A Fun Pak!
Posted on 04/09/2011 6:52:12 AM PDT by KeyLargo
“Oh, for the good old days when we had the House, the Senate, and the Presidency and we were cutting spending left and right. We were unstoppable in those heady days... /s”
Funny post, but how true it is. Pubbies talk a good game but always fail to score any runs when they have the chance.
“Best thing that could happen now is if the gov’t steps on the gas peddle to drive this country into complete bankruptcy ... a complete financial collapse which will take decades to get out of. Maybe future generations will look back and make sure this never happens again.”
I’ve thought the same thing myself. Unfortunately, all the logic in the world does not seem to work; it usually takes a major life altering event to wake people up. We are not far away from that event IMO.
Our founders set up a system of government where EITHER the House, Senate, Executive or Supreme Court could stop something. None of them can force additional spending.
This was no victory for conservatives, and Boehner is no leader. The government would be shut down this morning if Michele Bachman were Speaker...and the sun would have still come up this morning. Now Harry Reid and the Worst President Ever know that they can get Boehner to collapse like a cheap umbrella.
A sore anal passage!
“This was no victory for conservatives”
In a very real sense, the Democrats were rewarded for their tactical decision of refusing to pass a budget for 2011. They avoided having to reveal the extent of their massive spending binge and yet wound up with nearly all of the money without having to vote on it. Talk about having your cake and eating it too. You’re right — this was no victory for conservatives.
If they wouldn’t hold fast for $60B how are they going to manage the $600B per year, that it will take to turn the problem around.
I see this as a watershed event. It’s all downhill from here. Straight into the sewer.
And we only have one of those. If we dont pass a budget (that should have already been passed) this week, because the Senate and Pres dont like it, what makes anyone think they will like it next week? Can we wait until we get either the Senate or Presidency to pass a budget? Can we have weekly CR’s, that get bemoaned by conservatives?
There are political goals and there is reality. We are only half of the legislature and half of the judicial. As much as we want to, we dont control the debate. Its pretty split right now.
Social security is still taking in more than it puts out, IIRC, if only barely. Ditto Medicare. Defense has already been cut, especially compared to the levels of the 50s and 60s, both as a fraction of the federal budget, and as a fraction of the overall economy. All those Air Force Wings, Navy Carrier Groups and Army Divisions that no longer exist are testament to that.
In 1962 defense spending was 9.3% of GDP, in 2009 it was 4.6% and had been as low as 3.0% in 2002. (The increase being due to the wars and the faltering economy resulting in a lower GDP than it otherwise would have been). Meanwhile entitlements have gone from 6.1% of GDP in ‘62 to 16.1% in ‘09. Total federal outlays were 18.8% in ‘62 24.7% in ‘09.
It had been 20.9% in ‘08. ‘09 being the first budget from the all Democrat House Senate and White House. Entitlements alone when from 12.4% to 16.1% in ‘08 to ‘09 while defense went from 4.2% to 4.6%.
Total numbers of active duty personnel are little changed from ‘04, but the Army and Marines have increased while Navy and Air Force have decreased. When we complete the pull out from Iraq and later Afghanistan, the Army and Marines will be cut, but the others will not be be increased. In fact I’d expect AF and Navy numbers to be cut some more as well, since many are serving in “non traditional” roles as convoy security, base defense, and so forth, rather than keeping ‘em flying or sailing.
Total number of AF aircraft, including Guard and Reserve has shrunk from 6,073 in ‘04 to 5,544 in ‘09. The number of ICBMs has shrunk from 523 in ‘03 to 450 in ‘09. That included all the Peacekeepers and 10% of the 500 Minuteman III’s we had in ‘03.
So, as with cities and other localities threatening to cut fire and police, the feds use threats of Military and SS cuts to avoid cutting things not authorized by the Constitution, but which help keep said politicians in power. That’s not to say that SS is not huge future problem, or that it is Constitutionally authorized. But in fact it’s in effect been masking overspending in other areas, since it’s been taking in more than it puts out and the surplus has been replaced by IOUs from the treasury.
