HEADLINE: America is screwed

Dan

Dan

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Here are some articles to enlighten Americans on their problems:

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/JA24Ak04.html

It is virtually impossible to overstate the profligacy of what our government spends on the military. The Department of Defense's planned expenditures for fiscal year 2008 are larger than all other nations' military budgets combined. The supplementary budget to pay for the current wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, not part of the official defense budget, is itself larger than the combined military budgets of Russia and China. Defense-related spending for fiscal 2008 will exceed $1 trillion for the first time in history. The United States has become the largest single salesman of arms and munitions to other nations on Earth. Leaving out of account Bush's two on-going wars, defense spending has doubled since the mid-1990s. The defense budget for fiscal 2008 is the largest since World War II.
Click to expand...

http://www.economyincrisis.org/articles/show/113 (this one is kind of alarmist, but has some valid points)

The United States is facing economic disaster on a scale few nations have ever experienced. Most people are unaware of the easily observable signs of this emerging crisis. While we persist in our superpower mentality, we have quietly become a second-class country in many respects.

We no longer produce what we need to sustain ourselves, we import much more than we export, and we are selling off our assets and taking on massive debts to sustain a standard of living we can no longer afford. Not only was this not the way we became a superpower but it is a sure way to lose this status.

Foreign countries are using the funds earned through our trade deficits to buy many of our strategic companies. Over the past 10 years, foreign interests have purchased an unprecedented $8 Trillion worth of US assets.

The game plan of our international competitors is to render us completely dependent on foreign production, innovation, and financing. In losing domestic self-sufficiency, national security and leverage in foreign affairs will suffer greatly.

We are failing even to acknowledge predatory foreign trade practices undermining US industry. Instead we encourage US manufacturers to design, engineer, and produce in third world markets like Mexico and China.
Click to expand...

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Global_Economy/JA29Dj01.html
 
Thanks for the "news."

Of course we know. It's plastered all over the news and internet. But thanks for the update.
 
Qonfused said:
Thanks for the "news."

Of course we know. It's plastered all over the news and internet. But thanks for the update.
Click to expand...

Not everyone knows that the US is spending a trillion dollars on the military. I thought it was good to share.
 
Qonfused said:
Thanks for the "news."

Of course we know. It's plastered all over the news and internet. But thanks for the update.
Click to expand...
Some Americans do nothing but vote for the winner of American Idol, and this would be new to them.
:angry:
 
They don't count as people with rational thought.
 
Ergo they don't count as Americans.

They're sub-americans.
 
sub-americans get a whole vote tho. It blows. If countries can sell carbon credits why can't we sell our vote?
 
And yet, they're the reason Bush is here in the first place.
 
Is it so important that we spend 8 times more than China, the second largest spender? Would it be so bad if we only spent 6 or 7 times more than China and had more than enough money to make us have the best funded Education system in the world, as well as health care for everybody. Maybe even, god forbid, better pay for the average and poor workers.
 
And aren't Katrina victims suing the gov't for 3 Quadrillion dollars
How is the gov't gonna handle that?
 
and?....this is news how exactly? Really, I've know these dark secrets about America for a long time and indeed, I am concerned how Washington D.C. thinks they will manage to pay back China all their debts. Dammit, we pay our taxes, at least they could do is quit being idiots with our money.:p I'm surrounded by idiots everywhere I turn these days. Ugh. Forget Hell, idiot bombardment is worse.:dozey:
 
America has always been screwed.

'Nuff said.
 
Absinthe said:
It's okay. Poland will help us.
Click to expand...

I lol'd :D

But I vote once America goes down, Australia takes its place. But then again, we're all so damn lazy we'd screw everything up in less than half the time ;)
 
does the military spending is causing all this?
 
Dan said:
Not everyone knows that the US is spending a trillion dollars on the military. I thought it was good to share.
Click to expand...

Any American that is slightly intelligent knows. Everyone else is too dumb to matter so it won't make a difference. I saw a guy comparing our budget using oreo cookies. All I could think about is how delicious it would be if the government spent some of those cookies on me. I love oreo cookies man.
 
Oh man, that would be such a boost to the milk industry too.

omg delicious. ****ing thread, I want milk and oreos now.
 
Well maybe if 18% of my taxes didn't go to pay off interest on our national debt my state could get more money from the government. My state could pay UW colleges so tuition decreases. Then maybe I wont have to go into debt in order to go to college. Maybe we would have better highways. Maybe we should lower our national debt.

Our national debt only grows. We have created thousands of new jobs since 9/11. We are decreasing taxes and our government is giving money back to the people. We are fighting a war across the seas. We are dealing with natural disasters such as Katrina. Where does our government get most of the money to pay for this? Banks and foreign countries. That only raises our national debt, increases useless tax spending, and forces us to loan more money from banks and foriegn countries.
 
