Posted on 08/17/2010 2:43:45 AM PDT by Zakeet
I can see no scenario where we can avoid debt default in some form or fashion without brutally slashing entitlements - especially Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security and Civil Service pensions. Directly stated, Congress has spent and borrowed us into oblivion. The inevitable reduction of defense spending simply cannot go far enough.
And unfortunately, I cannot envisage any significant reduction in entitlements without a revolution ... and I cannot see that happening before the public becomes convinced it is the lesser of all other evils ... and, unfortunately, I cannot imagine that happening before this country is ravaged by hyperinflation.
I hope and pray with all my heart that I am wrong ...
>>Cuts in Social Security and Medicare, for which people have paid 15 per cent of their earnings all their lives, would result in starvation and deaths from curable diseases.
I stopped reading here.
Phase the programs out over 20 years.
I have paid into these programs all my life, and I regard these payments, like 90% of taxes, to be a deadweight loss.
Dr. Roberts when around the bend about 15 years ago, I seem to remember. Has he come back to his senses?
Uh Oh.. The evil ‘neocons’ are to blame...
Someone has been in the koolaid... LOL
...”I can see no scenario where we can avoid debt default in some form or fashion without brutally slashing entitlements - especially Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security and Civil Service pensions”...
The first place to start would be to cut the cost of living increases which state and federal employees get in their retirement pensions..Teachers, for example, retire early because they know they eventually will pull in more retirement than they were making while working. Private pensioners do not get such benefits. If these programs are not scaled back, they will crash for too many goodies have been added on over the years for the sake of politics. However, they should not be cut for people already on them but for those coming on, the scaling back should be gradual. Social security was originally set up to be a retirement supplement for old people and it has become a welfare system because of the politicians. We have elected ignorant power mongers to rule over us for many years because we went for the charm rather than real deal and it has never been worse than today...
Yah, ok. Stop military spending.
Don’t fire any bureaucrats, though
This guy sounds a tad ... left.
While I disagree with the good doctor on more than a few comments in his article, such as the anti-Semite remarks against Israel - I think he and Ray Bradbury are spot on in regards to the need for a Second American Revolution.
Of course, at this time most Americans are against a revolution, in the words of Claire Wolfe “America is at that awkward stage. It’s too late to work within the system, but too early to shoot the bastards.”
However, a daily growing number of radical republicans such as myself have long concluded that only a Second American Revolution can restore the Republic, because only by the brute force revolution can the Leftist ruling class be removed from all positions of authority in Government, Media, Academia, Church and Business.
In the words of an old 70s folk song we must have, “A Night They Drove Old Dixie Down.”
The Neo COns created Social Security and Medicare? The NEO CONS authored the Immigration Reform act in 1965? Read that Neo con, the late Lion Of the Senate,Ted Kennedy Speech from the floor of the Senate in 1965 of what reforming Immigration would not do to the Country,just google it.
The question the American People should have been asking is where did THE MONEY Go! The answer they get will be the same one Bernie Madoff gave
I think the good doctor is Libertarian and like Ayn Rand I disagree with the Libertarians on most issues, for instance, the American military must remain strong and forward deployed around the world to defend our nation.
Isolationism - the central theme of Libertarian foreign policy - never works.
However, he speaks right on in regards to the need to completely overthrow the ruling socialist establishment of America by revolution.
IMO, the United States already HAS run out of time to get its budget and trade deficits under control.
I do agree with that. I've pretty much abandoned any hope that elections will help us. After Nov, the power may shift in Washiington, but the GOP will follow the wisdom of Olympia Snowe, John McCain, Lyndsey Graham and others. We're marching off a cliff as fast as we can, and only one thing can turn it around.
I'm just waiting for the shooting to start.
My thoughts on Civil War are on my homepage. Basically every scenario I can see for this calamity would end up without a Republic at the end of it.
“Has he come back to his senses?”
If the wars are not immediately stopped and the jobs brought back to America, the US is relegated to the trash bin of history.
Obviously, the corporations and Wall Street would use their financial power and campaign contributions to block any legislation that would reduce short-term earnings and bonuses by bringing jobs back to America. Americans have no greater enemies than Wall Street and the corporations and their prostitutes in Congress and the White House.
The neocons allied with Israel, who control both parties and much of the media, are strung out on the ecstasy of Empire.
The United States and the welfare of its 300 million people cannot be restored unless the neocons, Wall Street, the corporations, and their servile slaves in Congress and the White House can be defeated.
Without a revolution, Americans are history.
Dr. Paul Craig Roberts is the father of Reaganomics and the former head of policy at the Department of Treasury. He is a columnist and was previously an editor for the Wall Street Journal. His latest book, “How the Economy Was Lost: The War of the Worlds,” details why America is disintegrating.
