State of the nation? Broke

[Jayco1]

State of the nation? Broke

When President Bush gave his State of the Union address Tuesday night; he called for a balanced budget. Too bad that nobody's using an honest definition of "balanced." What you can count on is that the deficit is disastrous and the debt is piling up.

http://articles.moneycentral.msn.com...tionBroke.aspx


Jim Jubak

if you or I managed our money the way that U.S. government manages our money, we'd be headed for bankruptcy.

Imagine if someone you knew:

Took on a mountain of debt -- to buy a house, say -- at a floating interest rate and never bothered to ask if the future payments would be affordable. That's exactly what the U.S. government does.
Used his annual bonus to make the down payment on a Porsche Cayenne and never worried that his current spending had created a huge future obligation for years of high payouts. That's exactly what the U.S. government does.
Ran up big credit card debt because the money he was saving for his kids' college education easily balanced out that debt. That's exactly what the U.S. government does.

Just kept on spending not only every bit of the monthly paycheck but every dollar that credit card companies and banks would lend, despite knowing that he would have to pay for college and retirement one day. That's exactly what the U.S. government does.

And then, of course, just like most deadbeats, what does the government do after mismanaging our money? It lies about how bad the problem is and clings to the hope that money will fall from the trees to bail it out.

Truth and the budget numbers

I hope you remembered this when you listened to the Jan. 23 State of the Union address from President Bush and the rejoinder from the leading lights of the Democratic Party. I didn't hear an honest number out of anyone's mouth. And it's not as if the White House and members of Congress didn't know better.

David Walker, comptroller general, delivered a primer on how to tell the truth on the U.S. budget in testimony delivered to the Senate on Jan. 11.
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http://www.macleans.ca/topstories/wo..._101541_101541

From Macleans Canada
Record deficits, colossal debt and no clear plan for digging itself out. If the U.S. sinks, it will take Canada down with it.
By Steve Maich

David Walker can see the future, and it scares the **** out of him.
That wouldn't be terribly unusual if he were one of the thousands of lobbyists, legislators and activists crawling all over Washington on any given day, pontificating about the urgency of their pet issues. There is a thriving industry here built on pushing policy prescriptions for every ailment, real or imagined. But Walker isn't a lobbyist or an activist, he's an accountant. His title is comptroller general of the United States, which makes him the head auditor for the most important and powerful government in the world. And he's desperately trying to get a message out to anyone who'll listen: the United States of America's public finances are a shambles. They're getting rapidly worse. And if something major isn't done soon to solve the country's intractable budget problems, the world will face an economic shakeup unlike anything ever seen before.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

It does not require a majority to prevail, but rather a vigilant and tireless minority keen to set brush fires in people's minds." - Samuel Adams

[Jayco1]

State of the nation? Broke

When President Bush gave his State of the Union address Tuesday night; he called for a balanced budget. Too bad that nobody's using an honest definition of "balanced." What you can count on is that the deficit is disastrous and the debt is piling up.

http://articles.moneycentral.msn.com...tionBroke.aspx


Jim Jubak

if you or I managed our money the way that U.S. government manages our money, we'd be headed for bankruptcy.

Imagine if someone you knew:

Took on a mountain of debt -- to buy a house, say -- at a floating interest rate and never bothered to ask if the future payments would be affordable. That's exactly what the U.S. government does.
Used his annual bonus to make the down payment on a Porsche Cayenne and never worried that his current spending had created a huge future obligation for years of high payouts. That's exactly what the U.S. government does.
Ran up big credit card debt because the money he was saving for his kids' college education easily balanced out that debt. That's exactly what the U.S. government does.

Just kept on spending not only every bit of the monthly paycheck but every dollar that credit card companies and banks would lend, despite knowing that he would have to pay for college and retirement one day. That's exactly what the U.S. government does.

And then, of course, just like most deadbeats, what does the government do after mismanaging our money? It lies about how bad the problem is and clings to the hope that money will fall from the trees to bail it out.

Truth and the budget numbers

I hope you remembered this when you listened to the Jan. 23 State of the Union address from President Bush and the rejoinder from the leading lights of the Democratic Party. I didn't hear an honest number out of anyone's mouth. And it's not as if the White House and members of Congress didn't know better.

