F: I was reading the Washington Post and Times the other day and one of the articles was about Congress wanting to block the purchase of more F22 fighters for the Air Force, to the tune of 1/2 to 1 billion dollars, IIRC. Congress and Secretary of Defense Gates claimed that the fighters were not wanted nor needed (which I found a bit odd, but I digress).
M: Don't digress if you are just going to crap and leave it. Who cares what you think is odd if you have nothing else to say about it.
F: At any rate, however, the next article I read was about the rising projected costs of the health care reform plan by Congress and Obama's intent to press the bill into law this year. And yet, the purchase of these aircraft would require skilled workers that (surprise!) will have to pay taxes that will fund initiatives like this one way or another. I sense a small bit of irony here.
M: That's not irony you smell, You've wrapped your head in your colon. We can create jobs as easily making buggy whips, but instead we try to create jobs that have a ripple effect, that produce real value to the economy which jet plains do not.
F: Now, with debt currently at $11 T, I can only shudder......
M: You seem to attribute some significance to the fact that you shudder. That can happen biting on a Popsicle stick.
F: at the fact that Congress is trying to expand the responsibilities of the federal government without having any solid way of paying for it (yes, let's tax the rich so they'll try and find even more tax deductions and take investments elsewhere where taxes aren't so high).
M: No, lets throw our latest stereotypical talking point trained monkey response in here at the mention of the trigger worked, Congress.
F: At some point, our creditors are going to refuse loans, and what then? Do we just sell the entire US?
M: Sure, we are going live on the moon anyway, so why not. One nut case scenario, I am sure, deserves another, no?
F: As someone who is about to enter the real world from college,
M: And therefore has no real world experience but yet is still stuffed full of all kinds of trained opinions
F: and is very much a financial conservative (religiously tracking my spending and money available; ensuring I can pay my bills in full each month), I unfortunately see Congress running the entire country into the ground.
M: As if there were any real world correlation between you and the government regarding spending
F: A little bit of debt is a good thing - after all, that's how people buy houses and cars. Most of us simply can't afford to pay hundreds of thousands in cash. But that bit of debt people pay back over a period of time. Currently, we are only paying the interest on our national debt. The interest amounts to about $300B, which is ~10% of the yearly federal budget. What happens when interest rates rise? What happens when health care reform inevitably costs more than projected (and it's already at 1.5T), and our debt increases?
M: What happens if you pull your head out of your ass so fast your ears pop?
F: Unless Congress makes some major shifts in spending behavior, I am honestly quite uncertain about the future of our country.
M: There is nothing to be done for people who self induce a state of terror by walking around awake in their own self created nightmares.
F: Our debt will consume larger and larger portions of the national budget, and to combat this taxes will inevitably rise (because I don't see Congress cutting programs).
M: There are two reasons we don't see things. It can be they are not there or it can be that we are blind.
F: We will be in roughly the same position now - but only with less money than before. What happens when we are bled dry?
M: What happens if you get a job and have kids and life goes on happily for you?
F: Terrorism may be a threat to national security, but with every new spending bill, it seems to me that our national debt should be the greatest concern of all.
M: Good to hear that "it seems to me". I know nothing and have no opinion. I'm also not wound up like a top.