EAllusion wrote: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.