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Politics : Mainstream Politics and Economics -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Steve Lokness who wrote (14378)	4/2/2012 3:33:27 PM
From: TimF	Respond to of 85487

I do think it will happen here for these reasons; 1) Too much spent on military Military spending is high, and one could reasonably argue its too much, but its not nearly enough to make much of a difference in the long run. Its been declining for generations as a percentage of the economy and of the federal budget, and it will keep doing that. Cutting it in half as you suggest (or by a third as someone else here did) will speed that decline and help a bit, but it isn't were the real money is. Nobody willing to address rising cost of health care All sorts of people are willing to address it, but other people disagree with each of the forms of addressing it. Also even if you could somehow exclude all the useless or counterproductive ideas, and include all the reasonable measures to contain costs, costs would still grow a lot. An over consumption of oil compared to the rest of the world I'm not sure why this is such an issue. Where talking about the budget and the fiscal situation of the government. Sure the government uses oil (esp. for the military) but not to the point where its a major driver of budgetary costs. Also real GDP per gallon of gasoline, or barrel of oil, or even unit of energy, keeps going up. Over time (at least assuming we don't get oil price increases that dwarf what we have seen) oil's cost is less of a factor for the economy. While at the same time changing to alternatives is a costly expense, and and expense that would hit the budget harder than using oil since government would have to heavily subsidize it if was going to be a major move in anything short of a very long time frame. 4) Everybody camped in their ideological corners unwilling to work towards a solution 5) Demographics problem of the baby boomers I agree that political disagreements (ideological and otherwise) help keep change from happening. Some of those possible changes could be useful and to the extent that's the case the political climate causes a problem (of course some of them are harmful too, so this cuts both ways). I agree that demographics (both of the baby boomers, and longer term issues) are a budgetary problem. So I mostly agree with your last two points, and possibly have some degree of agreement with points one and two.