Ayiekie Wrote:...It isn't the military budget that's the big issue - it's the health-care budget that's only going to get bigger as more baby-boomers retire, moving from taxpayers to Medicare recipients. Obama tried addressing this with his health-care reforms, moving at least part of the burden of funding the system from the government to the insurance companies. It didn't get a chance to work.
As for the American deficit, bluntly, it isn't a realistic priority. And it certainly wasn't a priority for the vast majority of conservatives under Bush, or his father, or Reagan, all of whom ran massive deficits. Regardless of that, the deficit, while a problem, is not an existential problem for the US - it is not in danger of becoming an unsustainable expense any time soon, nor will any amount of realistic cutting (particularly since there is no serious support for a substantial reduction to the military budget) affect the budgetary situation in the short or even medium-term. The problem for the US is that the overall economy isn't recovering because most Americans do not have the income necessary to refloat it, due to real wages not rising for decades. Without fixing that, any amount of cost-cutting may clear out the deficit (eventually) but will not fix the underlying economic problems.
Nor is it likely to be a political priority for Obama, since history shows quite consistently that people do not actually care about deficits as a voting issue regardless of political rhetoric about them. Obama pretended to care about the deficit in opposition and doesn't now that he's in power - the Republicans have in the past and most assuredly would in the future behave the same way.
And, yes, we have exactly the same problem in Canada. It only looks smaller because there are fewer people collecting Social Insurance - but there are fewer people paying into the Social Insurance fund, too. People who are just getting out of college are being told to not expect anything from the Canada Pension Plan even as they're told that they're required to pay into it.
If we don't do something about the culture of entitlement - which means to stop expecting the governments to do everything they're doing now - then we're going to end up where Greece is currently. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but before some of us retire...
--
Rob Kelk
"Governments have no right to question the loyalty of those who oppose
them. Adversaries remain citizens of the same state, common subjects of
the same sovereign, servants of the same law."
- Michael Ignatieff, addressing Stanford University in 2012