Calling all big government advocates !!! It's time to do your patriotic duty for your country. As VP Joe Biden would say, "step up and be part of the deal."
As the Christmas season approaches, what better present could all you compassionate statists, leftists, socialists, communists, marxists, maoists, progressives, and liberals give us than to pay down the massive federal debt that all this out-of-control government spending has rained down upon our heads ? Show those mean old conservative grinches that you big government types are standup people who have the courage of your convictions. Send a big fat check to Uncle Sam to brighten the holidays for all us recession stressed Americans. We know you are the good people (because you keep telling us you are), so I'm going to tell you where to send your money. No need to thank me. Remember to dig deep, and give until it hurts. Your country needs you. The poor and oppressed need you, now more than ever.
Reuters has helpfully written an article on this subject. Here is the essential info:
The U.S. Treasury Department accepts gifts, payable to the Bureau of the Public Debt. Just mail them to the attention of Department G, Post Office Box 2188, Parkersburg, West Virginia, 26106-2188. Make a note in the memo section that it is a gift to reduce the debt held by the public.
The info is also contained on the U.S. Treasury website here.
I'll even help you big government lovers calculate the amount you should send in. According to the U.S. debt clock, the federal debt is just short of $12 trillion. Now I have to figure out how many liberals we have. Let's see…..we have about 250 million adults over the age of 18 living in the United States, and about 20% of the people refer to themselves as liberals according to polling……….soooo, that means there are around 50 million caring liberals in our broke country.
Dividing $12 trillion by 50 million liberals comes to…………
If you all would send in a check for $240,000, then voila!, our debt problem is solved.
Man, this is gonna be great !!! You liberals just paid for health care reform and lots more, because by paying off the federal debt, you saved America from paying over $330 billion a year in interest on that debt. We can use that savings to pay for health care reform, AND have lots left over to institute massive tax cuts, thereby revving up the economy !!! God bless you, every one !!! The recession will be over and jobs will be created !!! It'll be morning in America again !!!
Of course, there's always the possibility that you will think only of yourselves instead of helping others, and not send in any money, but no way do I think you good liberal people would be that selfish. I have complete confidence in you. I'm so excited.
Oh, wait a sec. There is one other thing. Even if you pay off the debt, we'll still have that $106 trillion in unfunded entitlement liabilities hanging over our heads. Rats. Still, I know how you good liberals love your entitlements. You'll certainly want to pay for those, so allow me to recalculate the amount of money you need to send in….$106 trillion plus $12 trillion equals $118 trillion. If I divide that by the 50 million liberals in America……….
You all need to send in a check for $2,360,000. Then we'll be good.
I offer my heartfelt thanks on behalf of all Americans. Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to you all.
{ 53 comments… read them below or add one }
The Onion had a better idea on how to pay down the debt.
http://www.theonion.com/content/video/u_s_to_trade_gold_reserves_for
Happy Friday, King.
I love it. I bow to the superior satirical powers of the Onion.
It brought to mind the Reverend's latest 'starve your pets to pay for ObamaCare' post. Except the Rev was serious, poor soul.
King, I am wondering how many of those 50 million American liberals are real progressives. It appears to me that you wrote them a nice letter about how they could help the nation and then finished it by saying something that a good ACLU-type progressive would take affront at. You said the dread words "Merry Christmas" and they much prefer to call the holiday "winter holiday" or something like that so all religious beliefs can be included.
We are using the Onion here and I thought a bit of truth may be needed to get back to reality.
Thank you Rev, for helping pay down this debt. Before you make your check out, please consider throwing in a little extra. Nancy Pelosi just stated that ObamaCare would represent the best Xmas "present" we could give to the American people, should they get it passed by year's end. (I hope she's not referring to the invoice). I know it's a lot to ask for, but where else can we go with unemployment in double-digits, consumer confidence down, and all these other "stingy" people that only care about paying for their mortgages, utilities, and food for their children.
Roy, I know one thing. If the liberals had to pay down the federal debt as I requested, there would suddenly be a whole lot less of them
Alex,
I think Pelosi WAS referring to the invoice, because the ObamaCare "benefits" won't kick in until after Obama's second term in 2013. Pretty convenient, eh ? I wonder how liberals can live with themselves, being that they believe 40,000 die each year due to no health insurance. That's another 120,000 the libs are going to let die by 2013 just for the sake of bureaucracy and politics, by their own measure.
