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[mainiac]

Actually, we could pass a law tomorrow stating that corporate activity domestically gets taxed domestically even if you have an office in the Cayman islands.  Such a law has been proposed many times, usually with the caveat that you get a deduction equal to the tax burden in the foreign office country.  So if the US rate is 40% and the Cayman rate is 1%, the rate on taxable income is 39%.

And there are many laws already on the books regarding offshore laundering of money which we could enforce already.  If it weren't for the fact that we keep firing IRS agents.  It's hard to campaign on lessening the tax burdens of corporations.  It's easy to fire the IRS agents without anyone noticing and allow tax fraud to increase.

It should be noted that the bulk of the US government is Social Security, followed by Medicare, followed by Medicaid.  Even military spending is pretty small compared to that trio.  Everything after that is peanuts (an incidentally where the GOP wants to make all it's cuts.  Because cutting where we spend the least money is a sure way to win).  There's certainly a lot of money to be saved there, but the bulk of money is in Social Security (which is only a couple percentage points away from solvency) and the bulk of deficits are caused by Meedicare (which is growing unsustainably and why we need more healthcare reforms).  The fact that these facts are unknown to most Americans speaks to the dysfunction of our political system.

Sometimes people are confused by the fact that Military is the majority of discretionary spending.  However most of the budget is non-discretionary items (i.e. Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.)

[G-Flex]

I'm pretty sure most of what you just mentioned is already in the law, it's just barely-if-ever enforced.  It's not legal for Chinese toothpaste to contain formaldehyde, it's just that regulation and inspection just isn't there.

What a product contains is only part of the battle. What about how the workers are treated? And how safe the production methods are? There are a lot of factors in play, and the US can't even enforce them in its own country, never mind making sure others live up to them.

And yeah, I'm totally for cutting varieties of military spending, but that in itself is not enough without genuinely crippling one of the most internationally-vital arms of the government, which was my point.  It's worth noting that our nuclear arsenal, which is big enough to obliterate the world a couple time over and is still being expanded, isn't actually paid-for through the military, it's considered the budgetary jurisdiction of the Energy Department.

Yeah, I'm not saying slashing the military budget would solve all of our problems, but it's certainly a big part of it; we can't expect to balance the budget while we waste so much money there with our lack of oversight, bullshit defense contracting, and unpopular wars as if we're still pretending at being an empire. This isn't to say that there's no waste in other sectors of the budget, just that the military is probably the most egregious and obvious example.

[Sowelu]

Didn't I see an article quoting Gen. Petraeus saying that maintaining a major infantry-oriented army is pretty much worthless these days, and saying "Anyone who starts a land war these days is a complete and utter moron" (NOT as much of a paraphrase as you might think)?  It was either Petraeus or one of our other popular-name generals that I don't remember at the moment.  And no, it wasn't a "We should switch to higher tech" thing either, it was purely "We're wasting effort on stuff we won't use, so let's trim down".

So, it seems like even our military desperately wants to shrink itself as soon as this conflict is over.  You know, whatever 'over' means.

[Nadaka]

A lot of military spending goes towards good middle class jobs in domestic research, design and development and manufacture through the military procurement chain. Another significant investment is in the salaries of the service men and education through incentive programs like the GI bill. I am all for trimming the waste and ending the wars, but slashing that military budget arbitrarily will cause a lot more harm than good.

[mainiac]

The people we are currently paying to develop military boondoggles could just as easily be paid to develop non-military boondoggles if that's what we cared about.  But it's a bad concern.  The government can't fund something of no economic benefit without hurting the economy.  That money is coming from somewhere.  A 3 billion dollar stealth bomber could pay for a lot of good middle class jobs teaching math to middle schoolers.  It could buy a lot of community hospitals.

[Urist is dead tome]

What we could do is stop giving foreign aide. Which means we would pull out of Iraq immediately and Afghanistan quite soon. Seems to me that it's been proven that foreign aide in the form of building up governments is unneeded.

[Tilla]

It should be noted that the bulk of the US government is Social Security, followed by Medicare, followed by Medicaid.  Even military spending is pretty small compared to that trio.  Everything after that is peanuts (an incidentally where the GOP wants to make all it's cuts.

I gotta say, this is..not quite true. It's still a very significant chunk over $680 billion annually, with Social Security at $700 billion. The difference is not such a huge gap as you seem to imply here.

Medicaire and Medicade are really, really broken and I'm not sure what you can do to fix that. It seems like, as the biggest ticket item in the budget, you don't get an awful lot for it compared to say, canada.


Edit: Edited to add a pie chart. Because fuck it, anyone who doesn't love pie charts is sub-human.




Here's a fun idea that will never happen: how about these hardcharging neo-con pricks propose salary cuts for Congressmen and Senators: The current salary (2011) for rank-and-file members of the House and Senate is $174,000 per year.

That's roughly $100,000 more than I would pay them and it's probably at least 4 times what they've actually earned through showing up and doing their jobs.

