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B, my friend, I am somewhat educated with a couple of doctoral degrees, but I cannot for the life of me figure out what you are trying to say.
"If welfare numbers are so high in the US, you can infer that a big part of the economy is based on these disparities" --- how exactly do you infer that, what is the logic of the inference, and what do you mean by economy beimg based on welfare?
If you indeed mean to say that US economy created welfare class for its own purposes, I must point out that the US economy does not need welfare recipients, the US economy does not encourage anyone to have 5 kids if they are not able to provide for the kids. The US economy needs investors, workers, and buyers of products - and welfare recipients are none of these three, typically. Welfare recipients in the US are not created by economy. Professor Karl Marx, I have some news for you: not everything is created by economy, and for example, human beings (including those on welfare) are created by their parents.
If you mean to say that the US welfare class created the US economy, that is also not true, again because they have no means of interacting with the US economy by investing, working, or spending their earnings.
The US welfare class is outsode the US economy. Its only interaction with US economy is extraction of tax money from tje US economy, something that the US economy definitely does not like, want or encourage.
"Americans are averse to redundancy they revile"... B, are you okay? Seriously, WHAT in the world does that mean??? Incarceration is the result of reviling a redundancy to which Americans have an aversion? Do you mean to say that Americans revile redundant people in order to put redundant people in jails, because Americans have an aversion to redundancy? No, people in the US are not in jails because they were reviled, but because of a legal proof that they committed a crime (justice system in the US is not based on reviling anybody, not to my knowledge since the 1690s Salem witch trials).
It would be easier to debate with you if you could try to make sense...
Yes, excuse my French, I was using the word redundant in lieu of repetitive. I meant to say that American citizens did not want a boost to the social security scheme already in place.
Yes, excuse my French, I was using the word redundant in lieu of repetitive. I meant to say that American citizens did not want a boost to the social security scheme already in place.
While I still do not understand anything in your previous post (replacing "redundant" with "repetitive" makes it even less comprehensible), this last statement at least makes some verbal sense. No, American taxpayers (which is actually a minority of the US citizens) do not generally want to pay more taxes in order to increase social security benefits for people who do not pay for these benefits. Middle-class American taxpayers are already paying so much tax that the taxes are constantly pushing them into the poverty class. Higher-paid end of the middle class pays 1/2 of their earnings in taxes, as I demonstrated on the example of myself.
Everybody probably agrees that the US needs a comprehensive health insurance system without loopholes that leave many people vulnerable to high medical bills (however, these are not people on welfare - people on welfare have 100% health insurance coverage. You can reliably get full health insurance coverage in the US with 100% certainty only if you don't pay anything for it :-). But in order to have enough funds to provide comprehensive health insurance to 330 million people, you can't have more than 52 million of them paying nothing into the health insurance pool, and a certain other percentage making substantially reduced premium payments. In order to fully insure 330 million people with only 50 million paying full premiums into the insurance pool, you would have to tax the middle class more than they earn, and tax businesses to the point where it would no longer make sense to even have a business.
The root of inability to fund a national health insurance in the US is not that the "rich" are not paying enough taxes, but that the number of the poor (who are not required to pay taxes) is enormous. It is not that taxpayers are taxed too low, but that there are too many non-taxpayers. The size of population on welfare has greatly outgrown the ability of taxpayers to support them. The solution to that is not more tax, but decreasing number of people on welfare - by not giving them incentives to have large numbers of kids that require more and more welfare.
While I still do not understand anything in your previous post (replacing "redundant" with "repetitive" makes it even less comprehensible), this last statement at least makes some verbal sense. No, American taxpayers (which is actually a minority of the US citizens) do not generally want to pay more taxes in order to increase social security benefits for people who do not pay for these benefits. Middle-class American taxpayers are already paying so much tax that the taxes are constantly pushing them into the poverty class. Higher-paid end of the middle class pays 1/2 of their earnings in taxes, as I demonstrated on the example of myself.
