Medicare and SS are welfare programs. People receive far more in benefits than they contributed to the systems. And many receive benefits (spouses and children) that never contributed to the systems.
The average Medicare recipient receives three times more in benefits than they contributed to the system. 40% of all Medicare costs are paid by the General Fund. The premiums for Parts B cover only 25% of the costs, by law. The other 75% comes from a subsidy from the General Fund.
Most current SS recipients receive far more in benefits than they contributed. If we want to make these systems self-sustaining and actuarial sound, taxes must be increased or benefits reduced or some combination thereof.
I referenced welfare, because those people never contributed a dime to what they are drawing, and able bodied people are on those programs instead of going out and finding work.
There is no doubt that there fraud and abuse of Medicaid, food stamps, etc. But using that as the justification for spending trillions of dollars on endless wars that we can't afford is intellectually dishonest.
Our Ukraine efforts should make Russia think twice.
Think twice about what? Why aren't our European allies doing more, since they are more at risk geographically? This war has been going on since 2014 and we were front and center at provoking it.
March 2022-- Just eight of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization's (NATO) 30 member nations met the alliance's military spending guidelines, with the U.S. still by far the defense pact's biggest spender, according to the organization's annual report.
The new numbers were published Thursday in NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg's annual report for 2021. While figures show more members of the Cold War-era military alliance are meeting their spending commitments, they confirm a complaint from some Republicans, and others, that member countries aren't paying their fair share.
NATO members in 2006 agreed to spend at least 2 percent of their gross domestic product (GDP) on defense to ensure the readiness of the alliance, which guarantees a mutual response if one member is attacked. Member countries in 2014, following Russia's annexation of Crimea, signed off on a pledge calling for them to meet the 2 percent GDP spending guidelines by 2024.
However, the report shows that the U.S. still accounted for just over half of the alliance's GDP spending and 69 percent of total defense expenditures in 2021. The report puts total NATO military spending for 2021 at $1 trillion.
The other countries that met the 2 percent threshold include the United Kingdom, Greece, Croatia, Poland, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania.
Germany spent 1.49 percent of its GDP on defense, putting it in the bottom 10 for spending despite having Europe's largest economy.
If the West had piled on Germany early on in the late 1930s and early 1940s, it would probably have saved a lot more problems than we allowed to develop while everyone sat on their hands.
Stop with the false comparisons of Nazi-led Germany to today's Russia. Russia doesn't have the conventional forces to conquer and occupy Europe. The Russians are having a hard time against Ukraine and they were defeated in Afghanistan. Russia has said it will use nuclear weapons if its territory is at stake and that includes Crimea. A red line. Launching an attack against NATO countries and risking the invoking of Article 5 would be an act of national suicide. Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD) remains a policy.
The combined populations and economies of the EU and the US dwarf Russia, an aging country of 142 million with a declining population. The real threat is China, but the incompetent and compromised political leadership of this country does nothing except make us more dependent on China for the basic necessities.