Bush Seeks to Soothe Republican Worries on Budget

How very Swiss of you, those cold selfish pecuniarily driven bastards.

Nahh, no Swiss Gold here, because I'm not talking about capping legal immigration at 100,000 per year; that would be 100,000 above and beyond the current levels, to which the annual number of refugees admitted does not apply.
This would be a self-funding increase in current immigration levels.

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What matters is the absolute number as a % of GDP.

I ran through this on another thread, allow me to post it again here. Absolute number as a % of GDP is an incomplete metric. A president who inherited discretionary spending as [say] 10% of GDP and whittled it down to 6%, has a superior record to one who inherited [say] 3% and allowed it to climb to 5%.

Bush's numbers in this regard are SUPERIOR to Ronald Reagan's in the same year of their presidency. Think about that. They are SUPERIOR.

Simply not true.
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It is true. Now, there is nothing wrong with your reasoning. What is wrong is your conclusion. It faces the cold reality of mathematics. No president of the past several decades has "whittled down" domestic discretionary spending from 10% to 6% and waved his arms in celebration because It Hasn't Happened And Probably Never Will.

Domestic discretionary as a % of GDP has hung between 3 and 4% for multiple decades. That's right. Decades. It is a multi decade norm. Between 3 and 4% is where it is, and where it has been, and that's where it will probably be in the future. Bush's spending is not at all out of line with norms of past presidents and it is superior to Reagan's.

So the metric I specified is in fact accurate, real, and proper. What matters is not claimed growth or reduction when the number hardly changes at all over so long a period of time. What matters is the absolute value -- which IS SUPERIOR to Ronald Reagan's in the same year of their presidencies, though, because both are between 3 and 4%, not by much.

Feel free to post that to other threads, too.

Single payer won't happen in your lifetime so nothing to worry about there. Single payer requires the alignement of four stars, a democratic house, congress and executive and a willing part of the electorate that votes.

Not gonna happen in the near future. Tax increases on the "rich" such as the medicaid portion of your paycheck are much more likely as is extending the SS tax to all earned income.

There are ways around it but it would take a radical shift to accomplish. The single best way is to disengage employment and health care in order to put competition into the health provider market place.

At any rate, those are my feelings on the subject.

The single best way is to disengage employment and health care in order to put competition into the health provider market place.

What a radical and novel idea! At the very least, there needs to be an incentive for each consumer of medical care to price shop, pending the ultimate squaring of the circle. Thus the rationale for HSA's, and it is a good one. Heck, I get my drugs from Costco, because I have to pay for the bulk of my drugs.

Stick to the Vanguard total stock market fund, whose symbol is VTSMX. Leaven it with the Vanguard tax managed international fund, dilute the risk with Vanguard's short term corporate bond fund (suitable for incipient old fogies), and you will be in the winner's circle, relatively speaking. Granted, my portfolio is a bit more complex than that. We all have our hobbies.

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