Everybody probably agrees that the US needs a comprehensive health insurance system without loopholes that leave many people vulnerable to high medical bills (however, these are not people on welfare - people on welfare have 100% health insurance coverage. You can reliably get full health insurance coverage in the US with 100% certainty only if you don't pay anything for it :-). But in order to have enough funds to provide comprehensive health insurance to 330 million people, you can't have more than 52 million of them paying nothing into the health insurance pool, and a certain other percentage making substantially reduced premium payments. In order to fully insure 330 million people with only 50 million paying full premiums into the insurance pool, you would have to tax the middle class more than they earn, and tax businesses to the point where it would no longer make sense to even have a business.
The root of inability to fund a national health insurance in the US is not that the "rich" are not paying enough taxes, but that the number of the poor (who are not required to pay taxes) is enormous. It is not that taxpayers are taxed too low, but that there are too many non-taxpayers. The size of population on welfare has greatly outgrown the ability of taxpayers to support them. The solution to that is not more tax, but decreasing number of people on welfare - by not giving them incentives to have large numbers of kids that require more and more welfare.
I do agree that there is something unfair about this.
While I still do not understand anything in your previous post (replacing "redundant" with "repetitive" makes it even less comprehensible), this last statement at least makes some verbal sense. No, American taxpayers (which is actually a minority of the US citizens) do not generally want to pay more taxes in order to increase social security benefits for people who do not pay for these benefits. Middle-class American taxpayers are already paying so much tax that the taxes are constantly pushing them into the poverty class. Higher-paid end of the middle class pays 1/2 of their earnings in taxes, as I demonstrated on the example of myself.
Everybody probably agrees that the US needs a comprehensive health insurance system without loopholes that leave many people vulnerable to high medical bills (however, these are not people on welfare - people on welfare have 100% health insurance coverage. You can reliably get full health insurance coverage in the US with 100% certainty only if you don't pay anything for it :-). But in order to have enough funds to provide comprehensive health insurance to 330 million people, you can't have more than 52 million of them paying nothing into the health insurance pool, and a certain other percentage making substantially reduced premium payments. In order to fully insure 330 million people with only 50 million paying full premiums into the insurance pool, you would have to tax the middle class more than they earn, and tax businesses to the point where it would no longer make sense to even have a business.
The root of inability to fund a national health insurance in the US is not that the "rich" are not paying enough taxes, but that the number of the poor (who are not required to pay taxes) is enormous. It is not that taxpayers are taxed too low, but that there are too many non-taxpayers. The size of population on welfare has greatly outgrown the ability of taxpayers to support them. The solution to that is not more tax, but decreasing number of people on welfare - by not giving them incentives to have large numbers of kids that require more and more welfare.
The problem with US is that it's high cost country when you factor the cost of healthcare. Even with ACA and Medicaid it's not enough to provide long term health. We have too many people with unhealthy habits that need expensive prescriptions and regular visits. In other countries you rarely hear of people taking regular prescription meds even for seniors. We have a high obesity rate and that contributes to the high cost of healthcare. Look at other 1st world countries, very few have such a high obesity rate.
More taxes would not solve the problem unless people make better health choices. Unlike many 3rd world countries, US is the only country where the poor can be obese and overweight. So there's no shortage of food here.
The problem with US is that it's high cost country when you factor the cost of healthcare. Even with ACA and Medicaid it's not enough to provide long term health. We have too many people with unhealthy habits that need expensive prescriptions and regular visits. In other countries you rarely hear of people taking regular prescription meds even for seniors. We have a high obesity rate and that contributes to the high cost of healthcare. Look at other 1st world countries, very few have such a high obesity rate.
More taxes would not solve the problem unless people make better health choices. Unlike many 3rd world countries, US is the only country where the poor can be obese and overweight. So there's no shortage of food here.
And people in the US eat very poorly. People that eat organic or GMO free food and have a healthy diet are seen as "food snobs". I was talking about this the other day with a colleague who also eats organic like I do and we were saying that not that long ago, the food didn't have so many chemicals and additives, but now you need to eat organic and GMO free foods just to avoid all of that. I have been the same waste size since high school. It isn't just about eating organic or GMO free though. People also don't eat things in moderation, and get little exercise. All of those people shopping at CostCo and those other places where you buy portion sizes that make no sense, and we wonder why the US is a country of obese people.
