hit-the-books reblogged your photo: The notion that if we cut our defense budget by as…

We could cut our defense budget and use that money to fix the economy, it’s ridiculous to think we need so much in our…

Actually, we probably couldn’t use that money to fix the economy because first of all, government spending doesn’t “fix” the economy and secondly, we are borrowing more money every fiscal year than we are spending on defense. That means that if we spent $0 on Defense next year, we’d still be losing money and have to borrow (about $500 billion dollars) to keep our massive Federal Government going. 

thevocalibertarian:

1. One recent survey discovered that 40 percent of all Americans have $500 or less in savings.

2. A different recent survey found that 28 percent of all Americans do not have a single penny saved for emergencies.

3. In the United States today, there are close to 10 million households that do not have a single bank account.  That number has increased by about a million since 2009.

4. Family homelessness in the Washington D.C. region (one of the wealthiest regions in the entire country) has risen 23 percent since the last recession began.

5. The number of Americans living in poverty has increased by about 6 million over the past four years.

6. Median household income has fallen for four years in a row.  Overall, it has declined by more than $4000 over the past four years.

7. 62 percent of middle class Americans say that they have had to reduce household spending over the past year.

8. According to a survey conducted by the Pew Research Center, 85 percent of middle class Americans say that it is more difficult to maintain a middle class standard of living today than it was 10 years ago.

9. In the United States today, 77 percent of all Americans are living to paycheck to paycheck at least some of the time.

10. In the United States today, more than 41 percent of all working age Americans are not working.

11. Since January 2009, the “labor force” in the United States has increased by 827,000, but “those not in the labor force” has increased by 8,208,000.  This is how they have gotten the unemployment numbers to “come down”.

12. Sadly, 60 percent of the jobs lost during the last recession were mid-wage jobs, but 58 percent of the jobs created since then have been low wage jobs.

13. Today, about one out of every four workers in the United States brings home wages that are at or below the federal poverty level.

14. Right now, the United States actually has a higher percentage of workers doing low wage work than any other major industrialized nation does.

15. At this point, less than 25 percent of all jobs in the United States are “good jobs”, and that number continues to shrink.

16. There are now 20.2 million Americans that spend more than half of their incomes on housing.  That represents a 46 percent increase from 2001.

17. According to USA Today, many Americans have actually seen their water bills triple over the past 12 years.

18. Electricity bills in the United States have risen faster than the overall rate of inflation for five years in a row.

19. In 1999, 64.1 percent of all Americans were covered by employment-based health insurance.  Today, only 55.1 percent are covered by employment-based health insurance.

20. Health insurance premiums rose faster than the overall rate of inflation in 2011 and that is happening once againin 2012.  In fact, it has been happening for a very long time.

21. According to one recent survey, approximately 10 percent of all employers in the United States plan to drop health coverage when key provisions of the new health care law kick in less than two years from now.

22. Back in 1983, the bottom 95 percent of all income earners had 62 cents of debt for every dollar that they earned.  By 2007, that figure had soared to $1.48.

23. Total home mortgage debt in the United States is now about 5 times larger than it was just 20 years ago.

24. Total consumer debt in the United States has risen by 1700 percent since 1971.

25. Recently it was announced that total student loan debt in the United States has passed the one trillion dollar mark.

26. According to one recent survey, approximately one-third of all Americans are not paying their bills on time at this point.

27. Right now, approximately 25 million American adults are living at home with their parents.

28. The percentage of Americans that find that they are able to retire when they reach retirement age continues to decline.  According to one new survey, 70 percent of middle class Americans plan to work during retirement and 30 percent plan to work until they are at least 80 years old.

29. The U.S. economy lost more than 220,000 small businesses during the recent recession.

30. In 2010, the number of jobs created at new businesses in the United States was less than half of what it was back in the year 2000.

31. Back in 2007, 19.2 percent of all American families had a net worth of zero or less than zero.  By 2010, that figure had soared to 32.5 percent.

32. Approximately 57 percent of all children in the United States are living in homes that are either considered to be either “low income” or impoverished.

33. In the United States today, somewhere around 100 million Americans are considered to be either “poor” or “near poor”.

34. In October 2008, 30.8 million Americans were on food stamps.  Today, 46.7 millionAmericans are on food stamps.

35. Approximately one-fourth of all children in the United States are enrolled in the food stamp program.

36. Right now, more than 100 million Americans are enrolled in at least one welfare program run by the federal government.  And that does not even count Social Security or Medicare.

37. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, an all-time record 49 percent of all Americans live in a home where at least one person receives financial assistance from the federal government.  Back in 1983, that number was less than 30 percent.

________

But no, really, it’s okay; vote for Bush/Obama/Romney.  Maybe this time it will work out for you.  

xamotomax reblogged your photo: The notion that if we cut our defense budget by as…

It is estimated that only roughly 30 billion dollars is needed to end world hunger. Think about that. Now look at these…

Then there’s the flip side of the coin. Those that think we can end poverty and world hunger by giving people money. 

Just think about what you are saying. Simple math tells us that you don’t understand simple math. 

The estimates of how many people live in poverty world-wide is around 20% of the population, which is about 1.5 billion people. $30 billion dollars applied here would mean about $20 dollars per person. PER PERSON. And you actually believed that this figure was true? Why? Because it’s got the word “billion” in it? 

I’m not even talking about the ignorant notion that just handing people money ends hunger and lifts people out of poverty. I’m talking about just giving people food. $20. You’re kidding, right? In what sense are you even considering that $30 billion? Per year? Per month? Per day? It’s got to be closer to the latter than the former. Even in the poorest countries, $20 a year is not enough to logistically grow, ship and supply food to everyone. 

