Nothing new here, just another leftist cut out in the standard cookie cutter mold, identical to every other little budding communist.

Thus I gave up.

As for whether you fit comfortably into the leftist ensemble, let’s consider:

You find nothing wrong with a Social Security ponzi scheme that even most liberal economists agree is in trouble – well, nothing that can’t be fixed with (what else) a hefty tax increase.

You concede Baklava’s numbers showing the reduction of military spending from 50% of budget to 19% – and conclude that somehow means the military’s share of the pie is increasing. On that, I’ll be charitable and assume were you standing on your head when you looked at the same graphs Baklava used.

And then there’s the blubbering about the vetos of the SCHIP expansion, which was a vote-buying gimmick to expand the program into the middle and even upper-middle class. The ironic thing is that the reason for the veto is that the expansion did NOT target those who should benefit from the plan, but whether a program is actually useful seems to be less important to you than how much it can be spent on it. Military excepted, of course.

Leftist? If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck…

By the way, when you rail against the evil military industrial complex, you might try to get the company names right. It’s McDonnell Douglas, not McDonald-Douglas. They made aircraft, not hamburgers. And the company hasn’t existed as such for over 10 years since it was acquired by Boeing. You really need to stop using that yellowing copy of the Daily Worker as your reference.

Can you guess what I think of your argument?

I gave that about a nanosecond of consideration, which is more than it merits, and concluded that I don’t give a rip.

Military spending needs to be back at 50% of the budget again. Given the nature of the world we live in and the threats we face that might even be too little.

Folks comparing the numbers using GDP when up to a few years ago numbers were based on GNP, as just one example.

Numbers recited that are optimally coerced to reflect one side of an argumenet. “Truth in politics”? Jebus H. Keee-rist.

Being an accountant, I’ve often heard the expression “The numbers don’t lie”. I know from personal exerience that they can be manipulated to “stretch” the truth though.

For example, increase military spending.

Duh.

When it is slashed to 19% due to a non-existant “peace dividend” of course it will be increased once we go to war. Without looking at exact numbern increase of “one-third” will still only make it les than 25% of the entire budget wghich is less than half of what it once was.

I would hope that the increase of spending on the military is rising at a faster rate than socila programs.

*Shrug*

No matter, most is fiscally irresponsible in both the social and military spending as the governemet is terrribly innefficient at ANYTHING the do.

Please, continue your discussion though. I will no longer interfere.

But it doesn’t negate the fact that these things are larger and larger expenditures PER year and are a larger and larger percentage of the budget as compared to everything else.

They are not. Your blanket statement is not born out by the facts.

Now, not to burst your bubble that you are some kind of guru when it comes to reciting facts and figures better than everyone, you were wrong. I can’t put it any nicer and would hate to think you deliberately lied about this simple fact.

Opinions are one thing. They can change and should adapt in the face of changing facts. Facts don’t change, they don’t lie. If you insist on continuing this childish display, I take it that your offer to return here was to fulfill some foolish desire throw rhetorical stones and not engage in an adult discussion. That’s sad, because you seem to grasp the language well enough, you just don’t have the intellectual honesty to admit when you may have been in error. Too bad.

Baklava: Just so I know how much of a liar I am, how much of that Heritage Foundation graph is attributing debt service and military retirement pay as part of the mandatory spending? I take it you are agreeing that the majority of debt service stems from over and off budget military cost. And is that graph using real dollars or adjusting for inflation as a percentage of GDP (actual buying power). I can’t tell from the graph and I’d like to compare apples to apples if possible. Factoring spending as function of GDP reveals a much flatter chart.

I can link interesting graphs too. From the looks of it, the debt was dropping pretty steadily from Truman on, leveled off when Nixon got in power, skyrocketed during Reagan/Bush, went down again from the Ike-like percentage of GDP it reached under GHW Bush up until Clinton began paying it down again, and Bush (43) pushed it back to Ike levels.

And BTW, read what I wrote again. I was talking about the rate of increase of the debt and military spending vs a much slower rate of increase for the social programs.

Let me try and explain it this way:
Here’s the Rate of increase in ‘07 budget over ‘06 budget:

Military or mostly military:
Debt service rose 13.4% over last year.
On-budget Military rose 9%
Vets 5.8%

Unfunded social programs:
Medicaid 2.9%
unemployment/welfare 2%
education 1.3%

Fully funding Social Programs:
Security 7%
Medicare 12.4%

Now, Medicare is as much a problem with a whole different argument, what to do about health care, but most of it is from rising cost industry wide. Either way, since it and Soc.Sec. are running in the black, they pay down the debt, the biggest item when charting the marginal rise in spending per item.

Oh, and don’t forget the wars which aren’t even budgeted and go straight to the cost of the debt.

I know it’s redundant, especially when you are so fond of repeatedly calling me a liar, but really, are you daft?

