In Defense of Obama on Defense
Reader Comments (3)
Michael
Five trillion dollars in new debt (in less than a term).
##I'm really tempted to leave it at that.##
But let's expand a bit. That's $16,043.39 (in NEW debt) for every baby. More new debt racked up by Obama in 39 months than racked up in the first 219 years of the Republic.
The US federal budget deficit, in its current form, is mathematically impossible to balance. You could fire every single government employee, shut down the entire US military, stop all foreign aid, etc. and the US government would still have to borrow money every year just to pay for the entitlement programs, and interest on the debt.
In the last 50 years, even when adjusted for population growth and inflation, entitlement spending in the US has grown by 717%.
This is all fine and good as long as the Chinese (and others) keep financing it. But when they stop - and unless something changes, they will do eventually, when they begin to see it as unsustainable, or they see America printing money to finance it all, and thus creaming the value of their investments - the resulting financial cataclysm will make 2007-2012 look like a hiccup. And it won't just be America that's McScrewed with Cheese - it will be the whole world.
This crisis should really be the only thing the candidates are talking about at this point.
That's pretty much my objection: (much worse than) bankrupting the country.
Five trillion dollars in new debt (in less than a term).
##I'm really tempted to leave it at that.##
But let's expand a bit. That's $16,043.39 (in NEW debt) for every baby. More new debt racked up by Obama in 39 months than racked up in the first 219 years of the Republic.
The US federal budget deficit, in its current form, is mathematically impossible to balance. You could fire every single government employee, shut down the entire US military, stop all foreign aid, etc. and the US government would still have to borrow money every year just to pay for the entitlement programs, and interest on the debt.
In the last 50 years, even when adjusted for population growth and inflation, entitlement spending in the US has grown by 717%.
This is all fine and good as long as the Chinese (and others) keep financing it. But when they stop - and unless something changes, they will do eventually, when they begin to see it as unsustainable, or they see America printing money to finance it all, and thus creaming the value of their investments - the resulting financial cataclysm will make 2007-2012 look like a hiccup. And it won't just be America that's McScrewed with Cheese - it will be the whole world.
This crisis should really be the only thing the candidates are talking about at this point.
That's pretty much my objection: (much worse than) bankrupting the country.
Michael
Incidentally, David, it's been four years - isn't it time to let BDS go and, dare I say it, move on? ;^)
(my personal experience of BDS)
Incidentally, David, it's been four years - isn't it time to let BDS go and, dare I say it, move on? ;^)
(my personal experience of BDS)
sound off
Well, I'm glad you realize you've misjudged Obama on defense.
I think you have misjudged him on economic policies as well--but I'm not sure what your objections to his policies are. If the problem is with the bail-outs, current independent projections show the US Treasury making $150 billion profit on the bail-outs over the next 10 years; Citi and AIG alone have already delivered nearly $30 billion.
George W Bush did a magnificent job of taking a major budget surplus and turning it into an utter economic disaster...and then bestowing that legacy on Obama. Bush also did an extraordinary job of doing exactly everything wrong in Iraq. It's not easy to follow the most incompetent President in US history!