The real number is 1.6 trillion for Iraq and Afghanistan, that's how much the US spent on those wars. That's slightly more than the deficit Obama ran in his first year in office. I know you are doing your best, but the facts just aren't on your side guy. I know where you got the 4-6 trillion number, but it's completely intellectually dishonest to quote that.....well not for you, but for the person that wrote those talking points. Also, the national debt is at 19.4 trillion, 10.4 trillion of that has been added since the Democrats took control of the 110th congress
If you know where the high number came from, then why not agree that it does represent the increase to the budgets as part of Post 9/11 wars, war-related increases to base pentagon budgets and the new homeland security budgets. Why try to split it out, and not count the full dollar increases to the budget that congress has to deal with. Sure, we can say it was necessary spending, but don't discount the full number...to do so, and to ignore the Watson Institute budgetary finding by 30-some economists seems also to be "completely intellectually dishonest."
This is also "intellectually dishonest." Your statement makes it sound like that 60% is all from the discretionary budget. Social Security and Medicare are often called "earned-benefit" programs. They are called that because WE gave the government 34% of their revenue to put aside for those programs. They took it from us as a social contract for those two programs, so they must spend it on those. Calling it "entitlement" is intellectually disingenuous. SS and Medicare revenue taken as payroll tax was 34% of total tax revenue ($1.1t) SS and Medicare spending last year was 38% of the budget ($1.44t) It is disingenuous to say the govt has 60% to play with, when 38% can't be stopped without losing 34% of the revenue. I'm all in favor of the debate on whether we should stop taking money from our income to put aside in trust funds, but if we do and subtract the spending from the budget, then (if my math is correct) the Military budget goes from 16% to 25% of the total budget.
Payroll taxes are taxes imposed on employers or employees, and are usually calculated as a percentage of the salaries that employers pay their staff. Payroll taxes generally fall into two categories: deductions from an employee’s wages, and taxes paid by the employer based on the employee's wages. The first kind are taxes that employers are required to withhold from employees' wages, also known as withholding tax, pay-as-you-earn tax (PAYE), or pay-as-you-go tax (PAYG) and often covering advance payment of income tax, social security contributions, and various insurances (e.g., unemployment and disability). The second kind is a tax that is paid from the employer's own funds and that is directly related to employing a worker. These can consist of fixed charges or be proportionally linked to an employee's pay. The charges paid by the employer usually cover the employer's funding of the social security system, and other insurance programs. The economic burden of the payroll tax falls almost entirely on the worker, regardless of whether the tax is remitted by the employer or the employee, as the employers’ share of payroll taxes is passed on to employees in the form of lower wages than would otherwise be paid https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Payroll_tax If Wiki is to be believed. . . . if we stopped taking out Social Security and Unemployment insurance .. . then 33% of governmental tax revenue goes away . . . is this correct? Rocket River
Rocket River, Payroll tax is to pay for SS, Medicare and Unemployment ... plus disability insurance, too. Want to reiterate, they lump Medicare and Health programs together (Medicaid). The pure Medicare portion of that (which is taken from payroll tax) is 15% of the budget...and Social Security+Unemployment is 24% of total govt spending. Those are the numbers I'm comparing to the payroll tax, in my post before yours. So, 39% can be chopped out of the 60% of that pie, by eliminating the trust fund mandatory spending, but to do so knocks out 34% of the revenue. So in those adjusted terms, Military spending is 25% of the budget, making it #1 and ahead of the 21% of "entitlements" remaining after axing SS and Medicare from the equation.
That is all phony accounting nonsense. There is no separate fund which funds social security and medicare, it is all part of the same pie. The fact that it is marked differently is meaningless. Would you take military spending off the chart if they had a special military tax that was used to pay for it? Of course not, because that would go against the talking point. Payroll taxes are just another bit of income tax, the just don't want to admit tax rates are that high.
It is not phony accounting nonsense. By law, Payroll tax is set aside in trust funds for SS and Medicare spending. It isn't all mixed together. Absolutely zero of that money is spent on Military, without giving the fund securities in exchange. The point is: you cannot eliminate that spending without eliminating the Payroll tax, too. You have to drop the entire programs, which include the revenue collected to pay for them. So, it is accounting nonsense to say there is 60% of the budget to discuss axing, when 39% of that is paid for with special revenue funds -- by law. I'm all for the debate to drop them, but that debate includes stopping the Payroll Tax that funds them.