War is not good for anybody. The current stockpile of weapons is created by the need to AVOID war.
We don't need 10X the fire power to avoid war. That's nonsense. We could do it with a 1/4 of it, and still have more than we need. It's to fund the Halliburton's and Rayethon's of the world and those corporate masters.
The rest of your post really doesn't address it. It goes on about geopolitics. That's not the point. It's about spending MORE money to maintain the hegemony you discuss when it's not necessary.
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Currently, the United States spends more on defense than the next seven countries combined — China, Saudi Arabia, India, France, Russia, the United Kingdom, and Germany. Keeping in mind some of those countries are close allies, it simply makes no sense to spend as if another Cold War is around the corner. While hostile international actors certainly remain, none amount to the existential threat that was the USSR for the better half of the 20th century.
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the Senate Armed Services Committee's proposed budget authorizes $10 billion for purchasing 16 more F-35 Joint Strike Fighters than initially requested, shorting $162 million from the administration’s ask for F-15Xs. The combat aircraft family has received much criticism over the year for the sweetheart deal that Lockheed Martin received from the military to design, test, and produce the F-35s all at the same time instead of fixing flaws before mass production. As a result, the fleet has a long history of malfunction.
Protecting wasteful bases. Periodically, the President and Congress go through a round of base-closing to close facilities that are no longer needed. President Obama asked to start such a round, and officials thought it would save $2 billion/year but Congress would have none of it. Members of Congress hate seeing bases closed in their districts or states. Congress took the extraordinary step, not merely to refuse to start a round, but even to bar studying or considering one.
Mississippi’s cutter. The New York Times said it all: "Language inserted into the federal budget over the objection of the Obama administration by Senator Thad Cochran, Republican of Mississippi, directed the Coast Guard to build a $640 million National Security Cutter in Mississippi that the Coast Guard says it does not need.”
There is no security threat comparable to the Soviet Union today that would begin to justify spending more than at the height of the Reagan build-up. Reagan’s splurging on the military was also excessive, but he could at least point to a major rival that posed a serious threat as the reason for doing it. Threats to the U.S. today are not remotely on the same scale and don’t require anything like the same outlays on the military. We are frittering away resources on a much more expensive military at a time when we don’t need one and can’t afford one. Jacking up military spending at the same time as cutting taxes makes the new expenditure that much more irresponsible, and compounding the fiscal irresponsibility is the fact that there is no good reason to do it.
Instead, from the highest reaches of the Pentagon (and the president himself) came a proposal to create a Space Force, a sixth military service that’s all but guaranteed to further bloat its bureaucracy and
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duplicate work being
done by the other services. Even Pentagon planners estimate that the future Space Force will cost $13 billion over the next five years (and that’s undoubtedly a low-ball figure).
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In addition, the Defense Department employs an army of private contractors—more than 600,000 of them—many doing jobs that could be done far more cheaply by civilian government employees. Cutting the private-contractor workforce by 15 percent to a mere half-million people would promptly save more than $20 billion per year. And don’t forget the cost overruns on major weapons programs like the Ground-Based Strategic Deterrent—the Pentagon’s unwieldy name for the Air Force’s new intercontinental ballistic missile—and routine overpayments for even minor spare parts (like $8,000 for a helicopter gear worth less than $500—a markup of 1,500 percent).
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The Project on Government Oversight has found—and the Government Accountability Office recently substantiated—that, despite years of work and staggering costs, the F-35 may never perform as advertised.
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This year’s budget proposal supersizes the slush in that fund to a figure that would likely be considered absurd if it weren’t part of the Pentagon budget. Of the nearly $174 billion proposed for the war budget and “emergency” funding, only a little more than $25 billion is meant to directly pay for the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere. The rest will be set aside for what’s termed enduring activities that would continue even if those wars ended or for routine Pentagon activities that couldn’t be funded within the constraints of the budget caps.