Debt is good for a country; it streamlines it's expenditures only to the most important things. But this fact doesn't seem to be stopping Bush from spending money on useless crap. You know what we need?
We need another waaaaaaaar!
The Netherlands are our first target.
 
Cole said:
Our national debt only grows. We have created thousands of new jobs since 9/11. We are decreasing taxes and our government is giving money back to the people. We are fighting a war across the seas. We are dealing with natural disasters such as Katrina. Where does our government get most of the money to pay for this? Banks and foreign countries. That only raises our national debt, increases useless tax spending, and forces us to loan more money from banks and foreign countries.
Click to expand...

Not to mention that Bernanke attempts to just print the difference of our deficit, which causes all these ridiculous bubbles. Then their solution to fixing that is to inflate our money supply more by lowering interest rates to artificial levels. It's a cycle I wish I didn't have to be a part of. We need a recession now more than anything, but the Fed is insistent on building it up first. We've been turned into a consumer nation by this inflated money supply and borrowed money. It's all going to come back and bite us hard.

Glirk Dient said:
Any American that is slightly intelligent knows. Everyone else is too dumb to matter so it won't make a difference. I saw a guy comparing our budget using oreo cookies. All I could think about is how delicious it would be if the government spent some of those cookies on me.
Click to expand...

Yeah, or never took them in the first place.

Pesmerga said:
On the note of military spending...

https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/rankorder/2034rank.html

Ah, resting nicely at 28th place with percent on military spending per GDP.
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Consumption is not the legitimate creation of wealth. Our GDP is measured in a way that tries to convince you otherwise.
 
Debt is good for a country; it streamlines it's expenditures only to the most important things. But this fact doesn't seem to be stopping Bush from spending money on useless crap. You know what we need?
We need another waaaaaaaar!
The Netherlands are our first target.
Click to expand...
Debt can be good for a country. However it can also be really really bad. When you're spending nearly 1/5 of your money on paying the interest on that debt your not doing so good. Especially when that only looks to be rising. In 5 to 10 years how much of your money will be spent on debt? 1/4? 1/3?. The more our debt grows the more loans we have to make due to interest, the more our debt grows. Then even when we do have a surplus we give it back to the people to increase popularity (90's), and our debt doesn't get reduced. It's a cycle, and the future only looks like our debt will grow and grow.

Not to mention that Bernanke attempts to just print the difference of our deficit, which causes all these ridiculous bubbles. Then their solution to fixing that is to inflate our money supply more by lowering interest rates to artificial levels. It's a cycle I wish I didn't have to be a part of. We need a recession now more than anything, but the Fed is insistent on building it up first. We've been turned into a consumer nation by this inflated money supply and borrowed money. It's all going to come back and bite us hard.
Click to expand...
I hate politicians. They often say, "We will cut the deficit by half over the next 10 years". The american public thinks deficit and debt are the same thing and get happy. Furthermore, theres no debating on our national debt in the democratic or republican debates.

I should move to canada and start offering the U.S. money and claim interest on it every year. Woo!! Income for life baby.
 
Debt was good for the U.S. during the post-WW2 era due to the high demand for raw goods like steel and rubber. Because of the plentiful manufacturing jobs at the time, the war actually helped pull the U.S. out of the depression that lasted for nearly a decade. Now that alot of companies are outsourcing to other countries, the U.S. has a much weaker counter-measure againt debt and is more focused on a "service" based economy, which of course, equates to a very un-healthy economy. It's the equivalent of someone who frivously swipes a credit card, but has no job, and relies on wel-fare checks. :p Outsourcing sucks and it should be banned imo, or at least raise corporate taxes enough to make them think twice about outsourcing. /smokes pipe :smoking:
 
Cole said:
I should move to canada and start offering the U.S. money and claim interest on it every year. Woo!! Income for life baby.
Click to expand...

Then the US would have your wood.
 
Pesmerga said:
On the note of military spending...

https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/rankorder/2034rank.html

Ah, resting nicely at 28th place with percent on military spending per GDP.
Click to expand...

The problem with that budget (as was noted in the very first article I posted) is that so much of the military budget is hidden in other things than the DOD, and the DOD budget itself has big classified chunks that we cannot know. Nuclear weapons research and maintenance of the existing warhead stockpile is all filed under the Department of Energy. Veterans affairs is separated. And then there are the supplementary budgets used to fund the two wars the United States is fighting.

Also, military budget should be compared as a percent of total government expenditures rather than GDP, because the military isn't really an economically useful product, it's just a power amplifier.
 
The military creates hundreds of thousands of jobs, Dan. Hardly solely a "power amplifier".
 
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