David Walker, comptroller general, delivered a primer on how to tell the truth on the U.S. budget in testimony delivered to the Senate on Jan. 11.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

http://www.macleans.ca/topstories/wo..._101541_101541

From Macleans Canada
Record deficits, colossal debt and no clear plan for digging itself out. If the U.S. sinks, it will take Canada down with it.
By Steve Maich

David Walker can see the future, and it scares the **** out of him.
That wouldn't be terribly unusual if he were one of the thousands of lobbyists, legislators and activists crawling all over Washington on any given day, pontificating about the urgency of their pet issues. There is a thriving industry here built on pushing policy prescriptions for every ailment, real or imagined. But Walker isn't a lobbyist or an activist, he's an accountant. His title is comptroller general of the United States, which makes him the head auditor for the most important and powerful government in the world. And he's desperately trying to get a message out to anyone who'll listen: the United States of America's public finances are a shambles. They're getting rapidly worse. And if something major isn't done soon to solve the country's intractable budget problems, the world will face an economic shakeup unlike anything ever seen before.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

It does not require a majority to prevail, but rather a vigilant and tireless minority keen to set brush fires in people's minds." - Samuel Adams

[apackof2]

I hear ya

However NOTHING will happen until tax payers get sick and tired of looking at all the taxes taken out of their pay check and become pro-active.

Until then, government HAS the money to spend.

Actually it amazes me that there isn't a public outcry over the taxes?

A "Tax & Spend Revolution"
"We're mad as h**l and we're not gonna take it anymore!

There is an old story goes that if you place a frog in boiling water, he'll jump out. But if you place him in room-temperature liquid, slowly raising the heat level, he'll remain until he, you should excuse the expression, croaks. The process being so slow and insidious that the frog doesn't jump out before it is cooked. ...Like that poor frog, we taxpayers have adjusted ourselves to the same desensitizing system of tax and spend

Maybe if we moved the voting date to April 16th from Nov. 2nd!


<BLOCKQUOTE class="ip-ubbcode-quote"><div class="ip-ubbcode-quote-title">quote:</div><div class="ip-ubbcode-quote-content">Originally posted by Jayco1:
State of the nation? Broke

When President Bush gave his State of the Union address Tuesday night; he called for a balanced budget. Too bad that nobody's using an honest definition of "balanced." What you can count on is that the deficit is disastrous and the debt is piling up.

http://articles.moneycentral.msn.com...tionBroke.aspx


Jim Jubak

if you or I managed our money the way that U.S. government manages our money, we'd be headed for bankruptcy.

Imagine if someone you knew:

Took on a mountain of debt -- to buy a house, say -- at a floating interest rate and never bothered to ask if the future payments would be affordable. That's exactly what the U.S. government does.
Used his annual bonus to make the down payment on a Porsche Cayenne and never worried that his current spending had created a huge future obligation for years of high payouts. That's exactly what the U.S. government does.
Ran up big credit card debt because the money he was saving for his kids' college education easily balanced out that debt. That's exactly what the U.S. government does.

Just kept on spending not only every bit of the monthly paycheck but every dollar that credit card companies and banks would lend, despite knowing that he would have to pay for college and retirement one day. That's exactly what the U.S. government does.

And then, of course, just like most deadbeats, what does the government do after mismanaging our money? It lies about how bad the problem is and clings to the hope that money will fall from the trees to bail it out.

Truth and the budget numbers

I hope you remembered this when you listened to the Jan. 23 State of the Union address from President Bush and the rejoinder from the leading lights of the Democratic Party. I didn't hear an honest number out of anyone's mouth. And it's not as if the White House and members of Congress didn't know better.

David Walker, comptroller general, delivered a primer on how to tell the truth on the U.S. budget in testimony delivered to the Senate on Jan. 11.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

http://www.macleans.ca/topstories/wo..._101541_101541

From Macleans Canada
Record deficits, colossal debt and no clear plan for digging itself out. If the U.S. sinks, it will take Canada down with it.
By Steve Maich

David Walker can see the future, and it scares the **** out of him.
That wouldn't be terribly unusual if he were one of the thousands of lobbyists, legislators and activists crawling all over Washington on any given day, pontificating about the urgency of their pet issues. There is a thriving industry here built on pushing policy prescriptions for every ailment, real or imagined. But Walker isn't a lobbyist or an activist, he's an accountant. His title is comptroller general of the United States, which makes him the head auditor for the most important and powerful government in the world. And he's desperately trying to get a message out to anyone who'll listen: the United States of America's public finances are a shambles. They're getting rapidly worse. And if something major isn't done soon to solve the country's intractable budget problems, the world will face an economic shakeup unlike anything ever seen before.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

It does not require a majority to prevail, but rather a vigilant and tireless minority keen to set brush fires in people's minds." - Samuel Adams </div></BLOCKQUOTE>

[Vegascpl]

This is an interesting post. What I'm most amazed about is that few people appear to be even remotely concerned looking at the number of responses. Politically I'm pretty much in the middle somewhere but I've always thought of a balanced budget being a conservative ideal. That's because all you hear at election time is "Tax and Spend Liberals."� If you go back in history, however, Republican administrations always had higher deficits than Democratic administrations. So it doesn't tend to make any sense, but it is a catchy phrase.