King: I wonder how liberals can live with themselves, being that they believe 40,000 die each year due to no health insurance. That's another 120,000 the libs are going to let die by 2013 just for the sake of bureaucracy and politics, by their own measure.
I guess liberals will have to comfort these individuals, once they become ill, and encourge them to die quickly?
Oh, King's blog and dd20's post gave me the most wonderful idea! Let's combine the two plans, and let liberals give away their property, up to the $2,360,000.oo point. They can keep everything else after they've made that contribution. But, that way, they can clean a lot of the jewelry that's just using up space in their jewelry boxes, maybe lose that property tax bill that's dragging them down, shed that 401K that they don't really need, etc.
These are both brilliant ideas, but combined, they could make a huge difference!
Thanks for the laughs King! Love it! SO true!
No comment.
Because Republicans being in control helped the national deficit, right?
http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2009/jan/22/rahm-emanuel/5-trillion-added-national-debt-under-bush/
As usual, King and the Repubs try to sell Bush's failures as property of Obama. Tell me, what would McCain have done that would've helped the economy AND lowered the debt?
It worries me to see so many people hoping for Obama to fail at the cost of the country's well-being. Of course, these are the same people that buy into this are the same ones who think Obama is a "secret terrorist", so I guess you have to remember who we're talking about…
Steve, do you realize that you're preaching to the choir about Bush and the national debt? King is a libertarian, not a Republican. You might not have seen it, but I'll quote one of King's more memorable statements on the national debt. "When I talk about Obama's huge first year deficit ($1.8 trillion) on this blog, why do liberals always bring up Bush's deficits to excuse Obama's ? (Note to libs – By doing that, you aren't countering my argument. You are only making the argument that Obama is worse than Bush). "
Come on, libs, man up and get out your checkbooks! You're going to be America's salvation, right?
Thanks, Tory. You saved me some typing. Steve must not read this blog very often.
And I got a "no comment" from the Reverend. I must have hit a nerve.
And Steve, this isn't about wanting Obama to fail. People who cite that are engaging in misdirection. This is about wanting to change these disastrous big government policies that will cause the entire country to fail. I could care less where the needed change comes from. If that change comes from Obama, I'm all for it, but based on his first year, it looks very doubtful that it will.
King, afterall old Hopenchange Barack hasn't helped the newly unemployed have any hope and the Senate wants to raise withholding taxes to pay for their new Healthcare take over completely bill so I guess there is little for the employed to hope for.
There has been plenty of change but not for the better, I fear.
Mr. King,
Why don't you ask the people who have profitted so greatly over the last thirty years. You know, the people in the top income tax rate who had their tax rates cut by over 60%, the people fortunate enough to have capital gains taxed at a rate lower than worker's income, the corporations profitting from our "free"trade policies, or the financial sector which invented new pieces of worthless paper to gamble with. Because, this progressive, like most of all but the wealthy, has already paid, and has nothing left to give.
It's always "the other guy's" responsibility with these folks, King.
from the Stars and Stripes story from a previous thread….
Since 2003, the U.S. military has actively recruited Muslims for their language and cultural knowledge. Still, the number serving is small: About 3,500 servicemembers have identified themselves as Muslims on official military paperwork out of an active-duty population of 1.4 million.
………….an active-duty population of 1.4 million.
$.44 of every federal dollar goes to the military
cost of Iraq……estimated to exceed $1,000,000,000,000.
King, tory….you war mongers/war cheerleaders, don't be afraid to pull out your checkbooks.
Actually I think walt is coming close to being on to something, proving the old adage about blind pigs and acorns.
It would be interesting to have a tax system in which the taxpayer decides where his tax money goes–fill out some forms and say all my money should go to defense, or twenty percent goes to the NEA, or highways, etc. Then the clowns in Washington simply disperse the funds according to the taxpayers' decisions, rather than create budgets according to the needs of special interests that keep them in power. Very democratic and it would keep the federal gov't concentrating on the basics.
Yeah, that would work out just peachy.
Why do you hate democracy, Reverend?
"the financial sector which invented new pieces of worthless paper to gamble with"
You mean Al Gore's carbon credits, frank? I think that's a good idea. Al is getting rich off of that scam. Let's ask him to contribute!
Ms. Bug,
Although I don't see Al Gore's name as a bailout recipient, fine. I see this as a class war, not a political one. It seems to me that the wealthy of all political stripes are the beneficiaries of changes to our economic system over the last thirty years, at the expense of fiscal sanity. But neither party is willing to offend their wealthy patrons.
