onward to our third number: 3. $636 billion: Most people usually ignore this part of the national security budget and we seldom see any figures for it, but it's the amount, adjusted for inflation, that the US government has spent so far on "homeland security". This isn't an easy figure to arrive at because homeland-security funding flows through literally dozens of federal agencies and not just the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). A mere $16 billion was requested for homeland security in 2001. For 2012, the figure is $71.6 billion, only $37 billion of which will go through DHS. A substantial part, $18.1 billion, will be funneled through - don't be surprised - the Department of Defense, while other agencies like the Department of Health and Human Services ($4.6 billion) and the Department of Justice ($4.1 billion) pick up the slack. Add those three figures together and you're at the edge of $8 trillion in national security spending for the last decade-plus and perhaps wondering where the nearest group for compulsive-spending addiction meets. Now, for a few of those questions I mentioned, just to bring reality further into focus: How does that nearly $8 trillion compare with past spending? In the decade before the 9/11 attacks, the Pentagon base budget added up to an impressive $4.2 trillion, only one-third less than for the past decade. But add in the cost of the Afghan and Iraq wars and total Pentagon spending post-9/11 is actually two-thirds greater than in the previous decade. That's quite a jump. As for homeland-security funding, spending figures for the years prior to 2000 are hard to identify because the category didn't exist (nor did anyone who mattered in Washington even think to use that word "homeland"). But there can be no question that whatever it was, it would pale next to present spending. Is that nearly $8 trillion the real total for these years, or could it be even higher?