Obama February deficit exceeds Bush's entire 2007 deficit

[_Droopy]

Our defense spending is absurd,

Upon what basis?

with a healthy chunk going to defense related projects that likely aren't going to be all that helpful in the event they actually need to be brought to bear.

Such as and upon what basis?

We could easily halve our defense spending and still have by far the world's most powerful military on top of our impregnable nuclear missile defenses. We currently operate more aircraft carriers than the rest of the world combined. Decommissioning a few isn't the end of the world.

Moving back to reality, our military, land, sea, and air, is in point of fact much too tiny and undermanned to adequately protect the United States and its interests, including its allies overseas (like Taiwan) given the plethora and mix of actual threats that exist in the post bi-polar world.

The massive over extension of troops in Iraq, the exhaustion of material and weapons in the field, and the fact that, at the present time, the United States is only capable of fielding enough men and material to fight one, major conflict in one theater, and presently would have to decide between two major theaters if conflicts erupted simultaneously (if China attacked Taiwan at the same time North Korea attacked South Korea, or combined Arab armies attacked Israel, America would have to choose one major conflict to engage, and would, for all intents, have to let the others go).

Our military is far too small, at the present time, to present a credible conventional deterrent to large scale aggression in different theaters. Its more set up now to deal with one large scale conflict plus combinations of "brush fire" type conflicts on a much smaller scale in sundry places.

The military itself has also become far too over-bureaucratized, legalistic, civilianized in its attitudes, and dangerously politically correct.

Raise the retirement age a few years on entitlements and add in means testing and you've impacted the deficit far more than anything you could ever realistically do with the discretionary piece of the pie.

Social Security and Medicare are finished. No possible tweaking and meddling can save them. Their unfunded mandates utterly dwarf any numbers one wishes to throw around regarding deficits and national debt (Annual spending on Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid is projected to rise from $1.4 trillion to $2.7 trillion over the next decade, on top of Obama's added trillions to his yearly budgets and his deficit spending. Its present unfunded mandates out to mid-century are literally mind numbing).

Privatization of a substantial portion of Social Security and the eventual sunsetting of Medicare for a vibrant, growth oriented free market medical system are the only hope for either. That will return control of medical decisions to consumers of them and return the U.S. medical industry to a market oriented and disciplined system of health care delivery in which medical services are both abundant and affordable due to free market competition and incentives and a net contributor to the national economy, not a net drain upon it.

[_Kevin Graham]

What bcspace does here is purely disigneuous, and reveals once again that he and droopy have no friggin clue what they are talking about. What we should be looking at are the deficits at the end of each fiscal year, not dissecting the spikes that occur within a year. According to my issue of Money magazine, the jump in spending in February is hardly surprising since:

February is traditionally a big deficit month for the government, as Uncle Sam starts writing tax refund checks, he said. And because the recession dampens business profits and wages, refunds spike ... Corporate income tax refunds were higher than usual because of legislation that allows them to apply current losses against prior profits to become eligle for refunds.

So legislation passed by the newly minted Right wing congress, is mostly to blame for the increased spending. It has nothing to do with Obama's "socialistic" policies, which is what people like bcspace and droopy love to imply.

I refuted these clowns on this subject a while back. Heritage, which is droopy's personal touchstone, is a Right Wing think tank responsible for propagating such misinformation. Here is a chart they provided on their website to deceive people into thinking the outrageous deficit is Obama's fault:

But shortly after this deceptive piece of nonsense was published, the Libertarian think, CATO Institute, published a rebuke:

The chart (from Heritage) is based on the assumption that the current administration should be blamed for the 2009 fiscal year. While this makes sense to a casual observer, it is largely untrue. The 2009 fiscal year began October 1, 2008, nearly four months before Obama took office. The budget for the entire fiscal year was largely set in place while Bush was in the White House. So if we update the chart to show the Bush fiscal years in green, we can see that Obama is partly right in claiming that he inherited a mess (though Obama actually deserves a small share of the blame for Bush's last deficit since earlier this year he pushed through both an "omnibus" spending bill and the so-called stimulus bill that increased FY2009 spending).

Check and mate. Heritage is no more trustworthy than droopy. It is an outfit hired to do a job for Right Wing interests, and disinformation campaigning is one of its priorities.