Well, frank, Al Gore is ripping American businesses and taxpayers who fall for his carbon credit baloney off, big time. And, hey, I agree, corporate welfare is really adding to the deficit. Did you read that the Huff Po actually crowned Obama the king of corporate welfare? That's pretty harsh, especially coming from the home team like that. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/04/25/barack-obama-king-of-corp_n_191411.html
Interesting that you are blaming liberals and progressives for the national debt, but not talking about George W. Bush and the Republicans who ran Congress and just about doubled the Federal Debt from 2001 to the end of the Bush presidency in 2008. Oh, but wait, you don't belong to a reality based party so statistics and facts don't really matter to you, do they?
Okay, walt. Republicans will handle the trillion for the Iraq war. That's fair, even though half the Democrats voted for it too. Liberals will handle the $106 trillion in unfunded entitlements.
mrgavel,
I don't belong to any party, and I consider Bush to be a progressive when it comes to fiscal matters. There was certainly nothing conservative about him.
frank says, "Although I don't see Al Gore's name as a bailout recipient"
You never heard of cap and trade ? Gore's a big beneficiary.
Gore, GE and its affiliates such as MSNBC, frank. Welcome to The Machine.
Mr. King,
Between the insane hyperbole which the Republicans use to promote fear among the willingly ignorant, and the Democrats feckless attempts at "reforms" without cost to their (and the Republicans') corporate and wealthy patrons, I've avoided political news for a while now. Politics seems to be the ultimate freak show, these days, so I did not know that cap and trade had been signed into law.
I tried to explain who has and continues to benefit from the political and economic consensus over the last thirty years, but you folks wish to view things as an ideological struggle between two diametrically opposed parties, with different visions of what our country can and should be. The struggle is between the haves and the have nots, with both parties doing their best to placate their contributors while selling themselves as champions of the common folk. The real prize for the politicians is incumbency.
So, if you expect me to defend Gore or any other wealthy Democrat vs. wealthy Republicans, you have the wrong guy (and a problem with reading comprehension). But if you are serious about paying down the debt, the moral imperative would be to target those who profitted from our country's fiscal decline, regardless of party. This isn't a matter of ideology. It is a matter of history. History and the debt show that both parties have failed. Arguing which party caused it and which failed to prevent it is simply a distraction from solving the problem.
p.s.
There is nothing progressive about Bush's fiscal "policies". Describing anything about Bush as "progressive" is not only oxymoronic, but something I take personally as an insult.
Bush was as progressive as that delightful lizard in all those commercials, frank.
larry d.,
Roger that. He was also as obnoxious as the woman in the white jumpsuit with too much makeup and as believable. Thanks for recognizing my attempt at humor and not being angry with me for ripping off your two sentence snark format. I feared that I was risking copyright infringement. Thanks also for Welcome to the Machine. Nothing like Pink Floyd at high volume to clear the cobwebs.
frank,
It appears we're at an impasse, because when somebody calls Bush a fiscal conservative, I take it as a personal insult. During his tenure, Bush increased the size of government by over 1/3rd, increasing spending by a trillion per year. He even started the first new Medicare program in 40 years and increased social spending nearly across the board. If that's conservative, I'm LBJ. I will grant you that Bush was not AS progressive as Barry Soetoro is, but he was a progressive nonetheless. Real conservatives would REDUCE government, not massively increase it.
There is only one way I know of to eliminate the difference between wealthy and poor, and I hope you're not advocating that.
On the debt, I was just thinking that those who propose all the spending (liberals) should be the ones who volunteer to pay. Seems straightforward to me.
If you're going to dabble in humor you'll need to work on it some, frank. You come off as one of those fellows who's been let down by the Progressive Union Machine.
let's think about this for a minute…….first, we are in a very special time. Our economy for all intents and purposes quit working. Now along comes the stimulus. I know, from my experience anyway, that the stimulus is working. The company I work for does mostly work for governments. In the spring, we had hardly any work. Even tho I am retired I still work at this company part-time. This spring, I worked maybe 2 days a month. Now I am working 4 days a week. If there wasn't a stimulus I would have worked 20 days this YEAR.
The company my wife works for closed 2 plants this spring. Because of the stimulus and the energy tax credits the remaining plants are now booked.
