On Mon, 25 Apr 2011 17:25:44 -0400, wrote:

On Mon, 25 Apr 2011 13:22:41 -0700, wrote:

On Mon, 25 Apr 2011 15:35:32 -0400, wrote:

On Mon, 25 Apr 2011 10:59:15 -0700, wrote:


Do you even have a clue how much of our debt is in short term notes
that roll over in months not years so the interest rate can change in
a flash. You keep talking about "long term" and "years down the road"
but we could get clobbered in a matter of months.

There's no evidence to support that fear.

One of these days you will hear a democrat say it and then it will
have been obvious all along to you.
The fact remains that there are a lot of these short term notes being
rolled over into long term paper. In a way that is good because you do
not have to keep going to the well for the money but the bad news is
the interest rate is about 10 times as high, being over 3% instead of
the 0.3% they pay on short term paper.
Right now our average interest rate on the debt is around 1.5%
($206.7 Billion a year)

Right now, we're trying to recover from a devastating financial
calamity. Right now is not the time to try and fix a long-term
problem.

We are not actually recovering anything if we are creating an
unsustainable debt.

Every time you buy a house and get a mortgage, you create an
unsustainable debt, since you have no absolute guaranty that you'll
have a job long enough to pay off the mortgage.

It is not an unsustainable debt if you are generating enough revenue
to pay down the principle. We are not even stopping the growth of the
principle.

The key word of course is "if." Our debt may be "unsustainable" if you
assume the very worst case scenario. In all other scenarios, the
problem can be (and actually is being) address, even though you want
to believe otherwise.

I only assume the projected scenario in the best case examples given
by the people who have plans they can't even get passed. (like Simpson
Bowles or Ryan)

There is only one budget proposal out there that has the debt coming
down by 2021 but it gores so many oxen I doubt you could even get most
of the democrats to support it and you wouldn't get any republicans.

http://grijalva.house.gov/uploads/Th...2%20Budget.pdf


How about we start with subsidies and the military budget.

The Ryan proposal calls for $165B cuts in Medicare ... basically
eliminating it.

That is less than half of what they spend but I see your point.
I doubt anyone is really taking his idea seriously but I applaud the
bravery to even open the dialog. We do need to find a way to get a
handle on costs.

Less than half of what Medicare spends? So what. It's the meat of it,
as you know.

Ryan is NO HERO. He's a pandering jerk who wants to deny people basic
healthcare cover for the sake of big business and his own political
aspirations. He did "open the dialog" at all.


The big oil subsidies, tax cuts for millionaires (Bush's cuts), tax
breaks for corps that create jobs overseas (lost revenue) is about
$170B.

OK


Let's end those subsidies.

Then there's the military budget. How about not $1 more, as proposed
in the NYT op-ed piece..

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/20/opinion/20wed1.html

That is the hardest nut to crack, maybe even harder than entitlements,
simply because virtually every state gets pork from DoD.
I agree we build far too many unneeded weapons platforms.
Unfortunately, they all represent high tech jobs for someone.

As said, all that has to happen is not spend more. Spending the same
is a good start.

I liked Ed Rendell on one of the talking head shows proposing that we
take all of that effort and declare war on our aging infrastructure
with the same zeal we used to counter the various enemies, real or
imagined.
The other thing in the CPC budget Harry and I have been talking about
for years is defunding the Iraq and Afghanistan crusades.

The right wing is staunchly opposed to spending money on
infrastructure, unless of course, it's in their district.

The Iraq war is winding down, as you know. There's no need to pull the
rug out from a largely successful campaign to get us out without allow
the country to collapse. The Afg. war is in the make or break stage.
While no war monger, I think it's worth following Patreaus' advice for
now.

There are a reported 150 suspected (mostly low level) terrorists in
Afghanistan and we have 150,000 people looking for them.
That is projected to be $1.8 trillion in 10 years.
Instead we are spending another couple hundred billion on other
adventures in the middle east and we are not even sure who the people
we are putting in power will turn out to be.

A couple of hundred billion or things other than the Iraq/Afg wars?
Huh? Where are you getting that number?