Argh... too much text to read so late at night. I'll go through all this in detail later...
Basically, my thoughts from what I've been hearing from NPR is that this is all just formalized throat clearing from Capitol Hill before they kick off another round of talking turkey on taxation. Honestly, I'm not looking forward to this because everybody and their mother is going to be out keep those special interest tax exemptions or even get new ones entirely.
Really, there isn't going to be a hell of a lot that can be done to trim the budget. Military spending can't really be cut by too much. It's a foregone conclusion that if you're not careful you can easily cut into the meat and bone of the US Armed Forces. (Witness the clusterfuck that was the US Navy's 'Optimal Manning' once they decided to enforce it. Sorry about that, USS Port Royal!) And that's to say nothing about things like pensions, MGIB, and health care for military families.
Bad enough they're closing schools for military children. Don't even dare try and say that the public schools are good enough - that might be true, but they tend to be miles out from base housing. Far enough in most cases that school districts will feel uncomfortable paying for all that gas to bus those kids. And this isn't even getting into how much strain on an already strained system these extra children are gonna exert.
Honestly, I don't side with Corporate America. They put a figurehead into the White House, stopped caring about the American Worker as much as they could legally get away with, and made more than a few metric fucktons of cash in the process. The least they can do is invest some of that money into the nation that has made their successes possible, and I ain't talking about China.
Basically, my thoughts from what I've been hearing from NPR is that this is all just formalized throat clearing from Capitol Hill before they kick off another round of talking turkey on taxation. Honestly, I'm not looking forward to this because everybody and their mother is going to be out keep those special interest tax exemptions or even get new ones entirely.
Really, there isn't going to be a hell of a lot that can be done to trim the budget. Military spending can't really be cut by too much. It's a foregone conclusion that if you're not careful you can easily cut into the meat and bone of the US Armed Forces. (Witness the clusterfuck that was the US Navy's 'Optimal Manning' once they decided to enforce it. Sorry about that, USS Port Royal!) And that's to say nothing about things like pensions, MGIB, and health care for military families.
Bad enough they're closing schools for military children. Don't even dare try and say that the public schools are good enough - that might be true, but they tend to be miles out from base housing. Far enough in most cases that school districts will feel uncomfortable paying for all that gas to bus those kids. And this isn't even getting into how much strain on an already strained system these extra children are gonna exert.
Honestly, I don't side with Corporate America. They put a figurehead into the White House, stopped caring about the American Worker as much as they could legally get away with, and made more than a few metric fucktons of cash in the process. The least they can do is invest some of that money into the nation that has made their successes possible, and I ain't talking about China.