When Clinton came into office a balanced budget was a top priority for the American people. However, when Clinton balanced the budget and had a huge surplus we were told by Republican leaders that borrowing money was a good thing for the economy. Well if borrowing money is a good thing for the economy then Bush must be amazing because he is borrowing more money than any other previous president.

This is a very serious problem that someone is going to have to pay for. We can't continue to borrow hundreds of billions of dollars to pay for things like our favorite wars and not pay it back sometime in the future. The financial sacrifice for the Bush's Iraq war will be paid by our grandchildren, great grandchildren, and their children. Reducing taxes won't ever be possible as just the payment on our debt will be much greater that our current taxes. We are living off the income of our future generations. Doesn't that feel good!

Michael
2005 Dutch Star 40's 4 slide
2005 BMW K1200LT on lift
2006 Ford Escape Hybrid

[Lorna]

And just who do you think wants to give up their Government paid for extras??? Look at all the government subsidies and government paid for programs... the money has to come from somewhere.

Personally, I think all the politicians should be paid minimum wage. When you add in the freebies they get, that should be enough. And the governments, from local to national, should get back to the business of running the government and stay out of running businesses, child-rearing and various other non-government jobs.

[jfb]

Here's a couple of snippets to chew on: China just scored a hit on one of their satellites with a missle (how did they get that tecnology) and; they hold $700,000,000,000 of US credits ( $'s, treasury bills, etc) due to our inbalance of payments

[apackof2]

I am amzed that you manged to turn the post into a partisan post complete with revisonist history! So to set the record straight:

Let us establish one point definitively: Bill Clinton didn't balance the budget. Yes, he was there when it happened. But the record shows that was about the extent of his contribution.

And 1993 -- the year of the giant Clinton tax hike -- was not the turning point in the deficit wars, either. In fact, in 1995, two years after that tax hike, the budget baseline submitted by the president's own Office of Management and Budget and the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office predicted $200 billion deficits for as far as the eye could see. The figure shows the Clinton deficit baseline. What changed this bleak outlook?

Newt Gingrich and company -- for all their faults -- have received virtually no credit for balancing the budget.

Yet today's surplus is, in part, a byproduct of the GOP's single-minded crusade to end 30 years of red ink.

Arguably, Gingrich's finest hour as Speaker came in March 1995 when he rallied the entire Republican House caucus behind the idea of eliminating the deficit within seven years.
Skeptics said it could not be done in seven years. The GOP did it in four.

Now let us contrast this with the Clinton fiscal record. Recall that it was the Clinton White House that fought Republicans every inch of the way in balancing the budget in 1995. When Republicans proposed their own balanced-budget plan, the White House waged a shameless Mediscare campaign to torpedo the plan -- a campaign that the Washington Post slammed as "pure demagoguery."

It was Bill Clinton who, during the big budget fight in 1995, had to submit not one, not two, but five budgets until he begrudgingly matched the GOP's balanced-budget plan. In fact, during the height of the budget wars in the summer of 1995, the Clinton administration admitted that "balancing the budget is not one of our top priorities."

And lest we forget, it was Bill Clinton and his wife who tried to engineer a federal takeover of the health care system -- a plan that would have sent the government's finances into the stratosphere.

Tom Delay was right: for Clinton to take credit for the balanced budget is like Chicago Cubs pitcher Steve Trachsel taking credit for delivering the pitch to Mark McGuire that he hit out of the park for his 62nd home run.

The figure shows that the actual cumulative budget deficit from 1994 to 1998 was almost $600 billion below the Clintonomics baseline.

Part of the explanation for the balanced budget is that Republicans in Congress had the common sense to reject the most reckless features of Clintonomics.

http://www.cato.org/dailys/10-08-98.html

<BLOCKQUOTE class="ip-ubbcode-quote"><div class="ip-ubbcode-quote-title">quote:</div><div class="ip-ubbcode-quote-content">Originally posted by Vegascpl:
This is an interesting post. What I'm most amazed about is that few people appear to be even remotely concerned looking at the number of responses. Politically I'm pretty much in the middle somewhere but I've always thought of a balanced budget being a conservative ideal. That's because all you hear at election time is "Tax and Spend Liberals."� If you go back in history, however, Republican administrations always had higher deficits than Democratic administrations. So it doesn't tend to make any sense, but it is a catchy phrase.

