http://news.yahoo.com/s/yblog_thelookou … re-in-jail

It's a sad-state (period, not just of affairs) when people have to go to jail just to get BASIC healthcare! I just fail to see how can people be so against universal converage when you have a situation like we currently do in the USA... the wealthiest country in the world. Of course, how much of that wealth is held by the "average" American? Very very little. The top 1% reap nearly everything.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article … ds-newsxml

I think it would be quite easy to provide everyone with basic, and even advanced, health care. It could be done the same way we get streets and highways, libraries, schools, weapons for the military, prisons, etc.

Lots of restructuring needs to be done. In order to reduce the military budget, all troops in foreign countries should be ordered to return to the U.S. Those foreign nations have police and their own military. If they can't handle their own problems, then don't worry about them. Only worry (and attack decisively and efficiently) if they make a move against us. Federal Law should mandate that wars take less than 20 minutes. There is no need for any aggressive acts after that 20 minute window. If other countries know that we have a 20 minute law, then they will understand what that can only mean.

The purpose of the military should be changed to protect the physical U.S. borders (from the seafloor to the exosphere), decisively kill every drug dealer in the U.S., decisively kill every gang in the U.S., decisively kill every member of organized crime in the U.S., and pay no mind to any atrocities in foreign nations, unless those atrocities threaten to cross our borders. People don't always love you if you're altruistic. We should have learned that in Iraq.

Prisons and welfare would probably also need to be abolished. If the military did its job, then there would be few people left for the lawyers to play with. We could bring back public hangings for those rare violent people that are not in gangs, organized crime, or into drugs. When my great grandmother was a child, public hangings were family events. It's great education for children.

In summary, I think that with some restructuring, it should be possible to provide everyone with health care without raising taxes.

It's mind-boggling when you look at statistics concerning healthcare in the US.  This country spends the most on healthcare but ranks last in infant mortality, life expectancy, access to care, and several other key metrics.  We have more people uninsured in this country than Canada has people period - and I won't even mention the millions who are under-insured.

Big Pharma and Third party insurances companies have very powerful lobbies and they definitely don't want any talk of universal healthcare.  It's all about profits.  There's no money in having a healthy population.  And care is focused on helping people cope with symptoms as opposed to preventive medicine.  Big Pharma wants you to stay sick in order for you to keep having to fill prescriptions.  And everyone knows how shady third party insurance companies are with dropping people's coverages once they have a catastrophic illness.

@Jodo:  I agree with you specifically in that we need some restructuring.  And it is frustrating that only social programs and entitlement programs are ever on the chopping block when cuts need to be made when a whopping 50% of all our tax revenue goes to fund the military industrial complex. 

@avatar!:  I too don't understand why folks are so against universal care.  My guess is that the public is misled when this type of conversation comes up by corporate media - chants of "socialized medicine" and the demonization of  Canada's & Western Europe's universal healthcare programs go into full-effect.  There's the issue of higher taxes too, but I think most Americans will be ok with that.

I read a statistic that every 30 seconds someone in the US files for backruptcy due to a medical illness.  This type of thing is totally inexcusable.

Kenology, I couldn't agree more with everything you said!

Jodo, you're always amusing

Of the $5.3 trillion spent by federal, state, and local governments in 2010, just under $700 billion, or about 13%, went towards the military. Even if we look at only federal spending ($3.5 trillion), it was around 20%. The same year, the federal government spent a bit over $700 billion on Social Security alone, $620 billion on income security (mostly welfare, about 20% is pensions for federal employees), $450 billion on medicare, and $370 billion on miscellaneous health spending.

See tables B-80 and B-83 here.

The bottom line is that social programs and entitlements are about 2/3 to 3/4 of all government spending, and they're growing much faster than other components of government spending. Any serious proposals to limit the growth of government spending will, by necessity, target social programs and entitlements.

At least some people are willing to get facts to back their argument, instead of inventing figures.

