Skip to main content

Budget Talk. Sensible Budget Talk.

Here you are!  This is how the U.S. Government spends our money!

Let us take seriously the need to get our budget back into balance; that is to say, to get our income to match our expenditures.  Some things will not make much of a difference.  Those things are all grouped under Physical Resources.  General Government expenditures are also large, but not compared to Human Resources and Military spending.

More specifically, there are three areas we can cut, realistically:  Medicare and Medicaid, Social Security, and the Military.  The other thing we can do is to raise our income.

Our military budget is larger than the combined military budgets of the next fifteen largest countries, combined!


Do we really believe that old people should have their pensions trimmed back, and their health care reduced? Do we really believe that we are the only industrial country in the whole world that cannot provide universal health care?

We need to do two big things:  we need to reduce our military spending, and we need to augment our income.  We do not need to be the policeman for the world.  We do not need military bases all over the world.  We do not need a war in Iraq, and never did, and we need to get out of Afghanistan.  And we need to raise the tax rates on the people and corporations that make the most money.  Start with the oil companies!  They still get subsidies!  Institute a small transaction tax on every financial investment gamble made in the markets.  And we need a graduated income tax, where the people who make the most money not only pay the most, but pay at the highest rate.  It does not have to be a punitive rate:  just a fair one.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Friends-- My step-father of 35 years died this morning. His name was Conrad Royksund. He was 86 years old. He was born into poverty on a farm near Puyallup, WA. He was the first member of his family to attend college and earned a PhD from the University of Chicago. He paid his way through all of that by fishing in Alaska. He spent his professional career as a college professor. I met him when I was just 3 years old and don't actually have any memories of my life befor e he was in it. He was intimidatingly smart, funny as hell, and worked his ass off. He taught me to meet people with kindness and decency until I was certain they could not be trusted. He taught me to meet ideas with carving knives until I was certain they could. I will remember him as one of the bravest, most curious, and funniest people I have ever met. He left this world with a satisfied mind. We are so grateful. Dan Hubbard
1 comment
Read more

The Sea is Rising

Let us just step back:  two hundred and fifty years ago, or so, the ships of England and Spain had drifted onto a whole new continent, as they saw it, from far north to a savagely cold south; pole to pole, as if there were such things. Millions of people already lived here, some of them still hunters and gatherers; some of them very wealthy, indeed!  Gold and silver stolen from the southern Americas funded Spanish and English dreams. There was land, lots of land, under starry skies above, rich land, and oil and coal and iron ore.  The whole western world learned how to build industries not on simple muscle power, but on steam and oil.  We farmed, too, of course.  All we needed was cheap labor--slave labor from Africa, mostly, so the ships came with slave labor.  Chinese labor built railroad beds where there had been rock cliffs. Europeans, long used to killing each other for good, religious reasons, brought their religious savagery with them. ...
Post a Comment
Read more

That's all we want: fairness! Not more guns and more war! Fairness!

The five police officers who were killed in Dallas are certainly not the officers who killed innocent citizens. There is more than enough tragedy to go around. "What is happening to our country?", Mari asked this morning. I had no answer.  We do have an answer.  We do not want to say it. There are lots of answers, all of them pertinent. We are a racist society, like most human societies. We are a society in the midst of enormous changes-- social, political, economic--and we do not know what to do about it. We are divided unsustainably into absurdly rich, and an enormous number of crumbling middle class families, and poor. We have guns everywhere; military guns, guns just for killing people, cheap guns, heroes carrying guns into churches and supermarkets, idiots who think guns ought to be allowed in bars and schools and ball games and beauty parlors and political rallies. Our political process is almost useless. There are good people in Congress, but there...
Post a Comment
Read more