When Clinton came into office a balanced budget was a top priority for the American people. However, when Clinton balanced the budget and had a huge surplus we were told by Republican leaders that borrowing money was a good thing for the economy. Well if borrowing money is a good thing for the economy then Bush must be amazing because he is borrowing more money than any other previous president.

This is a very serious problem that someone is going to have to pay for. We can't continue to borrow hundreds of billions of dollars to pay for things like our favorite wars and not pay it back sometime in the future. The financial sacrifice for the Bush's Iraq war will be paid by our grandchildren, great grandchildren, and their children. Reducing taxes won't ever be possible as just the payment on our debt will be much greater that our current taxes. We are living off the income of our future generations. Doesn't that feel good!

Michael
2005 Dutch Star 40's 4 slide
2005 BMW K1200LT on lift
2006 Ford Escape Hybrid </div></BLOCKQUOTE>

[apackof2]

AMEN Lorna!


<BLOCKQUOTE class="ip-ubbcode-quote"><div class="ip-ubbcode-quote-title">quote:</div><div class="ip-ubbcode-quote-content">Originally posted by Lorna:
And just who do you think wants to give up their Government paid for extras??? Look at all the government subsidies and government paid for programs... the money has to come from somewhere.

Personally, I think all the politicians should be paid minimum wage. When you add in the freebies they get, that should be enough. And the governments, from local to national, should get back to the business of running the government and stay out of running businesses, child-rearing and various other non-government jobs. </div></BLOCKQUOTE>

[apackof2]

As for the war, pro-actively protecting our country from another 9-11 and ousting a murderous dictator hostile to freedom and the USA cannot be measured in dollars.

However it is measured by my heroes, the American soldier of an ALL VOLUNTEER Army who bravely fight for the rest of us

FREEDOM ISN'T FREE


"With the distance of time, we find ourselves debating the causes of conflict and the course we have followed. Such debates are essential when a great democracy faces great questions. Yet one question has surely been settled – that to win the war on terror we must take the fight to the enemy.

This war is more than a clash of arms – it is a decisive ideological struggle, and the security of our Nation is in the balance. To prevail, we must remove the conditions that inspire blind hatred, and drove 19 men to get onto airplanes and come to kill us. What every terrorist fears most is human freedom – societies where men and women make their own choices, answer to their own conscience, and live by their hopes instead of their resentments. Free people are not drawn to violent and malignant ideologies – and most will choose a better way when they are given a chance. So we advance our own security interests by helping moderates, reformers, and brave voices for democracy.

Our enemies are quite explicit about their intentions. They want to overthrow moderate governments, and establish safe havens from which to plan and carry out new attacks on our country. By killing and terrorizing Americans, they want to force our country to retreat from the world and abandon the cause of liberty. They would then be free to impose their will and spread their totalitarian ideology. Listen to this warning from the late terrorist Zarqawi: "We will sacrifice our blood and bodies to put an end to your dreams, and what is coming is even worse."� And Osama bin Laden declared: "Death is better than living on this Earth with the unbelievers among us."�

In a time of testing, we cannot find security by abandoning our commitments and retreating within our borders. If we were to leave these vicious attackers alone, they would not leave us alone. They would simply move the battlefield to our own shores. There is no peace in retreat.

Our success in this war is often measured by the things that did not happen.

We cannot know the full extent of the attacks that we and our allies have prevented – but here is some of what we do know: We stopped an al Qaeda plot to fly a hijacked airplane into the tallest building on the West Coast. We broke up a Southeast Asian terrorist cell grooming operatives for attacks inside the United States. We uncovered an al Qaeda cell developing anthrax to be used in attacks against America. And just last August, British authorities uncovered a plot to blow up passenger planes bound for America over the Atlantic Ocean.

For each life saved, we owe a debt of gratitude to the brave public servants who devote their lives to finding the terrorists and stopping them."

State of the Union Address-1/2007

GOD BLESS AMERICA
GOB BLESS OUR TROOPS



This is a very serious problem that someone is going to have to pay for. We can't continue to borrow hundreds of billions of dollars to pay for things like our favorite wars and not pay it back sometime in the future. The financial sacrifice for the Bush's Iraq war will be paid by our grandchildren, great grandchildren, and their children. Reducing taxes won't ever be possible as just the payment on our debt will be much greater that our current taxes. We are living off the income of our future generations. Doesn't that feel good!

Michael
2005 Dutch Star 40's 4 slide
2005 BMW K1200LT on lift
2006 Ford Escape Hybrid[/QUOTE]