But nah, lets just take away union rights and cut seniors pensions yo.

[mainiac]

I'm still going to say that defense looks a little bigger on that then it is.  For one thing, some of that is honest to goodness war related defense of the type that actually helps protect soldiers in warzones.  Knock 160 billion off that tag as war related or "war related".  That type is going to get phased out as the wars draw down so there's a small blessing.  Then keep in mind that another chunk of that defense stuff is soldiers pensions, tricare, etc.  The remainder is the actually discretionary spending; current salaries, procurement, contractors, etc.  The point as I see it is that discretionary defense spending, while the biggest discretionary item, isn't too big when compared to the 2/3rds of the budget or so that is non-discretionary or impossible to dodge (i.e. interest or warzone spending).  It's certainly not the only important point, it's just the one I like to make.  Defense is big, but trimming the fat and pork out of defense isn't enough by it's own.

The other fun point about discretionary funding is that the GOP has set it's sights on trimming 65 billion out of that orange slice of yours.  So basically they are cutting 10% of everything we actually think of as government services once you get rid of the cash transfers (i.e. pensions, interest and medical insurance).  So everything the government does except shoot people feels the pain, education, conservation, postal service, transportation, law enforcement, welfare, unemployment, the IRS, etc.  And even within that they've spared pretty much every scrap of pork (like farm subsidies to millionaires) while homing in on the social welfare (like food subsidies).

But yeah, like you said, the Medicare system is really, really broken.  It's a simple problem of medical cost inflation.  Medical inflation is far, far faster then economic growth rate.  And that isn't just a problem for government but is a problem for the economy as a whole.  So what's really needed is some sort of aggressive cost controls.  The good news on that was that a lot of the less publicized  parts of the health care reform bill were trials to test out a bunch of different things to reduce medical inflation.  Some of them could work and if Medicare resists medical inflation, it's large market share makes it likely the rest of the country will follow suit.  The bad news is that the health care industry really hasn't picked up on the fact that they are bankrupting the country.  In an ideal world, we would be aggressively considering more healthcare reforms to address this very pressing problem.  In the real world...

[werechicken]

As someone from the uk I find this debate a bit hard to understand, why can't the democrats get their own way? Aren't they in power? In the UK people are going ape-s*** over the fact that the coalition seems be doing whatever it wants.

P.S. anyone who's in one of the countries where democratic revolutions are taking place right now I'd use western democracy as a road map of what to avoid, well some of it anyways

[RedKing]

As someone from the uk I find this debate a bit hard to understand, why can't the democrats get their own way? Aren't they in power? In the UK people are going ape-s*** over the fact that the coalition seems be doing whatever it wants.

Yes, and no. The Democrats control the White House and the upper house of the legislature, but lost control of the lower house in the last election. It's also worth noting that, unlike most political parties, the Democratic Party is testicle-deficient and so requires about a 90% majority before it will actually consider wielding its power like a stick. They had a filibuster-proof 60-vote majority for a while, and pretty much failed to do anything with it because they have all the party discipline of a frat kegger. Whereas, Republican party discipline is traditionally so tight that they're a hivemind.

[werechicken]

It's things like the above that make me wonder why voter turn out isn't lower.

It's also interesting to note that the main reason the Soviet Union beat America into space with sputnik is that they weren't a democracy and could create massive projects that cost billions pretty quickly.

Although on the up side we don't have to worry too much about being killed by our own governments

[Lord Shonus]

They also stole more german scientists after the war, and were willing to work them to death.

[mainiac]

   The US outspent the soviets in the space race.  And we geared up very quickly once the chips were down:

Year/Nominal/% of Budget/Inflation Adjusted 2007
1958   89   0.1%   488
1959   145   0.2%   1,841
1960   401   0.5%   3,205
1961   744   0.9%   6,360
1962   1,257   1.18% 12,221
1963   2,552   2.29% 24,342
1965   5,092   4.31% 33,514
1966   5,933   4.41% 32,106

It took about 6 years to reach peak spending after sputnik.  Considering that these technologies were being developed from scratch, I don't think that it would have been possible to spend money much faster then that.

Of course, after the moon landing, we started the space shuttle program on very, very erroneous assumptions due in no small part to government departmental infighting.  But up until the moon landing, we had our eyes on the prize.

[werechicken]

They also stole more german scientists after the war, and were willing to work them to death.

Actually America got a bigger share of the scientific loot. In fact the first American rocket into space can be directly traced back to the doodle bug or v bombs. Also one of Americas top rocketry expert, von braun, was seriously implicated in forced labour. And let's not get into the faustian deal that America made in regards to Japans unit 731.

I'm not saying that to bad mouth America, it's just that jingoism really pisses me off

Also I have to say once America did get into the space race seriously they dod catch up and then overtake pretty quickly - so that's a plus in the democracy column.

[Lord Shonus]

IIRC, while the US god a lot more equipment, the USSR captured more people.