WSJ "Obama speech most dishonest in decades"Follow

Have I? I am the beholder of your viewpoint, myself, so could it not be possible that you have just conceded the argument to me instead? Perhaps neither of us has won or lost.

Just as you have only won in your "screwed-up little American mind", buddy.

Molson does suck, as does Driftwood. He's still better to have than a varus though.

Why do you keep referring to it as a win or lose scenario? Your low self esteem is troubling. Probably ***** envy. It's understandable.

What are you wagering? You'd lose. Badly. First off, if we're to use phrases like "using deficit spending", we should first start with a recognition that all dollars spent collectively either generate a deficit, or they don't. If we want to know what caused a deficit though, we should perhaps look at the spending deltas over time and see what things changed in terms of spending trends.

In 2000, the defense budget was $295B, discretionary domestic spending was $298B. In 2007 (the last year our debt was at a sustainable rate), defense spending was $547B while discretionary domestic spending was $458B. So defense spending outgrew domestic discretionary spending over that time period. Not surprising since we were fighting two wars. But remember, at that point the debt rate wasn't out of control. Thus, that spending increase wasn't what put us in this current debt crisis.

By 2010, those numbers had changed. Defense spending increased to $689B, while domestic spending increased to $614B. So in the three years when we went from sustainable debt to debt crisis, defense spending increased by $142B/year, while domestic spending increased by $158B. So discretionary domestic spending accounts for more of the increase in spending during the time when the debt became unsustainable. I'm not sure how you can argue that the majority was caused by wars.


And that's only the discretionary domestic spending btw. That's the smallest part of the problem. Social Security increased by $120B during those three years, Medicare increased by about $85B, Medicaid increased by about $80B, and Income Security (welfare essentially) increased by about $235B. So that's about $510B dollars in increased spending over a three year period. Add that to the modest discretionary domestic spending increase and the total comes in around $660B/year in increases spending. Now that $142B/year increase in defense doesn't look so huge, does it?


And btw, some of those numbers are more massive when you look at the relative increase. Social Security and Medicare increases were pretty much on their normal curve cost wise. But medicaid? That $80B increase was about a 50% jump in total cost (it went from $190B to $272B). Income Security increased by 110% (from $203B to $437B), an absolutely massive increase.


Let's look at the deltas though. We went from a $160B deficit in 2007 to a $1.2T deficit in 2010. So that's a $1040B difference. Revenue dropped by $400B during that time, so that leaves us with $640B in spending increases left to explain the increased deficit. Hmmm... That's almost exactly the spending increases we've seen. Now, if we subtract the Social Security and Medicare increases (because those increases were not super unusual), that puts the "domestic" spending increases at about $500B. Add in the $140B in military expense increases and we've pretty much explained the whole deficit delta.


Here's the thing though. We could exclude any of a number of dollar spending increases over that time period as "normal" spending increases (just as I did above with SS and Medicare). Coupled with a shrinking/sluggish economic growth, those numbers are problematic but don't necessarily represent "new spending increases". Where we really see the increase is in medicaid (which was never supposed to be more than a minor offshoot to medicare btw), and income security. The larger point is that you are absolutely 100% wrong to suggest that more than a very small factor to our current debt crisis is because of military spending.



It's just plain not true. It has never been true. Repeating it over and over wont make it any more true. Yet it's amazing how many people just repeat this talking point verbatim without ever bothering to check the facts themselves and in some cases even after they've had the facts shoved right in their faces and the false claim revealed for what it is. Please stop lying about this. I've probably heard this same claim made 7 or 8 times on this forum in just the last week or so. It is just not true.

Exactly. If it doesn't, why do we act like we need to possess that kind of wealth? Why do we insist, as a society, that no matter what we already have, that we need more?

Because you don't really know what wealth is. Wealth is not a measure of what you "have", but what you've given to others and for which you have not yet received anything in return. Dollars are "IOUs" for products and services provided for others. When you take away the "wealth", you don't hurt the wealthy that much (unless you take all of it of course, but the economy would collapse long before that point). You hurt the people the wealthy provide goods and services to in return for that wealth.

Once you understand this concept, you'll understand that the goal of "tax the rich" is really counter productive.

Hell no. Anyone who's too much of a pussy to deal with a bit of weather can get the hell out.

Fine, but your broke-*** states aren't getting our federal tax dollars either. It's the liberals that subsidize the ****** conservative states.

That's funny considering that the redistribution of wealth at the federal to state level trends heavily towards blue states paying for red states.



This is such a naive sense of fairness and liberty that I wouldn't even know where to start, but in the interest of brevity, liberty is not the end-all, be-all. Government is about promoting what is best for all of the people, not just those with the most means, and people with an ecological understanding of the world unanimously accept that wealth, as a system of measurement that is entirely relative, is not "stolen" by the government through taxation, but rather is invested in the best interest of the nation in ways that the taxed individuals benefit from both directly and indirectly.

I mean, if nothing else, you should understand Jesus' point of view that all money belongs to the government that prints it, and they can take however much of it they want because they're the ones who give it. If you want to avoid taxation, you could always see how far you get on bartering.

Ahahahaha, you're showing yourself. You used to be better at hiding the fact that you're a deep-cover liberal impersonating a conservative to discredit it from within, but now you're just getting lazy.