Most of the bases in Germany are to be closed in the next five years, but I'll have a hard time believing this is not wasteful spending that could be better spent keeping our people alive here.

Most of the countries with true universal healthcare also have significant debt problems, are beginning to ration that care, have huge percentages of adults living at home and can't sustain the cost of entitlements.

Links?

We can't afford a single payer, government provided healthcare system.

I can't understand how someone believes this. Or maybe I just don't understand what you're saying. This isn't a rental at Redbox, it's the ability of citizens of a modern civilization to remain alive.

The government isn't the problem, the "entitled" patient who needs health care to remain alive isn't the problem. The insurance company and the HMO and the pharmaceutical companies that are the problem, as they drive the cost of the care up for the patient so everyone can report great earnings year over year. The patient just needs an operation that bears an actual soup-to-nuts cost of a few thousand dollars but carries a high-fives bill because of the free market.

The free market destroys this made up person's life, unless they had the unbelievable fortune of being rich before the fact.

I know you're not a stupid person, so you must know something I don't. How do we pay for social security and medicare/medicaid entitlements AND enact a universal healthcare system, while lowering our debt enough to sustain our economy, creating jobs and avoiding a double dip recession?

My point being that people having $200k in health care bills is not a common thing. If you want to build a system where that never happens, you will not accomplish it in the forseeable future.

I would definitely start by nearly halving the budget for the armed forces, but even that doesn't bring spending down.

I'll throw out a potential "hot potato" because I'm really interested in gauging the diverse responses/thoughts on this subject.

Many states are throwing around bills to enact mandatory drug testing for those people who are on gov't subsidized income/welfare etc, the reason being that, if you have a job in many/most cases drug testing is a requirement of employment, so why for those who don't, not be subject to the same, because while not all, and I am very understanding of those people who bust their ass daily trying to make it, find a job in touch times etc, there are those who sit around on their ass collect that check and well spend that money on less than shall we say what it should be used for.

I'm mostly lurking now, but I've seen this halve the armed forces budget thing a few times now. This seems like quite an exaggeration of what is actually possible even with drastic cuts. How would you envision this playing out if you did get your wish of a 40-50% budget reduction? How would our role in the world change and what level of national security would we retain?

For arguments sake, I am guessing our troop payroll is about 40% of our budget, which is a fairly fixed cost. Even if we cut our troop force by 10% by letting reserves called to active duty go back to reserve status, that is only a 4% savings. To still achieve a 40-50% overall reduction would mean cutting most tech programs and physical purchases by 75-80%. This sounds like a recipie for disaster to me (modern USSR), but I'm curious to how others calling for this action see it playing out.

I would definitely start by nearly halving the budget for the armed forces, but even that doesn't bring spending down.

I often have a similar question about people who propose balancing the budget without raising revenues. Forget making it complicated-- do this simple mental exercise: a quick look at wikipedia tells me that the deficit for fiscal year 2010 was approximately $1.3 trillion dollars. Give me a list of $1.3 trillion dollars of expenditures you would cut in order to balance the budget that year. If you don't raise revenues at all, you cannot do it without seriously gutting programs that millions of people depend on. You can't do it without laying off thousands of people, and putting our already precarious economy in a downward spiral.

The debt and deficit problems are intensified because too many people are out of work. Get more people working and that will increase the revenues coming to the government without raising taxes.

raise taxes on everyone 2%, let the bush tax cuts expire for people who make 200k+ or families who make 250k+, eliminate a lot of silly tax deductions and loopholes, and cut defense, and you'll probably end up with a budget surplus again that can be used to pay down our debt faster than we can accumulate it for once.

It is showing that there was an INCREASE in TAX REVENUE after the implementation of the "Bush Tax Cuts". "Revenues" declined when the economy went into the crapper.

Van, it seems you missed this chart from the GAO:
<snip>

It is showing that there was an INCREASE in TAX REVENUE after the implementation of the "Bush Tax Cuts". "Revenues" declined when the economy went into the crapper.

Spending, not entitlements, created huge deficit
"We're $1.5 trillion in debt," Weekly Standard Editor Bill Kristol said Sunday, referring to this year's projected deficit. "Where's the debt coming from?"
...
There's no doubt federal spending has exploded in recent years. In fiscal 2007, the last year before things went haywire, the government took in $2.568 trillion in revenues and spent $2.728 trillion, for a deficit of $160 billion. In 2011, according to Congressional Budget Office estimates, the government will take in $2.230 trillion and spend $3.629 trillion, for a deficit of $1.399 trillion.

That's an increase of $901 billion in spending and a decrease of $338 billion in revenue in a very short time. Put them together, and that's how you go from a $160 billion deficit to a $1.399 trillion deficit.

But how, precisely, did that happen?
...
A lot of the higher spending has stemmed directly from the downturn. There is, for example, spending on what is called "income security" -- that is, for unemployment compensation, food stamps and related programs. In 2007, the government spent $365 billion on income security. In 2011, it's estimated to spend $622 billion. That's an increase of $257 billion.

Then there is Medicaid, the health care program for lower-income Americans. A lot of people had lower incomes due to the economic downturn, and federal expenditures on Medicaid -- its costs are shared with the states -- went from $190 billion in 2007 to an estimated $276 billion in 2011, an increase of $86 billion. Put that together with the $257 billion increase in income security spending, and you have $343 billion.

Add to that the $338 billion in decreased revenues, and you get $681 billion -- which means nearly half of the current deficit can be clearly attributed to the downturn.

That's a deficit increase that would have happened in an economic crisis whether Republicans or Democrats controlled Washington.

There is no line in the federal budget that says "stimulus," but Obama's massive $814 billion stimulus increased spending in virtually every part of the federal government. "It's spread all through the budget," says former Congressional Budget Office chief Douglas Holtz-Eakin. "It was essentially a down payment on the Obama domestic agenda." Green jobs, infrastructure, health information technology, aid to states -- it's all in there, billions in increased spending.

As for the Troubled Assets Relief Program, or TARP -- it has no specific line in the budget, either, but that is because it was anticipated to pay nearly all of its own cost, which it has.

Spending for Social Security and Medicare did go up in this period -- $162 billion and $119 billion, respectively -- but by incremental and predictable amounts that weren't big problems in previous years. "We're getting older one year at a time, and health care costs grow at 7 or 8 percent a year," says Holtz-Eakin. If Social Security and Medicare were the sole source of the current deficit, it would be a lot smaller than it is.

The bottom line is that with baby boomers aging, entitlements will one day be a major budget problem. But today's deficit crisis is not one of entitlements. It was created by out-of-control spending on everything other than entitlements. The recent debt-ceiling agreement is supposed to put the brakes on that kind of spending, but leaders have so far been maddeningly vague on how they'll do it.

One legislatively easy fix would be a mandate that ALL defense contracts go to U.S.-based manufacturers.

If by easy legislatively you mean harder in virtually every other way, then yes. We've been outsourcing these jobs for many years now, with commitments/facilities/organizations rooted in many different countries. The tax burden simply shifts and we pay even more for high-end military equipment. Oh we'll get jobs in the short term, but at a price that will end up cutting those jobs in the near future anyway, nullifying the point.

Looks good on paper, and gives an artificial "feel good" to the people who get ancy about outsourcing anything military, but it ignores the reality of the situation.

If the global economy continues to struggle for the next few years, I would not be surprised if there comes a renewed US protectionism fervor.

I don't know if that would be a good thing in the long run, but getting competitive in the manufacturing arena again would be good for the US. We are way too dependent on other countries for our goods. This is in part due to the higher wages required by workers in the US.

Right now the only way to get our safety from our own military back