That's an economic issue, not a production issue, correct? We have a ton of food waste.
MSU featured in this NYT article on education funding
- Thread starter Faustdog
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Social Security and Medicare are our largest ticket items by far, and if they don't get "fixed", or can't get "fixed", there is some pain coming that will impact everyone. We are in a game of generational roulette. Nobody knows what generation will be left without a chair...
The idea that anyone looks at this clown show that is going on in the white house with stupid hats on the table for people to grab and thinks, "yeah, this is just how you should run a country" is bizarro world stuff...
We cut all of our social programs. If enough parents who don't care about their kids see their kids starve to death, they will all bring their skillset to the free market and bootstrap themselves right out of poverty***
Its all plus availability. The availability of healthy food (fresh produce, lean protein, etc) vs the DG with SPAM and twinkies.
It's almost like our foreign aid was tied to foreign policy or something. Crazy, but if you are committed to ending foreign policy and turning into an isolationist friend of despots, then do you really need foreign aid?
If it's going to waste, IMA get mine mentality is certainly a contributing factor to spiraling spending. If Congress ever decided to congress again, and some industrious soul could find a path, it would be worthwhile to have laws/rules around Bill complexity that eliminated the ability of people to attach/hide pork.
I think that collectively, with our votes, we've made that pitch. Not a formal statement, more a line of thinking that federal government is hopelessly broken so we might as well get our part of the waste to use for our people.
For sure that is true. It was posted earlier in this thread that some MS legislators took the view that they would fight to reduce federal spending and then try to grab as much of what was passed as possible. That is a similar mindset to what you describe.
I have absolutely said at work 'well its worth trying because if it ends up not being helpful, it only cost us 10%'...because the federal government is picking up the other 90%. That is also a similar mindset to what you describe.
While that style of thinking does exist, what you described and what I described are perspectives that are taken after the fact. The legislation or program is already in place at that point.
Johnson86-1 is claiming its been done before legislation or program is created and its used as a selling point to get states to join. I havent seen that.
I'd really like for you to explain this. I'm a boomer and all I've ever done was play by the rules and paid the government what they said I owed them. Social security was was started in the 30's but the first boomer was born until a decade later . I'm not trying to argue if I've done something I should feel badly about I'd like to know exactly what I did .
Yeah, maybe we wouldnt then need to possibly create this 'National Medal of Motherhood' award for any women who have 6 or more kids.
Sweet, we can blame Boomers for this insane pronatalism movement!
While at MSST I participated in undergrad research stints for both the baseball team (biomechanics) and cardiovascular degeneration for the Bio department. Research is integral to any institution. That being said, that are quite a lot of bull**** things wrapped up in millions of government research dollars that are a complete waste of time and money. That should absolutely come to an end
Boomers are uniquely bad and selfish as a generation, not necessarily individually. But, the problem with social security and medicare was known in the early 1980's. In 1983, as a whole, voters basically said, "instead of coming up with a plan for hot to use current excesses to fund future shortfalls, let's spend the excess collections and promise ourselves that younger workers will pay us back for spending that money." I'm sure lots of individual voters wanted to stop that but were in the minority, but as a whole, that's the route they chose, and boomers were already a big part of the voting block, with the youngest boomers basically 19 when that was voted on.
And as bad as the 1983 "fix" was, it's going to be way worse because I guarantee you that when the social security "trust fund" shows zero, social security recipients are not going to take the position of, "well, we already 17ed youngers workers pretty good by spending down the 'trust fund', it's probably time for us to just take the haircut at this point. After all, we've had roughly 50 years to plan for this." What they're going to argue for is to screw younger, generally poorer workers, even harder, and demand that they pay more in taxes to make up for the fact that boomers promised themselves younger people would give them a lot of money.
I would say that at the very least, if a boomer hasn't been planning to be able to take a 25%ish haircut on social security at some point, they have basically been planning on being an *** hole. Granted some people probably are just doing their best to get by at this point, but we are a rich country, and the vast majority of them had the opportunity to plan to not demand to screw over younger workers.
Thanks, I definitely agree with half of your advice LOL
We boomers collectively voted in a manner that gave us a government for the last 45+ years that in some combination spent too much and taxed too little the result of which is $31 trillion in debt.
I was a huge fan of Milton Friedman in my McCool Hall days as an econ major and his "Starve the Beast" pitch to the Reagan Revolutionaries to make the federal government shrink. That turned out to be a big bust. The government "beast" grew significantly and the federal debt went from about $800 billion to $31 trillion.
Our current annual interest payments on this debt - now projected to be $950 billion in 2024 and $1 trillion in 2026 - is more than the cumulative federal debt when this all began. Colossal failure.
Like you, I played by the rules. But the problem is, we voted for the people that wrote the rules that screwed the future. We can't deny that.
Meh, inflation adjusted tax revenue is about 2.37 times larger than it was in 1983 (just picking that year since it was the year of the social security "fix"). The population has grown by about 45.5% since that time. We collected plenty of revenue. We just had a corrupt political system that couldn't keep resist spending as long as voters didn't penalize them for mortgaging their future.
Been resisting getting defensive but my thinking all along. Between GOAT and 86, seems we are the root of all evil. Just take it in stride, sure blame me. Now what?
You took that swing at us types more gracefully than I did. I was across the drill field from you in McCain so I don't understand a lot about economics other than "income needs to equal expenses" (a phrase often maligned on here). Simplistic, but a great starting place for all things econ from my POV. I simply voted for those who I hoped would use that as a starting point but seems many "econ types" have rationalized their way to "you don't understand"/debt is good/OK ... until it isn't.
More than happy to give up my SS COLA, cut my payment, adjust Medicare if every one of you "representatives" for the next 10 years commits to making us whole again by doing such. Something tells me that's not happening. In the mean time, there are a lot of folks not in my position to say such. Now what do we do?