Quote:robkelk wrote:Sorry, I disagree on pretty much every point.
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.
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...
1) The US spends 20% of its reported budget (there is a huge amount of unreported discretionary spending on mercenaries and other such things) on the military, which is almost what every other country on earth combined spends. Slash that in half, and they'd still have a far bigger budget for military than any other country. Medicare and medicaid represent 23% of the same budget. There is absolutely no question that a massive slash in military funding, by itself, would fund medicare and medicaid for a long time to come.
2) The US also has some of the lowest tax rates in the Western world, including and especially corporate and upper-class tax rates. It has been estimated by economists that tax revenue would have to increase 8.1% of total GDP in order to cover current and future increases in medicare and medicaid costs while avoiding further debt increases. This would still leave the US tax rate considerably lower than Western European countries like France and Germany, and considerably lower than what it was during the post-WWII time period when the US experienced its greatest economic growth.
3) Canada had no trouble running a budgetary surplus during the Chretien-Martin years; one of the reasons it doesn't now (aside from the world economic crisis, of course) was due to the reduction of the GST from 7% to 5%, a change that made very little difference to any individual consumer but significantly affected government revenue, to the tune of about six billion dollars a year. This is a not-inconsiderable chunk of the total deficit, which in 2009 was 8.7 billion dollars according to Statistics Canada (http://www40.statcan.gc.c...1/cst01/govt01b-eng.htm) - and since that includes both federal and provincial statistics, it's an even bigger chunk than it looks. Canada's overall tax rate is also much lower than that of Western Europe, though slightly higher than the US.
4) What happened in Greece is not a simple moral fable of living beyond your means as a government, nor is it true that people in Greece have refused austerity measures. To do a very short list, Greece was affected by extremely widespread tax evasion, and insane lending schemes that let essentially anyone in the country rack up massive private debt. Due to the country's inability to get off the Euro, Greece is unable to allow its currency to devalue to the point where it can handle its debt load. Because of all this, austerity measures, while draconian, are having little impact on the situation and loans can only keep the situation afloat at the cost of further damaging the Greek economy. None of this applies to Canada or the US.
To put it in a shorter-form way - there is no reason either Canada or the US would have to cut their social programs (both of which are quite modest by world standards) other than a greater political desire to not raise tax revenue than to maintain those social programs. While it's quite true that may well happen, given the political culture in both countries, it is by no means inevitable. It certainly has nothing to do with a "culture of entitlement" to the extremely modest social programs in the US, nor with the also modest social programs in Canada.