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Much of Germany's debt is from bailing out the rest of Europe. I already said elsewhere I would end foreign aid.
I said in the same place that I would bring our soldiers home. Simply protecting our borders is certainly do able. Germany can't continue to afford to bail out so many others. We aren't going to be able to either as soon as other countries start refusing the dollar as the world currency (and it is going to happen).
My guess is that Germany's bailouts are recorded as assets in file 13, which is a bookkeeping trick much like Enron.
It's odd how you would.consider helping the less fortunate as something bad but yet we can continue to go trillions in debt killing people that have done nothing to us.
In case you hadn't heard, roughly 64% of federal expenditures in FY 2016 were for transfer payments of one type or another to individuals (Social Security, unemployment, Medicare and other health expenditures, etc.)
We are certainly broke, of course. But we're not broke because of defense expenditures, obviously, which are part and parcel of a constitutionally mandated obligation of the federal government, and account for only 15% of federal expenditures in FY 2016.
In other words, we spend more than four (4) times as much on transfer payments to individuals than we do for defense (which is, once again, a constitutionally mandated function of the federal government, whereas transfer payments to individuals enjoy no such status.)
We're broke because our representatives have purchased the votes of an enormous class of mendicants of one stripe or another, and predictably, said mendicant class has treated the U.S. Treasury as their personal ATM.
We have become the worst national financial deadbeat in all of recorded history, in large part, by "helping the less fortunate." Our generosity toward the underprivileged of all ages is largely responsible for our deplorable national financial condition.
To lay all of this financial woe at the feet of the Defense Department, an intellectually vapid stance which you are asking us to adopt, is to cry about the defense spider in the corner of the room while the entitlement elephant in the selfsame room crushes our collective head underfoot.
Eh...still implies heartlessness. I still believe in helping people by choice.
Well, that's because you're probably a good person. If everyone believed in helping others (within reason) or even just not knowingly exploiting them, there'd be no need for government intervention.
Of course, government often is part of that bad group. And then we have situations where our government us in bed with big pharma companies, and result in a healthcare market that is in no way a true free market, but a captive market (in the U.S.).
Since I have little faith that that would ever be addressed directly (if at all), I see single payer healthcare as a necessary alternative so that people can get healthcare, despite health care providers and patients alike being boxed into paying obscene amounts of money for the same healthcare provider anywhere else at a fraction of the cost.
That's just one example of a social program I support. I used to be a complete free market libertarian, but my beliefs were based on premises that don't and will likely never exist in the U.S.
100% agree, which is why I've said before and I'll say it again, Bernie Sanders was just as much of a lying con man as people said Trump was.
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