Is the company I work for going to put anybody on…..no, the owner is building a cushion and paying down the company's debt. His thought is that since a second stimulus is out of the picture and there is no recovery of the economy in sight things are going to get slow again. Same for the company my wife works for.
How about my buddy who owns the transmission shop. The stimulus hasn't reached him at all. He has to deal with unemployment/underemployment. He also figures the people that are working are cutting back, trying to build a cushion and paying down debt. That's why we are still losing jobs
Is a huge deficit bad….absolutly…..but when the economy is upside down and in the mud at the bottom of the ocean you gotta do something.
All the business people I have talked to say that if they got a tax cut what they would do is pay down debt and use it, not to expand but to try to hold on till the economy recovers
Mr. King,
I neither called Bush a fiscal conservative, nor did I advocate eliminating the difference between the wealthy and poor. But, by the way, the absence of Bush's conservatism doesn't make him a progressive. I believe that is called sophistry.
You say that you would like the people responsible for the spending to pay down the debt. Two problems with that. First, the ones responsible for the spending are our government officials. I know that most in a position to control spending are millionaires, but even their pockets are not deep enough to dent the debt. Second, there hasn't been a progressive administration in the last thirty years, and aside from Clinton, none have even submitted anything close to a balanced budget. If anything, the most fiscally irresponsible times have occurred under presidents who self identified as conservative. So, blaming progressives for the debt is both intellectually and historically dishonest. If the debt were the result of progressives spending on the poor, why have wages of the poor and middle class been at best stagnant, while the income and percentage of the nation's wealth held by those at the top skyrocketted?
The reasons for our debt aren't that difficult to see. Massive tax cuts, coupled with huge increases in military spending, plus foolish deregulation and suicidal trade policies. Separately, they violate all the tenets of fiscal conservatism and common sense. Together, they have been a disaster of epic proportions. So which party is going to undo these things? The "progressive" Democrats or the "conservative" Republicans? We all know the answer is neither.
But if we are talking about who should pay down the debt, the practical and moral thing is for those who benefitted to pay. It makes no difference whether they are Democrat or Republican, progressive or conservative. Their common denominator is wealth.
larry d.,
It's the lack of a Progressive Union Machine which has let me down.
frank says, "the absence of Bush's conservatism doesn't make him a progressive. I believe that is called sophistry."
No, with the supporting examples I pointed out of Bush's big government policies, I believe what I said is called the truth. People just don't recognize what Bush was because of that 'R' next to his name. Bush was the most progressive President since LBJ when it came to government spending, which is the true measure. His tax cuts (taxes incurred but not paid for) were just misdirection. Clinton was much more conservative than Bush (after the HillaryCare debacle), even though his Republican majority Congress forced him to be that way. That did result in some theoretical balanced budgets (even though they weren't really balanced even then), thus proving that even a minimum of actual conservatism works.
Progressives are responsible for the lion's share of federal spending, nearly all the massive unfunded entitlements (Bush the progressive added to that as well), and are therefore responsible for those committments. There is no dishonesty at all in that statement. It's pretty obvious, actually, and it's why I'm not a progressive. If we don't reverse course, we will be ruined. As you say, we don't have the money to pay our current committments, and then here comes Obama, adding even more. Sometimes I think this country has gone completely insane. The day of reckoning is very near.
Mr. King,
My main point is that the ones who profitted from our fiscal insanity are the ones who have the means and the moral obligation to pay down the debt. I don't care if they are Republican, Democrat, liberal, or conservative. It is the wealthy investor class who have profitted from St. Ron's 60% tax cut for the top, while the rest of us had our SS taxes doubled and extended to a year long tax. They also profitted from lowering the capital gains cut on unearned income to 15%. Warren Buffett says his secretary is taxed at a higher rate than he is. With the extra money, they were also able to take advantage of the speculative bubble created by by the deregulation and trade policies put into effect by Bush and Clinton. These are the "boom" times you remember. Starting with Reagan, wages either stagnated or fell, many jobs were created, but because of their low pay were known as McJobs. The joke at the time was Reagan bragging about the number of jobs created and the reply was "yeah, I know, I've got three of them". Clinton was able to restore some fiscal sanity prodded by Paul Volcker at the cost of his social agenda. The phrase "jobless recovery" was born during this period. Of course, even the memory challenged can remember the fiscal disaster and regulatory neglect of the last eight years. For anyone who disputes this history, I would point to the unprecedented gain in income and percentage of the nations wealth by the rich and the ever widening gap between the rich and poor.