This cuts to the heart of every gripe throw Obama's way. Is he the best President ever? No. But he is not responsible for our deficit. George Bush is. The deficit exploded because of his decision to bail out the banks, his two idiotic wars which cost a trillion dollars along with our dignity, and his tax cuts for the wealthy which cost us another trillion over the course of a decade. Oh, and his silly medical prescription bill which cost us roughly 1/2 trillion over ten years. That is why we're in this hole. That is why the Clinton surplus disappeared.

[_EAllusion]

Means testing and raising the retirement age would salvage both SS and Medicare for as long as actuarial tables can project out if you keep the taxes the same. Or you could modify the programs further and reduce the tax burden.

The US could commit far more military resources to Iraq and Afghanistan if it wanted to, but that would entail shifting where troops are stationed. That should be obvious from the fact that it is only a small fraction of our troops located there.

And maintaining an occupation is different than winning a military offensive. They have different goals and take different resources. There's no nation that could ever invade the US, simply because we have enough nuclear weapons to wipe out every nation on the planet. The only way the US is getting taken out is from decay on the inside. The US has the capacity to project power on any nation that can't deter us with nuclear weapons if it were forced into a truly major conflict. The US intentionally holds back the bulk of its military force because it doesn't have objectives that require its use. We have conventional bombs as powerful as the nuclear weapon dropped on Hiroshima; it just would be ludicrous to use that in Iraq. We are without question the most powerful military in the world. We spend by far the most money on the military. We spend over 4% of the nation's entire GDP on the military. China, the next closest, is roughly half that and their GDP is a little less than half of ours. Our spending rivals nearly the rest of the world combined, and most of the other major spenders are our allies.

There are costs for this that go beyond the 700 billion dollar hit on the budget. It makes the US more apt to use bellicose (and imperial) diplomacy than it otherwise might, for instance.

The graft and waste that exists in the Pentagon isn't some esoteric secret. The $600 military hammer is a joke for a reason. I recommend you simply google GAO reports on it and read about the billions upon billions of dollars that are flushed down the toliet on inefficiencies and equipment of dubious value.

Of course, it's no surprise that you whine about budget deficits while advocating for a significant increase in the second largest source of them. Way to play to Republican stereotypes.

[_Brackite]

So legislation passed by the newly minted Right wing congress, is mostly to blame for the increased spending. It has nothing to do with Obama's "socialistic" policies, which is what people like bcspace and droopy love to imply.

"Right wing" Congress??? Is the current U.S. Congress really that right wing? The Republicans did recently retake control of the U.S. House of Representatives, and now there is a new Speaker of the House, who is a Republican. However, I wouldn't really classify the GOP Speaker of the House, John Boehner, as a right winger. And Plus, The U.S. Senate is still controlled by the Democrats, with Democratic Senator Harry Reid still as Senate Majority leader.
I do agree with a few of the things that Barack Obama has done as President (Such as lifting the Ban on Embryonic Stem Cell reasearch, and signing into law to allow gays to serve openly in the Military), but he is Partially to blame for the current Federal deficit.

Report says Obama budget underestimates deficit:
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld ... 9964.story

[_Kevin Graham]

The government paid $33 billion in refunds to corporations this February, and that is why the deficit was so high. The legislation was signed by Obama this past November but the fact is this was just one of the many Right Wing suggestions he had to compromise on. Kinda like how he had to compromise with them to extend the Bush tax cuts in order to avoid cutting unemployment benefits for the working class. The Right Wing is in the pockets of the wealthy and the corporations.

That is the Right Wing theme song, after all. "Give the corporations more of the money back so they can hire more workers".... right?

Well, that is precisely what Obama did, and the results are a record deficit for the month of February, and the Right Wingers are complaining about it!!!!

So the Left Wing concern became realized in a heartbeat and the Right is too stupid to realize it.

Idiots.

This is precisely why the Left opposes tax cuts for the wealthy and the corporations: it increases the deficit.

Duh! And that is what's happening as we speak, but bcspace is too disingenuous or too ignorant on the matter to understand the hypocrisy. He just scans the Right Wing bloggers and relays their spin on the matter and hopes the deficit will convince the ignorant that it is at a record high, due to some mysterious "socialistic" policy. Bull crap. It is high due to a Right Wing policy of funneling government funds back to corporations.
http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2010/03/ ... looph.html