And it was by design. The White House itself stated that Bush has increased military spending by a third over his first term. Now if you factor in inflation, the much smaller rates of increase on the social programs (at least the unfunded ones) would be considered a reduction as a percent of GDP.

You realize the more you call me a liar over things I am not lying about only makes you look foolish. Misguided or uninformed would be better things to call me when a plain reading of what I wrote shows not a hint of mendacity on my part.

But it did enable us to pay off the WWII debt.

Wrong again, Mark. The 90% tax rates didn’t help us pay off the debt. Rather, they delayed the payment. Had the JFK tax cuts been done sooner, the fed’s revenue would have increased sooner, and the debt retired faster.

So if paying off the WWII debt – or the debt we have today, for that matter – were important to you, you’d be looking for the optimal point on the Laffer curve, not for the 90% marginal rate area which stifles investment, costs jobs, and reduces federal tax receipts.

But that’s not really what you’re interested in, is it? From what you’ve posted here, your main goal is to pare down the military and watch every nickel they spend – a diligence you utterly refuse to apply to any entitlement programs. Your secondary aim seems to be tossing around the standard leftist “punish the rich” meme. If someone has a dollar more than you, it must be confiscated in the name of some perverted sense of social justice. You really don’t care if those policies cause economic downturns and less money for your precious entitlements in the long run – as long as you feel good about sticking it to the evil rich and the corporations. It may not make any economic sense, but name me a leftist idea that does.

uh that’s our point. No it isn’t. Military spending has diminished over the years Mark from 50% of the budget to 19% Period. You can see a graph. You can see the line go down and down and down over a 40 year period.

It is NOT the problem. What is the spending problem Mark is the 81% of spending that is everything else. Period.

Mark wrote the LIE again, “hat doesn’t graph out to a curve, but is a straight diagonal up and to the right — at a much faster pace than the entitlements.”

uh no. It’s gone from 50% of the budget 40 years ago to 19% of the budget.

Mark shows no command of the facts by writing, “It will eventually overtake the entitlements”

You have it in the reverse. At this point you are being negligent and lazy. You have been informed of your lying.

Mark would have you believe we could spend so much on the military because the high tax rates brought in more revenue.

Sadly, no.

But it did enable us to pay off the WWII debt.

Guys, the Laffer Curve is a curve, you eventually reasch the point of diminished returns, unlike the debt, most of which is attributable to deficit spending on the military. That doesn’t graph out to a curve, but is a straight diagonal up and to the right — at a much faster pace than the entitlements.

It will eventually overtake the entitlements.

It is a feature, not a bug of Grover Norquist’s goal of starving the beast.

It will, if unchecked not only make the social programs suffer, but will strangle the Pentagon as well.

Not all military spending is bad, just the dumb and wasteful spending. Back to Barack Obama which started this thread. I’m not against all wars, just dumb ones. That is his best line and although I’m not a supporter of his or Hillary, I agree with the sentiment.

Sev wrote, “The nice thing about military spending is how much you get for your dollar compared with social programs aimed at subsistence level people.”

This is an incredibly important point. Investments in our security and in merchandise that projects power is very useful in that there are people learning and producing and the research and development increases our superiority. The government awarding contracts to the more productive companies who have more ingenuity is a system that far exceeds Russia’s where people were just paid to work and produce military hardware.

You pay the troops, they pay taxes back, in addition to providing both national security and assistance in natural disasters.

You pay the Eeeevil military industrial complex, you not only get a product (Humvees, tanks, aircraft) you get money back from both corporate taxes, and from taxes on the workers.

And in addition you get technological advances that spin off to the civilian sector.

So, for every dollar spent, you get a fair amount in taxes back. But, let’s instead spend it as a handout to people who won’t work, for example, and see how little we get back in taxes compared to military spending. The poor don’t pay taxes.

Baklava: We used to spend 50% of the budget on defense 40 years ago. Do you Mark recognize that?
Mark: And that was during a period where the marginal tax rate was 50% to 90% on the top 10%.

Mark would have you believe we could spend so much on the military because the high tax rates brought in more revenue. Wrong. Actually, Mark is making Bak’s point. The higher marginal rates had the effect of reducing revenue – witness the windfall for the government after the JFK, Reagan, and Bush tax cuts. So the military was getting 50% of a smaller pie, not a larger one. So after the tax cuts, where did all that extra money go? To the war machine? Well, no. Entitlements of one sort or another. Interestingly, Mark never refers to those programs as “black holes”…that’s a term he reserves for the Pentagon.

So Mark’s economic vision is one of very high taxation, massive and continually growing entitlements, and a military that subsists, relatively speaking, on spitballs (to use Zell Miller’s apt phrase), all the while ignoring the islamofascist threat (because, in Mark’s disdainful words, wanting to invest in America’s security is “going all patriotic on me”). That’s a good game plan if your goal is to ruin an economy. Not so much, if you want to grow and prosper.

So what color is the sky on your planet, Mark?