But you seem to have moved on to the Bush as a "fiscal progressive" meme. I've never heard of that term, but you seem to equate it with deficit spending. In the past thirty years, the only time I've heard deficit spending proposed as anything other than a temporary expedient, was when the experiment known as the "Laffer curve" was proposed by conservatives and implemented under Reagan. Also, if you knew anything about progressives, you would know that they are more concerned about where the government spends our money than the size of government. Most progressives I know would actually rather shrink defense spending and our world policeman role in order to free up capital for domestic spending than adding to government's size. So your made up term,"fiscal progressive" is nothing but a straw man.
As to the unfunded entitlements you blame on progressives. Social Security is actually overfunded with a huge surplus borrowed by the federal government conveniently masking the true size of deficit spending. The only way Medicare was passed was only by limiting its scope and cost to near ineffectiveness as LBJ tried to answer to question Guns or Butter by saying both. The competition between domestic and defense priorities plagued Nixon, who created the first bubble by eliminating the gold standard, and Carter when the costs of the Vietnam war came due and OPEC exercised its muscle. But by the end of the Cold War, the military-industrial complex that Eisenhower warned of had become so large and impacted so many congressional districts, that any politician trying to cut defense spending would have been committing political suicide. Accordingly defense spending has become as pervasive an entitlement as any proposed by progressives. Spending on weapons is a jobs program, and by providing other nations with our latest technology weapons we constantly need to improve and spend even more on the next generation of weapons. Military service has replaced good paying jobs and is the only way many can get technical training as well as a college education.
I used to consider myself a libertarian conservative during the late 60's. But I have since realized that despite what people espouse or even believe, once in power, they rely on that power to achieve what they want. That's why it is just as unrealistic to expect a conservative to cut the size of government as expecting Obama to willingly cede the powers that Bush claimed. So given the reality of the dynamics of power and politics, the question is not the amount the government spends but where it spends it.
We are in complete agreement about the unsustainability of our situation. The reality is that our country is falling apart. But Eisenhower had it right. Every dollar spent on the military industrial complex is a dollar unavailable for productive domestic purposes. Given that we spend more than the rest of the world combined on defense while being unable to pay for our self appointed role, the solution is obvious.
I can agree with you on some things, but the wealth transfer you refer to wasn't due to tax cuts, which help stimulate the real economy (the private sector). Tax cuts create jobs by leaving more wealth in the real economy. This is pretty much simple mathematics. The wage stagnancy was more due to the offshoring of our manufacturing base, rising health care costs. By osmosis, that left an overly financial-heavy, service-based economy.
And I'm just going to pretend I didn't hear you say SS is overfunded. We've already been through that. SS is beyond broke. It's actually trillions of dollars in debt. Also broke are Medicare, the Post Office, Amtrak, the entire federal government, most state governments, etc. I think the main difference between you and I is that you believe in government much more than I do. In my opinion, most (but not all) of what's wrong with this country is due to an overdependence on the government. Even the current recession can be traced directly to a series of moves by the federal government over the last three decades. It isn't strictly a case of deregulation. It's more of a CHANGE in regulation, from intelligent to political. It started with Carter and never stopped. It still hasn't stopped, though the Obama admin is making some gestures toward it now. I hope they follow through with some smart regulation. We'll see. I'm not confident.
Also, entitlements are still the lion's share of the budget. Defense is second. When the size of government doubles so quickly, it IS the overall size of it that is ruining America. You know, if we were in the situation we were in in the early 20th century, like in 1915, I'd be calling myself a progressive. But things have now swung in the opposite direction. We need to reduce the size of government or our country is not sustainable. If we keep going in the direction we're going, all but a very few of us will ultimately be broke, and will stay that way for a very, very long time. We'll be left begging for scraps from the government table, and the scraps on that table will be ever more diminishing, with ever shrinking wealth from the citizenry to support it. We have mustered up a recipe for certain disaster.
Mr. King,
I apologize for not being clearer. The wealth transfer was not the result of only the tax cuts,it was the result of all of the things I cited. If you want to create jobs through tax cuts, you target the cuts to the poor and middle class which will use them to purchase goods. Reagan's tax cuts were overwhelmingly skewed to the wealthy who have much less need for goods. They therefore, tended to invest the 60%, which caused a speculative bubble in the financial sector. Although the wage stagnancy began during Nixon's years, you are correct that the loss of manufacturing doomed the sector. Where manufacturing used to represent around 25% of GDP and finance 10%, it is now 10% manufacturing, 25% finance.