If Warhawks and Social Justice bloggers ever went to war, the only casualty would be logical reasoning. 

operator-as-fuck reblogged your photo: The notion that if we cut our defense budget by as…

>russia and chinas our 2 biggest threats >russia >russia LOL OP

Really? Who’s the real boogie man? The “terrorists”? 

If you don’t think Russia and China are the two biggest threats to America, you’re clueless and ignorant to what’s actually going on in the world. 

Russia is doing everything it can right now to undermine the US Dollar and to knock it off from it’s standing as the World’s Reserve Currency. Russia, with China, India, South Africa and Brazil, are trying to form their own economics union called BRICS, which will use a new currency and those countries will no longer trade on the US Dollar and instead will force trade partners to use BRICS currency in order to do business with those countries. Combined, they GDP will exceed US GDP, as will their reach, since they will have major footholds on 4 continents. 

Russia and China have also supported every oil-rich country that has tried to walk off the Dollar-standard and onto a Euro, Gold or alternative reserve standard because they, and every economically inclined person, knows that the real strength of America is that we artificially prop up our dollar value by forcing countries to trade with us as the middle man and we use our military to strong-arm any of the naysayers. 

If you think a bunch of unknowing Middle Easterners that don’t even have air-to-surface capabilities are a threat to America, you are brain washed. The biggest war we are fighting right now is an economic one. 

dvhled replied to your photo: The notion that if we cut our defense budget by as…

LOL. We could spend just 1% of our GDP and we’d still out spend everyone combined. 

Besides, GDP is a bullshit number. If blow up a building and rebuild it, it adds to the GDP, but we didn’t actually gain anything from the act. You can make stats twist and bend in many ways, what you can’t hide is the raw facts. 

The raw fact is that we outspend EVERYONE and we don’t have to. Period. 

I’m no gun-hating hippie. I own more guns than I have fingers on my hands. I run a gun blog. I go hunting. But I’m also logical and I understand that we don’t need to outspend everyone and serve as the world police for the UN and the global muscle for the bankster run mafia. 

You chart is also ridiculous in the sense that the countries that spend a greater GDP% than the USA also have insignificant GDPs, which when anchored to the fixed cost of weapons in the global market(that happen to be astronomically high) of course countries with tiny GDP’s will show a disproportionately higher spending on a percentage basis. 

A fighter jet or a tank or a SAM missile doesn’t have the benefit of localized production and therefore doesn’t get priced regionally. You want a tank, you have to pay American, Russia, German, British or Chinese dollars for it because that’s who makes the tanks. There is no local discount. If a country like Armenia wants a fighter jet, they pay the same if not a lot more than America does for it, but Armenia doesn’t make anywhere near the same money. 

Myanmar could spend 1000% of their GDP and still have a smaller military than a single battalion of the US Army because Myanmar’s GDP is 0.003% of our GDP. They produce $51.9 billion dollars a year, as a country! Apple makes that in a single fiscal quarter. Just to contract, we spend about $348 billion dollars to purchase and operate just 12 nuclear submarines. We spent $1 billion on researching and test what submarine we wanted to buy! 

So get this “As a % of GDP” out of your system. 

laliberty:

huskerred:

squashed:

huskerred:

Raising taxes on certain categories of people to pay for our egregious spending habits in Washington only passes the buck to future generations.

Technically raising revenue pays for the spending we’re doing now—which eliminates the need to pass the buck to future generations. Any budget has two sides. Money in. Money out. Taxes are low now. A more progressive tax system can both eliminate the deficit and allow us to fund our priorities.

By western standards, yes, taxes are relatively low. I would suggest 1) that our priorities are out of whack and 2) that 20% of GDP should be the maximum amount of revenue consumable by the Federal Government. 

We’re already there. No more. 

Looking at increased revenue as the solution to budgetary woes is foolish. Even if the United States government took every penny of profit from all the companies on the Fortune 500, plus every penny made as income over $250,000 from every individual - it still wouldn’t be enough to pay for half the annual budget. It would take an outrageous amount of pillaging of property and net worth to get anywhere near paying off an annual budget, much less addressing existing debt. And then what happens the following year when no one’s left to cull? 

This is a spending problem. Period. 

Further, I contend that there is no such thing as a tax being too low, just as there couldn’t exist a stabbing by kitchen knife that was too gentle. Any taxation above zero is too high; taxation is theft.

Exactly. Glad there are some people on tumblr that actually understand this. 

Our issue isn’t that we don’t tax enough. In fact, we tax too much. The issue is that we spend even more. Way more than we bring in. That’s why we have a deficit. We’re spending more and also incurring way more debt that we can actually pay off. 

As a result, our dollar is losing value, we are feeling the venom of inflation and that’s why most Americans can’t afford to buy things that were easily obtainable just a decade ago.

Here’s Peter Schiff on the real reason gas prices are soaring, the stock market and the truth behind Warren Buffet’s taxes.  

People need to wake up and stop drinking the Kool Aid from the fountain of Congress. The solution is not taxation. These two factions of what seems to be the same political party want to start a war between classes, so they can use the mob-power of the many to force the entire country into a socialist, corporatist country where your Congressmen will have the ultimate power because they will have the final word on who does what, where, how and why.

They want to rule and control everything you do, right down to your sexual behaviors and food consumption. This ensures that the gov’t gets to touch every single dollar that is generated by the American people. 

That’s the end game for many politicians. 

@Suga_Shane