OT: End of forced Child Support

This sort of thing (less visibly, lots of expensive clothes, makeup, hairdressing, even nip and tuck work) could be considered a kind of investment intended to make a 'sale' of sorts.

I suspect that's why you'll seldom see a real estate agent in a beat-up car, even if they're not doing so well.

Best regards, Spehro Pefhany

My ex is a race fan and likes sporty cars. Nothing wrong with that but I don't agree with her living it up on child support and the kids not having the same standard of living.

I just think we have a messed up system, we vote for the politician that promises us the most without making us pay for it. Sort of like letting your kids decide they want to eat sweets for every meal, cupcakes, Twinkies, etc., it would make them happy for a while but they will pay later with health problems. U. S. is becoming more and more unhealthy as the greedy citizens vote for the politicians promising the most spending with the least paying.

RogerN

Does that mean you're in favor of raising taxes?

Only if they cut spending. Now if they raised taxes to 100% they'd probably spend 120%.

RogerN

Whish spending do you want to cut, Roger?

Tax exemptions for organized religion, yes? (Good on You, Roger!)

--Winston

It would be nice if we had electives government benefits like we do with job benefits, if you want ObamaCare, then you pay for it, if you don't, you don't.

I saw an email recently that a man that serves in armed services for 20 years and retires gets 50% pay but a politician that serves only 1 term gets

100% pay. How about a politician that retires gets 50% pay too? Of course there is no reason to keep funding Planned Parenthood since ObamaCare is supposed to provide all those services for women. The Palestinians are involved with Hamas, a terrorist group, so we can save $500 million/yr by not giving to those associated with terrorists. Cut funding to PBS, they can survive on their own if they are worth their bandwidth.

RogerN

So what do you do with people like Gunner? Let them die in the street? We already HAVE universal health care. It's just that we pay through the nose for it, because many people don't have insurance.

Now you've switched from a really big cost -- health care -- to one that's so small you can hardly measure it.

If you're going to descend into bitching about trivial costs, you're only going to delude yourself about our real problems. Deal with the real ones first. Then you can bitch about the trivia all you want. Just don't waste the country's time and energy bitching about things that are so small you can hardly measure them, while the big ones are eating us alive. Leave that to the Tea Party.

If it ever does, then Planned Parenthood will have outlived most of its usefulness. But PP gets $75 million in federal funding. That's 5.35 x 10^-6 of the federal budget.

Are you going to get serious about this, or are you going to play child's games?

Well, we give about twice that much each year in total aid to the West Bank and Gaza governments. That's 0.007% of the budget.

Roger, WHEN ARE YOU GOING TO GET SERIOUS??

IS THIS A JOKE??? I won't even embarrass you by reporting those numbers.

Get real, Roger. You either know what's real and serious about our budget, or you're useless to the discussion.

If a half billion dollars is a joke to you then feel free to send that tiny amount to Iggy's paypal account. All the little wastes add up. If I were given the job of cutting spending then I would take the time to see where more significant cuts could be made. But even if I have a hundred thousand dollars in my pocket I'm still not going to pay $100 for a Happy Meal. Waste that insignificant amount of money enough times and you will see it makes a dent. Machining related, is it considered a waste of time and insignificant if all we can do is remove 0.001" of material per flute of the end mill? There are some cuts we can make that are clearly a waste, it may be like 0.001" removed for a 500" toolpath but it's a move in the right direction. I guess you'd just shut off the mill, 0.001" is just too insignificant? Yet Iggy would run it and have the cut made before long.

Our spending to GDP is supposed something like 24.8% now, this is supposed to be 4% above average, so even a few percent can help. Should I skip my mortgage payments because they pay such a small percentage toward my principal?

RogerN

So, RogerN, you want to cut the things which don't cost much and you want to ignore the things that are burning through our budget and you don't want to pay taxes. Ok, let's try this.

1. eliminate the air force and the navy - we have no need for either and they weren't in the constitution explicitly
2. eliminate all federal regulation, support, and guidance for air travel, there was no air travel specifically in the constitution
3. eliminate all federal aid to anyone at any time, including social security, medicare, AFDC, veterans benefits, as well as all benefits for any member of government outside of their salary.
4. eliminate all federal monuments, parks, buildings, etc, including the veterans memorials, the white house and so on, we can rent a warehouse somewhere and set up cubicles
5. eliminate the department of state, we don't give a damn about other countries.
6. eliminate all federal support, regulation and encouragement for education, nutrition, drugs, laws and so on.

That will leave us with no deficit. I can afford to move to a country where citizens will pay taxes for services, you can have the rubble that will be left of a once great nation

I believe it is important to cut all the trivial costs. If you do not cut trivial costs, you will never have the courage to cut the big ones.

If you are going to be serious, you have to take the same approach on all costs. Saying you are only going to look at big programs is really saying cost cutting does not matter.

Equally valid in when are you going to get serious, Ed?

But PBS does get money from the federal budget. Explain why cutting it out of the federal budget should not be considered. Keeping PBS in the budget, means that a hundred other items will be arguing " But we are like PBS. The Rain Forest exhibit in Iowa is just as cultural as PBS ."

See

for detail on that and other projects in Iowa that are planning on getting federal funds.

Dan

First off, I've been getting carried away with Teabagger numbers . The total federal budget is less than 1/3 of what I was counting, so multiply those percentages I gave by 3 and they'll be closer. Which means that they're still a joke, just a little bigger.