Yes there is a reality but it is not a political one.
Bill Gross, who runs the world’s biggest bond fund at Pacific Investment Management Co., said Treasuries “have little value” because of the growing U.S. debt burden.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-03-30/bill-gross-says-u-s-is-out-greeking-the-greeks-on-debt-1-.html
Republicans (over conservatives) won’t be able to avoid the blame when (not if) we have a debt crisis.
SS went in the red last year and will be even more so this year due to Obama’s payroll tax cut.
Defense spending is up 32% since 2008 and 55% since 2006.
We are in deep doo doo but I’m not worried that the Democrats don’t admit it. I am worried that the Republicans won’t admit how much spending *must* be cut.
I agree that the military should be the last of those to have cuts. We should take on Medicare and SSI first. But each of them are close to 20% of the budget. And each have waste. We need to be willing to cut some of the military budget in order to actual reign in federal spending.
If we took out 1/3 of Medicare and SSI, and 15% of defense, we would save 500 billion. I think that should be the plan for the next cycle (2012), assuming we have at least the House and either Senate or Pres.
And then, we should have a goal (as a movement) within the next 20 years to cut Medicare down to 1/2 and private half of the remaining SSI, while cutting defense another 10%. This would cut an extra 350 billion. If we can get 850 billion cut within the next 25 years, I think that is the plan to work towards. That would result in 1/2 current Medicare, 1/3 of current SSI, and 3/4 of current Defense. Hopefully we will be out of Irag and Afghanistan by then, so that will be a large chunk of defense. And I think it will be palatable to cut Medicare and SSI with some moderates if we take some of the top off Defense as well.
We already have. It's the prime function of government. We should not further endanger the country to preserve a little more of the unconstitutional spending. But yes, we might be able to cut some of the money, most of of it, we've been spending on day to day operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. But we've already eaten some of the seed corn to fund those efforts, so we need at least some of that "savings" to go into R&D. Or at least procurement, because many systems are getting old, and need replacement with the latest designs, even if we don't ramp up R&D at all. The supplies of expendables have been drawn down as well. Including a bunch of cruise missile pissed away in Libya.
A Fun Pak!
If as you say "Liberals... have taken over the churches, schools, universities, the newspapers, public radio, television, virtually all of our eleemosynary institutions, federal and state bureaucracies, unions, and generally everything politically correct" how is it possible for conservatives to win? Is conservatism just a futile rearguard action in the face of overwhelming odds? If America is center right what sustains it? Homeschooling? I'm hard pressed to answer the last question. I agree that "The problem is not in the stars, Horatio, but in ourselves."
Part of the problem is the university where "there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so" or where relativism is used as a convenient tool to scoop out the capitalistic residue in student's soul and have it replaced with socialist thought and activism. The university is like the magic mountain where the Pied Piper, Mr. Obama, keeps the children (the potential DemocRats) that he has stolen the village of Hamelin. (Is Hamelin also a hamlet and is Obama a Hamlet or just a ham?) Excuse my excessive metaphors and wondering thoughts, but I think what is needed is a group of cultural warriors to purge the spirit of the magic crone that lives in the heart of the university. The university has been feminized, it has become pagan, and men have become "sensitive" and yet are willing to commit the greatest violence and most barbarous acts: killing helpless babies (abortions). There is a spell cast on people's minds that removes restraint, moderation or any conformity to God's law or Natural law. People have lost their way; they have become beasts (again think of the Pied Piper and his job with rats). A great movie that reflects some of these themes is called The 13th Warrior with Antonio Banderas and Omar Sharif. This movie kind of encapsulates it for me -- humans becoming beasts, falling away from their divine nature. I see something heroic and redeeming in this movie though I doubt it was ever intended to be use as a modern metaphor, especially in regards to the university. It is also like The Magnificent Seven (if you like older westerns).
