The debt ceiling

I'm not paying more taxes, just so you can keep getting free cheese.

Cut the government cheese shipments to raditz and we could balance the budget in twenty years.. Stop sending him bologna as well, and we could balance it in five.

Or we could save 24 cents and only fund Israel. lol

Too bad it isn't that easy. I only consume about $50 a week in free government cheese.

On the bright side, it saves you from having to buy me TP. lol

Well now, there's a flaw in your thinking. Well actually theirs. They consider default as just another opportunity for control. Or as the old saw goes, they'd rather reign in hell than be a choir boy in heaven...something like that.

IOW, chaos is preferable to actual equality.

How does this add up ?
from $ 3. to $ 77 . per person
averages out to .25 per American ?


USA population
July 2009
307 006 550 times 25 U.S. cents = 76.7516375 million U.S. dollars.



CRS Report for Congress


https://www.au.af.mil/au/awc/awcgate/crs/rs21279.pdf



This is quite interesting .

HERE is a summary chart of United States Foreign Aid payments. Data is listed by major recipients, for the 6 years from 2001 to 2006.

United States Foreign Aid Summary Chart
All figures in millions of US dollars (rounded off)

https://www.vaughns-1-pagers.com/politics/us-foreign-aid.htm

Your two articles, while fascinating, show nothing about the percent of our budget that goes to foreign aid.

Now, for your first question..

There are a little more than 300,000,000 of us.. Each one of us gives 25 cents every year, which adds up to roughly 75 million a year..

But the money is not distributed equally. Israel gets the equivalent of $77 per Israeli, where poorer nations get the equivalent of $3 per resident of that country.

Because there are a lot of us, and we're helping relatively few with our money.. a quarter from each of us works out to dollars per person "helped"

When I posted about keeping our money at home , I said nothing about what percentage of it should go or stay.
That quote from your link shows we aren't helping the really needy countries much at all . So we need to start keeping our money here. IMO

If we could cut the word 'Pork" from politicians vocabulary and start keeping that measly 80 million here . That would be a start .

precentages, I said keep it at home. You are the one that posted about % 's.

Our measly 25 cents per person per year has nearly wiped smallpox from the face of the earth, and has kept more than 20 million people from dieing of AIDS..

But yeah.. It's like a flea on an elephants back, and won't make I bit of difference in our debt.. but if it makes you feel better to not spend the money and watch millions of innocent people die around the world, simply because it makes for a good republican sound byte, then let's stop sending the money.

A US default on our loans would be GREAT for the economy!

Look, no where did I say it would 'fix' our problems, and when all is put out on the table their is a lot of money leaving here that has nothing to do with wiping out diseases or feeding the needy.
What I did say is it would be a start.
It seems we all want someone to do something but damned if we want any of the 'fix' to effect us .We all piss and moan about the debt, but at the first hint that some real cuts should be made up jumps millions with all sorts of excuses why that can't happen , and it does not matter if the cuts would be effecting people here at home or some where else .
I guess when we are no longer The land of the free ' because some country has called in their markers when we default , then we will find out what cuts can be survived

Your so ready to 'defend' this Foreign Aid monies. Can you explain why we are giving $77.00 per person to a country that isn't in need and only $ 3.00 per person to other countries that have people literally dropping dead daily from starvation and disease .. And it was a few decades ago that our Foreign Aid money nearly wiped smallpox and there has been billions of dollars cut from that budget since then .

I know you didn't post an ideology, and I apologize for the misunderstanding there. I was responding to your suggestion I try and come up with a debt-free budget that is in line with the ideologies of the parties in power in the past several decades.

And, in response to your challenge, I don't necessarily have the ideological answers either, but am saying that if there is one ideology, or a system that encourages changing ideologies every several years, that creates, and continues to feed, the enlarging black hole that is now our national debt, which will probably lead to the collapse of our current government then, by definition, it just isn't practical.

Does that mean we need to cut out programs? Does it mean we need to raise taxes? Or does it mean we need a different form of government altogether? I don't know. But we obviously need something that fiscally works for it to simply remain viable.

My suggestion is to merely attempt to do this. But, who knows, it may be too late for us.

We won't default if we don't spend what we don't have, particularly in such enormous gobs. For a huge example, we can't afford Obamacare. We can't even borrow enough trillions to cover it--and Oby knows it. And even without it, as with Medicare, government inept interference and the law of unintended consequences alone, drive healthcare costs (or any other enterprise) up.

Well the choices are this:
1. Raise the debt ceiling
2. Don't raise it, and default.
3. Stop spending any money at all.

It's really not a choice.

As for Obamacare, the CBO says it will lower the deficit, are you calling them liars or have you done some analysis that they aren't smart enough to do?

(C'mon, 3. is hyperbole.)

4. Cut back on spending, (starting with Obamacare).

It isn't a question of intelligence with the CBO, it's a matter of politics. Hell, Medicare is going bankrupt and that's a drop in the bucket compared to Obamacare--which cuts Medicare btw.

You have gotten very cranky in the last couple of weeks.. Something going on IRL that's making you this way, or is it just winter blues?

How about we go after the biggies? Defense spending, and Medicare/Medicade?

Just cutting the waste from those two programs would save us TENS of billions of dollars at a minimum every year. And the only thing we would lose by having a watchdog to cut the waste is wasteful spending.

Those two items make up more than 50% of government spending.. Imagine what would happen if we could just cut the waste there.