About the national debt: Pretty much every industrialized country in the world increased their national debt as a % of GDP go by a substantial margin like the U.S. did due to the 2008-09 financial crisis and have seen their national debt stay at a high level since then even as the economy recovered some. So, it's a little silly to blame Obama for this global situation.
Another thing, the main argument about Payroll tax isn't higher tax rates, the argument is people want to keep the money to invest in their own retirement funds and medical care after retirement. They don't want the govt to do it for them. Of course, you could just drop the payroll tax and keep the money and spend it now and worry about retirement later. YOLO!! :grin:
If you rename payroll taxes to income tax, not at all changing the rates or how they are applied, nothing changes. Dollars are fungible. It isn't like the payroll tax dollars are marked with a special pen and put into a lockbox until it is time to send out social security money. It is all just moving numbers around. So, can you eliminate the spending without eliminating the payroll tax? Of course you can. You simply eliminate the entitlement, eliminate the payroll tax, and have an equivalent increase in income tax.
You don't understand how the SS Trust Fund works. Weren't you the one talking about "phony accounting nonsense." Now you are saying SS/Medicare can be eliminated while not losing any tax revenue. What are you going to spend that 34% of the revenue on, then? Answer me that? You really need to answer that. While you are struggling with that, I'll repeat the math: Spoiler The Payroll Tax is sent to the Trust Fund...still as originally decried by FDR and Congress. If you take both that tax revenue sent to that fund and spending taking out of the fund, and account for it separately (WHICH IS WHAT THE GOVT DOES and the Social Security Act originally stated) then 25% of the budget is Military, making it the largest budget item. To argue against that is silly. It just sheds better light on what budgets would look like had FDR never started the Payroll tax.
Never argue with a sociopath. Of course none of the war budget accounts for interest on the money borrowed to pay for the war and costs to the US economy, particularly the price of gas before and after the war. As gas goes up, everything else goes up by extension. I do find it kind of odd that people say government routinely lies but are perfectly happy to accept the budget numbers they throw out.
While you're bickering about the problem, try to propose a new solution, one that hasn't already failed to convince enough people to matter. Slashing military or health or labor is an old solution, it's not going to work WITHIN the system. Before there's a new solution, it never looks like there could be a new solution. There is a solution out there that even Bobby and CometsWin can agree on, we just might not know what it is yet, and you should look for it. There is no point having an argument that was designed to be a loop.
You can't provide a solution without understanding the root of the problem and coming to agreement on that but when you're doing toppling the Saudi royal family come over here and help us topple our democracy. Thanks bro.
The fact that you think these things are unrelated tells me you need to learn a bit more about where your budget dollars are going. What does it say about you that you launch a personal attack after I tell bobby you would risk your life for him before anyone else will, and after I tell you guys to be solution minded in solving your joint problems? He's simply not going to agree with you about how you describe the problem. He agrees with you on the base problem: people should be getting more than what they are getting. Theoretically, there is nothing more wrong with what he's saying than what you're saying and vice versa. But those two theories are failed theories. Neither of those two theories encompass all the people who are suffering from the base problem: where are the opportunities and benefits they deserve? How long are you going to shout AT each other? Until fascists are born on either side of the spectrum? Because that's what it takes to just shove through what you want. Force. And force - both physically and spiritually - has an equal and opposite reaction. If you force a country to do something, they will do the opposite very soon. Force doesn't work. I'm going to talk about the problems affecting Americans as long as Americans' well being and happiness is not satisfactory to me. Don't like it? Hit the ignore button and live in your fantasy land where everyone wants what you want.
The debt numbers seem scary on the surface but all values are relative. In a fiat currency the relative value of money can only be measured by the stress level of the system: inflation, social strife, warfare etc. The size of the numbers makes little difference. We don't even print much paper money anymore; the size of the derivatives markets dwarfs the GDP. It is not like personal debt at all, it's just a massively complex relative value balancing system. (and remember complexity is stability since it reduces the the potential for abrupt systemic change, think energy states... it's more diffused )
The separation of payroll tax is often used to say that poor people don't pay federal income tax when in reality, all people who work pay that tax. It is also very regressive since there is a cap on it and it doesn't apply to capital gains.
Thank you for the explaination I want to be clear in every argument being made When I looked at the two charts together You see how much is going out and how much is coming in If you eliminate the output you cannot still take the input . . . Rocket River