Secondly, when you're looking at a budget that's almost $4 trillion, and complaining about $75 million in your assessment of where to cut the budget to reduce our deficits, it's time for an attitude adjustment. In millions, the budget is $3,833,861, and you're obsessed with Planned Parenthood, at $75. My God, Roger.

You can't complain about "the most spending" and point to things so small, as a percentage of the budget, that they get lost in the rounding, and be taken seriously about taxes and deficits.

I'll give you a clue: Unless you go after Social Security, Medicare, and Defense, you're just batting your wings against the sides of the cage.

If you want an easy way to create your shopping basket of programs to cut, this is the slickest and easiest to use:

Well, take a look at the budget I pointed to above, and see how many times you can save on Happy Meals before you realize you haven't made a dent.

Your end mill ain't turning. In fact, you're running a planer, and you have to cut about six feet off of the workpiece.

As I said, you're end mill isn't rotating. You're pointing to a few insignificant things. The question is whether you can tell what's significant and what's not, and address significant things before you start carping about your favorite budget hobby horses. So far, it's not.

So you want to cut "a few percent" off of the budget -- say, from 24.8% of GDP to 22%? That's around 11% of the budget itself.

Go for it. This isn't your mortgage we're talking about. These are huge programs, very little of which is truly discretionary.

Who's the pensions for? And who gets all this government healthcare?

RogerN

Well, then, let's hope you hurry up, because the big ones are the ones that are causing us trouble. After health care and its projected costs for the future, the rest kind of fades away.

I'm saying that the big ones that are running up the national debt and creating the future financial risks. If you don't address them, you're kidding yourself. It's like trying to diet and you've decided to start by shaking the sprinkles off of two or three of the dozen cupcakes you eat every day, adding a couple each day. By the time you've shaken off all of the sprinkles, you've gained another ten pounds and you STILL haven't done anything that's going to help.

I am serious, Dan. And, no, that's not equally valid. Roger is focusing on a couple percent of the budget -- not even that, yet. I'm looking at the biggest costs, of which health care is the one that's going to eat Chicago.

Because Roger and many others are fiddling while Rome burns. And now you're saying you think the music he's making is just as important as putting out the fire.

PBS and 500 other bits and pieces of discretionary spending are not the fire. Health care is the fire. Defense is like a pile of cordwood waiting to burn, but it's not the fire, either. Social Security will take care of itself. Look at the actuarials. The SS "crisis" is so much smoke and baloney.

Health care is the problem, because costs keep going up while technology improves. It's one of the few things that keeps costing more as we improve the technology and methods. It's a runaway, and there are no structures in place, nor incentives in the entire system, that could cut costs. Obama's plan will put a few small ones in place, but its real value is that it COULD take the perverse incentives out of the hands of institutions that control the money -- like private insurance companies, one hopes, and the legal system that encourages redundancy, and private hospitals that always need to have the best and latest, even when five hospitals within cannon range of each other also have it, and they're each being utilized at a rate that's

1/5 of peak efficiency.

Of course. But it doesn't matter. You can forget about that trivia until you attack the big things. Because if you keep letting the big things go while you argue over the trivia, you're going to find there's nothing left to argue about by the time you get up the courage to address the real problems.

Uh, that was in 2004. Spending that money in 2004 was pure pork. Spending it in 2010 would have been stimulus. We didn't need stimulus in

2004. We did in 2010.

And those projects amount to $23 million. Let me remind you again of the size of the budget: It's almost $4 trillion. In millions, it's $4,000,000. You're complaining about $23.

Sometimes I think that people who think like you and Roger about the budget just can't deal with lots of zeros. The other six zeros do not all count for the same thing. d8-(

Drill down -- click the little plus signs to the left of each item. It gets quite specific.

It's Medicare and Medicaid. Drill down. You'll see the whole thing.

1 right and 2 wrongs. Cut things that obviously waste and look at what parts can be cut from the larger items. Fist cut out all the obvious waste, then taxes need to be high enough to cover the expense. I'm not against raising taxes, just against wasteing money and raising taxes.

Just cut the waste and tax as required. Is it right for one person to have to live without medicine so that an ex-politician can have full pay for not working? Is it right to charge to poor to pay the wealthy?

RogerN

Depending on your definition of "waste," that's a lot better than your recommendations of cutting PBS and Planned Parenthood, which are real programs that benefit real people, with costs that disappear in the rounding. The GAO found many billions of dollars worth of overlapping and redundant operations, mostly similar operations in different agencies, in a report they produced just a couple of months ago. Getting rid of the duplication could reduce spending by somewhere between $25 billion and Eric Cantor's estimate of $200 billion. (Cantor probably is 'way overboard; $25 billion is conservative.)

That's fine, but it still doesn't make much of a dent. Even $200 billion is only 5% of the budget. Still, it's something that should be doable and that, once the squabbling stops among the agencies involved, should not be controversial or lead to a lot of intra-Congressional conflict.

Beyond that, one man's waste is another's essential program. That's where the political battles begin. If we spend our time arguing over $10 million or even $100 million programs, the real problem is just going to grow while we fight over trivia. If you really want to address those smaller programs, they should be a much lower priority than the ones that cost hundreds of billions. And we know which ones they are.

Correction -- that was Tom Coburn's estimate, not Eric Cantor's.

In my own experience, having to live on credit during "no income" months while hospitalized, every dollar put on the credit card had to be paid back double by the time the interest accumulated over months-years of payments. So perhaps a half billion in spending reduction could save a billion in a few years. If it were my job, or if I had influence on government spending, I would spend time to look through the budget and recommend real cuts, but we have elected officials to do that, and some are coming up with plans.

RogerN