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Trash:
http://www.lewrockwell.com/roberts/roberts-arch.html\
Israel
In an article for Counterpunch magazine titled “Pirates of the Mediterranean”, Roberts wrote that for 60 years, Israel has replicated “the 17th, 18th, and 19th century theft of American Indian lands by US settlers.” Roberts repeated charges that Gaza is “the world largest concentration camp” populated by people who were “driven out of Palestine so that “Israel could steal their land.” He called the U.S. State Department a “puppet” of the Israelis and the U.S. itself a “puppet state” of the Israelis. He concludes the article by claiming that “there’s no money for California, or for Americans’ health care, or for the several million Americans who have lost their homes and are homeless, because Israel needs it.”
Neoconservatives and the South Ossetia War
In an interview on August 27, 2008, on a broadcast of The Alex Jones Show, Roberts stated that he believed that influential neoconservatives affiliated with the Bush administration were leading the United States into a nuclear confrontation with Russia over the situation in Georgia and South Ossetia. Roberts gave the conflict “almost total certainty if John McCain gets in office” and stated that the conflict would be in a timeframe of about two or three years.
September 11, 2001 attacks
Of the 9/11 Commission Report he wrote in 2006, “One would think that if the report could stand analysis, there would not be a taboo against calling attention to the inadequacy of its explanations.” (see Criticisms of the 9/11 Commission Report). He has reported what he says are findings by experts that conclude there is a large energy deficit in the official account of the collapse of the three WTC buildings, and says that this deficit remains unexplained.
Roberts comments on the “scientific impossibility” of the official explanation for the events on 9/11 and says those engineers and physicists who accept this theory are wrong. On August 18, 2006, he wrote:
I will begin by stating what we know to be a solid incontrovertible scientific fact. We know that it is strictly impossible for any building, much less steel columned buildings, to “pancake” at free fall speed. Therefore, it is a non-controversial fact that the official explanation of the collapse of the WTC buildings is false... Since the damning incontrovertible fact has not been investigated, speculation and “conspiracy theories” have filled the void.
On the (back) cover of Debunking 9/11 Debunking (2007) he is quoted:
Professor Griffin is the nemesis of the 9/11 cover-up. This new book destroys the credibility of the NIST and Popular Mechanics reports and annihilates his critics.Book Cover Quote
Roberts adding that the so-called neoconservatives intended to use a renewal of the fight against terrorism to rally the American people around the fading Republican Party. “The administration figures themselves and prominent Republican propagandists ... are preparing us for another 9/11 event or series of events,” he said. “You have to count on the fact that if al Qaeda is not going to do it, it is going to be orchestrated.
National media
“Anyone who depends on print, TV, or right-wing talk radio media is totally misinformed. The Bush administration has achieved a de facto Ministry of Propaganda.”
“The uniformity of the US media has become much more complete since the days of the cold war. During the 1990s, the US government permitted an unconscionable concentration of print and broadcast media that terminated the independence of the media. Today the US media is owned by 5 giant companies in which pro-Zionist Jews have disproportionate influence. More importantly, the values of the conglomerates reside in the broadcast licenses, which are granted by the government, and the corporations are run by corporate executives—not by journalists—whose eyes are on advertising revenues and the avoidance of controversy that might produce boycotts or upset advertisers and subscribers. Americans who rely on the totally corrupt corporate media have no idea what is happening anywhere on earth, much less at home.”
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Lomg story short:
NO
You are right on target, my FRiend!
I have been one of a few voices in the wilderness crying out for the need of a Second American Revolution for YEARS, and even at this late day just before the Hindenburg Omen comes around once again and the economy destroyed by hyperinflation, the vast majority of Americans are not yet in favor of rebellion.
Yes, it will take an Economic Holocaust for the scales to fall off the eyes of our fellow Americans. They must be reduced to hunger, poverty, homelessness and RAGE before they shoulder arms and march on Washington, D.C.
People like us are like the Russian revolutionary Yevgraf following the badly led and ill equipped Russian Army to its inevitable destruction on the battlefields of the First World in the movie “Doctor Zhivago” - We know the oppressive Regime will be destroyed by revolution because of its bad decisions, but until the “boots” wear out and the people have had ENOUGH, they won’t listen to the voices of revolution.
Until the Feds began taxing the $%ap out of everybody in the country, people bought and sold houses for hundreds of years without their involvement. Same thing with healthcare, How do you think we all got here?!!
I had many ancestors that lived through their 80’s and 90’s without either Social Security or Medicare!!!Imagine. Some of them even participated in King George III’s schooling
I don’t think I’m going to take economic advice from an apologist for Iran and Palestinian terrorists, and one who equates our soldiers to Saddam Hussein’s henchmen. The man’s either on some islamofascists’ payroll or he’s got dementia.
He’s probably got an Ahmed Huber portrait on his desk.
I would imagine many Gentlemen said the same sort of thing to Sam Adams on the eve of the First American Revolution, but like Patrick Henry said to those critics on March 23, 1775 in his famous speech, I would say as well, the revolutionary war has already been started by those who desire statism and our only options are to submit to tyranny as slaves, or to fight.
A pity it has come to war, but like someone noted wisely, “EMBRACE THE SUCK!”
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