Instead of looking up tables, here is a useful pie chart:

http://www.pgpf.org/Issues/Spending/201 … -Cuts.aspx

Are you implying that you can't have universal health care because the government is spending too much? How is it that most other countries, all less wealthy than the US manage to have universal health care and in fact offer many more social programs in general? I'm not saying the US should offer ALL these social programs as in other countries, however I do believe that there needs to be a massive overhall of the way health care works in this country. It's NOT simply that people who don't have health care are affected, many people who have been paying for health care all their lives are denied once they get seriously ill and need it most:

http://www.healthreform.gov/reports/den … index.html

That's the advantage of not knowing anything.

You know how to type apparently... clearly, you know some things. Now a sponge nor jellyfish, I don't know if they actually know anything?

Hey Brandon.

I'm going to take my time and look at the tables you linked to in a bit.  Here's where I got my numbers from though. 

However, while everything you said about entitlement programs is true, those percentages you gave based on the above data you linked to are completely misleading by default.  For example, the cost of the entire Iraq and Afghanistan Wars are OMITTED from the military defense budget.  Not to mention, adding a new theater of war is only increasing the amount of military spending to ridiculous proportions.

If you add in the costs of both the Iraq & Afghanistan Wars, add the costs of bombing Libya, "intelligence spending, [and] the long-term costs for Veterans Administration care and disability" for wounded soldiers, that 13% of appropriated government spending towards military is looking completely fabricated.

It's like an accountant has cooked the books to make the budget look more attractive.  The truth is that social programs are being trimmed when there's more of a need for them, while military spending is always increasing in order for the US to maintain its hegemony the world over.

That analysis is deliberately manipulated to exaggerate the percentage of government spending that goes to the military. First, they throw out Social Security and Medicare. Their rationale is that these are ostensibly paid for with a payroll taxes rather than income taxes, but that's not important. The bottom line is that all of it is money that's being spent and has to be paid for with taxes.

Second, they attribute 80% of the interest on the debt to past military spending. The rationale is that if we hadn't had a military, we wouldn't have had 80% of the debt. But the same is true of anything else the government spends money on. If we hadn't spent anything on welfare programs, we'd have less debt, too. The reasonable thing to do is attribute the debt to programs according to the proportion of government spending they took up during the years in which the debt was incurred.

Finally, they only look at federal spending. This is a bit more defensible, but I still think they're wrong to do that. We pay taxes, and we get government services. People care about what they pay and what they get, not about who takes care of the details.

I concede the $94 billion in veterans' benefits and the proportion of the debt interest which can legitimately be attributed to military spending, and also that there may be some relatively small expenditures here and there which could legitimately be considered military expenditures but which are not officially categorized as such. Together these may bring military spending up to about 25% of the federal budget and 16-17% of total government expenditures (federal, state, and local).

Not true. While they were not budgeted for ahead of time, they are included in the retrospective figures I cited earlier. According to the WRL link you provided, spending on the Iraq and Afghanistan wars in 2009 was $200 billion. A lot of money, but there's plenty of room for it in the $660 billion spent in the "National Defense" category in 2009.

"Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.), chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said Wednesday that he had asked the Defense Department for an accurate estimate of the cost of the mission since the ballpark numbers being circulated, including one of nearly $1 billion, seemed too high."

A billion dollars is a lot of money to you and me, but it's less than 0.2% of total military spending in 2010. If operations in Libya are expanded significantly, it could eventually become a significant expense. At the moment it's a statistical blip.

In fact, the exact opposite is true. Since World War II, military spending has been steadily declining as a percentage of GDP, while social spending has been steadily rising. Military spending has increased somewhat since 2001, but is still fairly low by historical standards, if not as low as I would like it to be. Meanwhile, social spending is at an all-time high.

Case in point: What about the budget proposal did they think worth calling out specifically? A 50% cut in LIHEAP spending, a $300 million cut in "community development," and limiting an expansion of Pell Grants. Not a cut. Limiting an expansion. Those are the best examples they could find to illustrate just how awful the proposed cuts were.

Well, LIHEAP's funding was doubled back in 2009, so the proposed cut would have pushed it back to 2008 levels. And in fact the 50% cut never actually happened. There's a big difference between a budget and a budget proposal.