I say SS is overfunded because it takes in more than it pays out, as it has for well over 25 years. Is there any other definition? Our dispute over SS is whether the surplus accumulated and used to purchase T bills is real. You claim that T bills are worthless, which is belied by the fact that they are still bought and sold. I say that if (and they may one day) they become worthless then not only will SS be insolvent, it will be a small part of the much larger crisis of government default. However, if you still think T bills are worthless, please connect me with anyone giving them away. You were wrong when I gave up trying to convince you and you are still wrong about SS.
Defense spending may be second to other entitlements, but at 44% of expenditures, it is not a very distant second. It is roughly where it was when we faced the very real and existential threat during the Cold War. Where is the existential threat today? The closest is China, and they are being underwritten by our insane trade policies. Our enemy du jour, Al Qaeda, was able to penetrate our Trillion dollar defense system with 8 men armed with boxcutters who even trained to carry out their mission in this country. Despite our expenditures, we cannot be sure of who or what enters our country and obvious targets for terror remain unprotected. One might ask if there were any social program that spent so much and failed so miserably, but the truth is that the entitlement called Defense has little to do with the defense of the country and its people. That would not require the crippling amounts we spend. The major portion of what we call defense expenditures is really better understood as empire maintenance. History shows that these costs eventually become untenable, causing the downfall of all empires. It is happening to us.
it's getting to be Thanksgiving and the smell of freshly baked pies are in the air……..check this one out
a link would be helpful……..http://www.warresisters.org/pages/piechart.htm
Defense spending is 20-25% of federal spending, not 44%..
http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/year2009_0.html
Entitlements are 60-70%, to be over 90% by the end of the decade. By 2030, entitlements will consume the entire budget. I guess we could just double taxes, but then y'all wouldn't be very happy with the pitiful job and low wages that you were being paid as a result.
And frank, you can't really cut income taxes for lower income workers. They already don't pay any. They get money back from the government in the form of earned income credit. Lots of those wealthy earners whose tax cuts you detest are small business owners who own sub-chapter S corporations. THOSE are the tax cuts that create jobs, along with investors, which is why capital gains taxes SHOULD be low.
Btw, under Bush, middle class workers paid less taxes than they did under Clinton, so Bush did what you prescribed.
the title of the chart you linked to………United States Federal State and Local Government Spending
sure, if you include state and local spending the 20%-25% for defense spending is correct
Mr. King,
The Defense Dept. accounts for only about 75% of our defense spending. Other departments, such as NASA, CIA, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, etc. have a portion of their budgets dedicated to the defense of our country. So I accept walt's 44% figure as the more accurate one.
Although I don't agree with the mechanism of the earned income tax credit, it is in reality a negative income tax and could be increased.
I agree that taxes on small businesses should be as light as possible, but if their owners extract a salary which puts them in higher income tax brackets, then I see no reason to cut their personal tax rates.
Bush also championed the Do Not Call List. So, although I could compare it to Reagan's middle class tax cut which his budget director, David Stockman described as the Trojan Horse for the tax cut on the top bracket, I'll just count it as 2 things that Bush did right.
this from the warresisters.org that would help explain King's 20%-25% figure……
Federal Funds vs. Unified Budget. WRL uses "federal funds" rather than the "unified budget" figures that the government prefers. Federal funds exclude trust fund money (e.g., social security), which is raised separately (e.g., the FICA and Medicare deductions in paychecks) and is specifically ear-marked for particular programs. By combining trust funds with federal funds, the percentage of spending on the military appears smaller, a deceptive practice first used by the government in the late 1960s as the Vietnam War became more and more unpopular.
frank,
With a sub-chapter S corp, a businesses entire net profit is treated as personal income, whether the owner took a dime in salary or not. S corps file their taxes using the individual income tax code. If we jacked up marginal tax rates for high earners, as almost every liberal dunce advocates, the less opportunity for expansion and job creation the S corps would have. Such a move would be a burden on small businesses, the primary job creators in this country.
walt,
The only problem with the way warresisters.org fudges their figures is that SS and Medicare are NOT separated from the general fund. For example, there is no SS Trust Fund full of money that can be drawn upon to pay future retirees, because the government already spent that money. What is in the mythical SS Trust Fund are IOU's in the form of T-bonds, that are nothing more than claims on future taxpayers.