Quote:
Originally Posted by jtur88
We have significantly cut food stamps.
Medicaid is frozen in most states.
Higher education funding has been curtailed.
Benefits for veterans have been abolished or reduced.
Criteria for medical disability have been made more stringent.
Some states have virtually shut down their welfare benefits.
Subsidies for public transportation have been cut.
Fees for amenities like passports have skyrocketed.
Agencies processing IRS and Medicare and incarceration have been privatized.
New highways are toll roads.
Parks and recreation facilities are user-fee areas.
School books must be rented.
Broadcast frequencies are sold to the highest bidder.
All galloping fast to more socialization.
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Actually, all we need is to do is NOTHING regarding Social Security and Medicare and we will gallop faster toward more socialism, even if we cut
all the other programs. That
is how bad it
is. This is not something I'm making up. And I'm not exaggerating for dramatic purposes. It's just the mathematics of it. This is pretty much how socialism works in the US, especially with medical care. You basically have the government throwing more and more money at a broken system, doing nothing to fix the cost issues. See link below:
Jim Jubak: US can't grow its way out of deficit - MSN Money
But I'll address some of the other issues you raise:
Same thing is happening with education. We spend as much as other countries on K-12 education as well as unviersity ed. But we don't get much for what we pay. This has been true for decades. But still, nothing is done about it.
Medicaid may be frozen. But when the cost per person keeps rising at double the rate of inflation, you can see why. No one in the government is taking any serious steps to do anything to make the health care system more cost effective. Democrats foucus on getting more people heath insurance without focusing on why people can't afford it in the first place. Republicans do nothing or provide watered down versions of what Dems want (witness Bush's prescription drug plan for Medicare). We spend gobs of money on health care, but we are not healthier than people in other countries. It's actually horrifically sad that 2/3 of us are overweight and 1/3 are obese. At the rate we're going we'll all going to need to spend 1/2 our lives at doctors' offices.
Higher ed. is mostly funded by states. And once again, the cost of providing higher ed has been moving well past the typical rate of inflation for 30+ years, just like it has been for medical care. Once again, we need to deliver higher ed in a more cost effective way. We've known this for decades, but nothing has been done about it, mostly because tenured faculty have too much power.
We would have to eliminate the ENTIRE disability component of Social Security disability for Social Security to be on sound financial footing again (or do something else equally drastic).
Passport fees? There are worse problems to deal with.
Public transit. Agreed. But once again, that is partly because most people don't give a sh*t about it. I agree this is unfortunate, but most Americans are still stuck in this "single house in the suburbs is the only way I can be happy" kind of mentality.
New highways: Again, part of the problem is excessive sprawl development policies. A natural outgrowth of endless sprawl is more expensive infrastructure, including roads. But since people b*tch endlessly about living at higher densities, then you are going to pay more for roads. People drive more today than they did 10 or 20 years ago because of sprawl oriented, auto-dependent land use policies. If we lived at even moderately higher densities, we would be able to spend less on building and maintaining roads and divert some of that money to mass transit.
I can't speak to welfare benefits. They are a small part of the Federal Budget. It all goes back to SS & Medicare. We must make Medicare more efficient, raise taxes, and reduce benefits to make SS & Medicare on sound financial footing.
As far as agencies being privatized....it is not a panacea. But I can sometimes see why it has been tried. In short, public sector unions are greedy. Now, I work in the public sector, so I see the entitlement mentality first hand. My job starts paying out retirement benefits at age 55. In an age when people are living into their late 70s and living longer all the time, the cost of providing these pensions is clearly not sustainable. Now sure, I will love collecting the pension---if the US economcy doesn't collapse between now and the time I'm 55, 16 years from now. (Personally, I think our economy will collapse, because people like yourself are not prepared to do what it takes to set things right--and people with your attitude, are, unforunately, in the majority).
Prisons are a perfect example of union greed in my state of California. Prison guards have been getting outsized raises year in and year out for more than a decade in my state (I'm talking that in one year a few years back they actually got an 11% pay raise!!! 11%. That is unheard of even in other public sector agencies).
So, in many respects, we are paying more for our public services and not getting anything for it. In some instances that's our own fault (wanting to live in endless auto-dependent sprawl---the cost of maintaining all those roads goes up over time). In other cases (greedy prison guards), it's not--at least not directly.
Quite frankly, America has been living beyond it's means for a long time. Conservatives have been saying this forever, although it's true, they don't always practice what they preach. However, even the liberal think tanks like the Brookings Institution would agree with what I'm saying here.
It's a combination of the government not handling tax money judiciously and American citizens wanting more government than they're willing to pay for. And now the bill has come due.
So, if we don't want to end up a 3rd World country like Argentina (which used to have the 5th highest per capita income in the world back in 1930 before they started running huge budget deficits, etc.), we are going to have to have both drastic increases in taxes and drastic cuts in benefits (as well as drastic improvements in the cost effectiveness of medical care).
The problems you are describing now are just the warm up.
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