So of the three big headliner cuts, one didn't happen, one was tiny, and one was never planned to be an actual cut at all. We're all gonna die!

Tl;dr version: It's best not to repeat as fact allegations which you have not personally verified from a primary source.

Yes, spending during WWII was higher, but then again that was WORLD WAR II. I don't think it's a fair comparison. On the other hand, SINCE WW II, today's military spending is the highest it has ever been. I'm not actually saying we should just cut huge chunks from the military, at least not without solid justification, but nevertheless the fact is we are spending more on military today then any time since WW II.

http://armscontrolcenter.org/policy/sec … cal_highs/

I said as a percentage of GDP. In absolute inflation-adjusted terms, yes, it is up somewhat. And absolute inflation-adjusted terms is arguably a better metric to use than percentage of GDP, so I'll give you that.

If we're going by absolute inflation-adjusted terms, though, social spending has skyrocketed, increasing severalfold over a period of time in which military spending has increased by a third or so. Any way you measure it, growth in social spending has dramatically outstripped growth in military spending.

Edited to add: I'm not saying that we don't spend too much on the military, only that statements made in this thread regarding the relative levels and trends of military and social spending lack any basis in reality.

I read your post in response to me in its entirety and it's a lot to respond to.  I don't agree with most of what you said still, but I don't have the patience to do a proper response right now.  However, we both agree that we spend way too much on military - which is good.  Our only debate is monetary appropriations.

And I would like to hear your insight on the question avatar! posed about healthcare at the top of the thread.

EDIT: for clarity

Alright Brandon, I said I would come back and reply directly to your previous response to me.  I think such a reply would be pointless though.  Here's why I feel that way:

The difference between the two of us is you put stock in those official numbers from the US government.  I don't.  But those numbers will ALWAYS support your argument over mine - which makes this debate somewhat pointless to continue. 

There's no doubt in my mind that the official numbers for the amount the US spends on defense are laughably understated - and the gov't has a major habit of doing this.  For example, we get unemployment data each month.  But the unemployment rate the government states is inherently invalid because of how it has chosen to calculate it.  The official figure doesn't include people who haven't actively looked for jobs in the past four weeks, people who are working part-time are counted as full-time employees, and the official figure also doesn't count workers who are underemployed, and thus, the unemployment rate always looks rosier than it really is and other people have to calculate the REAL unemployment rate.  Same thing with troops levels in a conflict.  The gov't will say they're reducing troop numbers to give then impression they're deescalating the war when in reality they've hired tons of private mercenaries to take the place of these soldiers and fighting might even be more intense then it was before. 

There are several examples but these are just a couple reasons why I view official government numbers as highly suspect.

I'm not a conspiracy person (I don't think there are all these dark Hollywood-esque conspiracies out there). However, I do agree that you have to be very careful when reading statistics. I heard on NPR not long ago how some people were claiming that the economy was improving because there were fewer people applying for unemployment, but what that statistic did not take into account was the fact that many people had simply run out of unemployment benefits and could not apply, and so the result was completely skewed from that perspective.

...Huh. Long-time STC posters will appreciate the irony of me defending the government, but let the record show that I'm defending nonpartisan bureaucrats, not politicians.

The thing is, this isn't a disagreement about the numbers. The WRL link you posted uses exactly the same numbers. So does the Daily Kos link. They just put a different spin on them. The spin they put on it obfuscates rather than clarifies, for the reasons I gave above, but nowhere do they question the accuracy of the raw numbers supplied by the government.

And there's really no reason to suspect that the treasury and OMB are lying about this stuff. These numbers are idependently verifiable to some degree, and significant distortions would be detected, resulting in a huge scandal.

There's a reason they do that, and it's not to put one over on the public. It's because people who aren't actively seeking employment could have any number of reasons for not seeking employment. For example, I don't have a job right now, but I'm not unemployed. I just haven't looked. I worked hard for ten years and saved up a big pile of money, and I'm taking some time off. The government shouldn't count people like me in the unemployment rate, because my lack of a job has nothing to do with the state of the economy. In fact, I've gotten several unsolicited e-mails from recruiters at big-name companies during my time off. On the other hand, discouraged workers arguably should be counted.