According to Aristotle, if you don't conform to society’s moral dictates and rules, if you are outside of society, you are either a God or a Beast. That is what the Democrats aspire to and it makes no difference if they are Gods or Beasts. Christianity and its moral authority is a joke to these Democrat socialists. If "God is dead," as Nietzsche famously states, then Dostoevsky finishes the thought with "all is permitted." That is Liberalism in a nutshell – all is permitted -- bad dreams and all. Liberalism will change the face of American culture and its institutions into something wicked and monstrous. I wish we could say to the socialists, the human Gods, the social engineers that want to remake the world into their vision of Eden: "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy." But it would make no difference in the future. We would be talking to ourselves about something our education tells us doesn't exist.
While you say the Liberals have been winning the war up, you aptly stated beforehand failure was a consequence of negligence. The United States is suffering an implosive moment of indifference. Our enemy is fat, atrophy, indifference.
You say Liberals, I say Leftists. I’m happy to engage my Liberal friends and debate the truths of the Constitution, but for the Left, they must be defeated, severely.
We are in a place in America today in which virtually every institution has been co-opted by the left. The infiltration is broad and deep and not one major institution has escaped. Our great universities, our teaching down through kindergarten, our great charitable foundations, our courts and the guilds associated with the courts such as the American Bar Association, the establishment churches, like the United Church of Christ, the Girl Scouts, the League of Women Voters, Hollywood, the publishing industry, the advertising industry. This list is by no means complete and it is growing daily under the predacious appetite of the Obama administration which has swallowed whole our industries such as automobile, insurance, banking.
The administration marches from industry to industry and from conquest to conquest in a series of usurpations and intimidations which have effectively seized control and sometimes ownership of America's great industries. We have seen corruption in America before on a national scale in the administrations of Grant and Harding. We have even seen usurpations and intimidations and thuggery in America before but isolated to a local scale in places like Chicago and not federalized nationwide. I think the problem goes back to even before the Alinsky school to The Frankfurt School which was the precursor to the cultural subversion which has come to America and which found expression in the Alinsky school and political consummation in the election of Barack Obama. It is not by accident that all these institutions have fallen into the hands of the left. The left has generated a new eschatology, a whole new way of thinking, which rejects the logic and and culture that was the common or majority experience in America at least through the Eisenhower administration.
The Frankfurt school was explicitly created to undermine those institutions which tended to hinder the sought after triumph of communism. These included the nation state, the church, the family, and the "liberal" tradition in education. So they devised means to undermine patriotism and combine that with wholesale immigration as just a couple of methods of undermining the nation state. They assaulted the churches and made expressions of Christianity in the public square illegal. To undermine the family, they belittled the father labeling him "authoritarian," derided paternalism, and encouraged abortion. They have had unimagined success in undermining our school system from kindergarten to postgraduate work. But these instances are but merely the symptoms and the venues of the dirty work.
The main problem that comes out of The Frankfurt School is that it changes the way we think. If one legitimatizes relativism then one begins to talk about George Bush as the moral equivalent of Hitler. If one says that there is no such thing as historical reality, one has destroyed the underpinnings of civilization. If one espouses and sells a "critical theory" one has made all other forms of analysis except downright cynicism look naïve and unworthy. Describing the methodology by which the The Frankfurt School "deconstructed" our epistemology is truly frightening.
The media behaves the way it does because that's the way it thinks and it thinks that way because that is the way it has been brought up. And all of this goes back To the Frankfurt School.
We are at a crisis in the moment because of the person of Barack Obama. We must bend every effort to prevent him from achieving the ultimate victory sought by The Frankfurt School and its disciples, Saul Alinsky, William Ayers, and the rest. But if we survive this crisis we must then as patriotic conservatives undertake the restoration of "liberal" common sense and biblical morality (but not necessarily religiosity) to our culture. That means we have to change the way people think, the way they see the world, their whole value system. That is what has been done to us and if we do not undo it we will always be one election away from the next Barack Obama.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.