Well okay, they should do a better job with preventing overpayments for parts and materials - but that is the only point of your amateur dissertation that I concede. I do not call research on new instruments of national defense futile even when "not working as advertised". Strong defense is a priority for the US, actually probably THE priority, and you are the last person in the world whose opinion I woukd take into account when judging how much defense the US needs. It is not my area of expertise, people at West Point study that and advise on it, and I am not going to second-guess them. Additionally, military research has resulted in all sorts of civilian benefits (as I hear from a close relative who specializes in remote sensing, occasionally works on government contracts (as one of the vast army of contractors, who btw are paid normal engineering salaries, nothing exorbitant), and is far more liberal than I am, but nevertheless thinks military spending is warranted).
None of this discussion about military spending justifies people having kids that they can't raise. Nobody should be welfare-dependent, regardless of how much or how little the US spends on national defense. How can a person incapable of taking care of self, and incapable of contributing anything to society, be considered capable of parenthood?
Well okay, they should do a better job with preventing overpayments for parts and materials - but that is the only point of your amateur dissertation that I concede. I do not call research on new instruments of national defense futile even when "not working as advertised". Strong defense is a priority for the US, actually probably THE priority, and you are the last person in the world whose opinion I woukd take into account when judging how much defense the US needs. It is not my area of expertise, people at West Point study that and advise on it, and I am not going to second-guess them. Additionally, military research has resulted in all sorts of civilian benefits (as I hear from a close relative who specializes in remote sensing, occasionally works on government contracts (as one of the vast army of contractors, who btw are paid normal engineering salaries, nothing exorbitant), and is far more liberal than I am, but nevertheless thinks military spending is warranted).
None of this discussion about military spending justifies people having kids that they can't raise. Nobody should be welfare-dependent, regardless of how much or how little the US spends on national defense. How can a person incapable of taking care of self, and incapable of contributing anything to society, be considered capable of parenthood?
Where did you get your degrees from?
Chump U?
Another one of your presidents failed businesses, and "drumroll"; he has his finger on the button.
That's what you get for voting in corporate welfare kings.
Another one of your presidents failed businesses, and "drumroll"; he has his finger on the button.
That's what you get for voting in corporate welfare kings.
Well, you certainly sound like a person unencumbered by any advanced degrees :-). You know, making up "funny university" names is funny maybe once, then it becomes stupid. Most people learn the meaning of "stupid attempts at humor" by the age of 6, but some evidently don't. I am not going to discuss my degrees or training because that is irrelevant for the purposes of this lowest-common-denominator forum (certainly irrelevant for discussing anything with you :-), plus I do not want to get into easily traceable elements of my identity :-). Fyi, I did not vote for Trump (I did not vote at all in the last election, since I did not support either of the two final candidates), and think that Trump is just a frontman that attracted the required majority of voters who ask for a stupid show. He is not the one who gathers information and makes decisions (he wouldn't know how), he is just the showman for the party. There is of course a much larger structure (of far more serious and intelligent people than Trump) behind the finger that he placed on the button. I do not know what is behind the decision these people made, since of course I have no connection with or knowledge of military intelligence, but I trust people who made that decision (and only a moron would think that the decision was in fact Trump's own).
Well okay, they should do a better job with preventing overpayments for parts and materials - but that is the only point of your amateur dissertation that I concede. I do not call research on new instruments of national defense futile even when "not working as advertised". Strong defense is a priority for the US, actually probably THE priority, and you are the last person in the world whose opinion I woukd take into account when judging how much defense the US needs. It is not my area of expertise, people at West Point study that and advise on it, and I am not going to second-guess them. Additionally, military research has resulted in all sorts of civilian benefits (as I hear from a close relative who specializes in remote sensing, occasionally works on government contracts (as one of the vast army of contractors, who btw are paid normal engineering salaries, nothing exorbitant), and is far more liberal than I am, but nevertheless thinks military spending is warranted).
None of this discussion about military spending justifies people having kids that they can't raise. Nobody should be welfare-dependent, regardless of how much or how little the US spends on national defense. How can a person incapable of taking care of self, and incapable of contributing anything to society, be considered capable of parenthood?
My assertion is amateur but yours is not? Are you serious? LOL. Yours lacks any sophistication at all while you parrot tired tripe. Do you even pay attention? You're political saavy is very, very unsophisticated and truly biased by your upbringing and preconceived biases including your PREJUDICE against poor and lower working people that you only see malcontents when the vast majority are not. Let's leave it at that.
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