There's legitimate room for disagreement on how exactly unemployment should be measured. Which is why the BLS publishes six different unemployment statistics which cover everything you complained about.

But for all its faults, U-3 (the headline unemployment rate) is a useful statistic, because the ratio between U-3 and U-6 (the all-inclusive rate) tends to be reasonably stable. For every ten people who are officially unemployed, there are about 7 who are discouraged, marginally attached, or underemployed. This tends to be true whether U-3 is at 4%, 5%, 7%, or 10%. So trends in the headline unemployment are a fairly reliable indicator of the broader employment picture. 5% is normal, 4% is STOCK BUBBLE SELL SELL SELL!, 7% is bad, 10% is really bad, and 15% is ZOMG WE'RE ALL GONNA DIE! That way you know whether or not to vote to reelect a figurehead who has very little influence over the employment rate.

Oh, and what that Daily Kos link actually says is: "Military spending is 53% of 25% of all government spending in the United States." That not one commenter saw fit to point that out tells you all you need to know about Daily Kos and its readership.

Come on guys, there's nothing conspiracy theory about this, the government does lie about many things.  I don't think you should blame people for not being completely trusting of it.

And nowhere is this more evident than in the foreign policy/defense spheres.

BTW, this might be somewhat interesting...  Here's a new study from Brown University's Watson Institute for International Studies:

"The group’s “Costs of War” project, which involved more than 20 economists, anthropologists, lawyers, humanitarian personnel, and political scientists, provides new estimates of the total war cost as well as other direct and indirect human and economic costs of the U.S. military response to the 9/11 attacks. The project is the first comprehensive analysis of all U.S., coalition, and civilian casualties, including U.S. contractors. It also assesses many of the wars’ hidden costs, such as interest on war-related debt and veterans’ benefits."

Democracy Now! reported that this $4 trillion figure is far more than what both Bush and Obama claimed the wars cost.  I'm going to take the time to read more over the weekend.  In the meantime, I wonder how these findings compare to the official numbers?

Edit: fixed Brown University link

Thanks for the link, Kenology. I would like to say that our response on the Taliban after 9/11 is completely justified in my opinion. They asked for war, and they got a war. I would like to see them all destroyed (yes, I think the Taliban are evil). That being said, the study is NOT just the war against the Taliban, but ALL the wars combined (including the messy Iraq war). There are quite a lot of things to consider, and I think people who say the US is fighting just for it's own purposes are simplifying things far too much. However, clearly the US is not just fighting for altruistic reasons either. At any rate, I do entirely agree that the cost of any war is always much higher than mere figures released by the government (as the study shows, there are many "hidden" costs which really are not that hidden, they simply often are not taken into account)...

That's fair. 

I think the Taliban was an entity that they allied with back in the 80's and it turned out to bite them in a$$ later on.  That happens.  And that study talks about ALL wars, which is what I've been talking about this entire time.  In addition to those wars would be the costs of maintaining military bases all over the world and all the other hidden costs.  This is all why I believe the official numbers Brandon linked to were understated.

But, I think there are too many peripheral wars or destabilization efforts that the US has been involved with that leads me to believe that the US is fighting to maintain its dominance.  For example, we know all about Operation Ajax (the overthrow of Mossedegh), the overthrow of Allende, Lumumba, Arbenz Guzman, the Iran/Contra scandal, etc.  Most, if not all, of those were motivated by US corporate greed.  And let's not forget that the US is still the only country to ever be convicted of international terrorism by the World Court.  So, even after 9/11, a war on the Taliban... ok.  But even if we give the gov't a pass on that, it still doesn't make sense as to how we go involved in Iraq - and the fact that it had to lie to us in order to garner that initial popular support. 

I'll also say that I think this government can definitely work.  It's just that corporations have taken it over and run it for their own benefit and not for the benefit of the people - which brings us back full circle to your healthcare question; because I think that's primarily why we don't have a single-payer system.