AND SO DAWNS A NEW ERA

Yes, I did get that from Lord of the Rings, but you know.... Nah, you probably don't.
Today's rant topic on politics is.... THE FEDERAL BUDGET. Yes, it's controversial, but that's because we can't cut things, like Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security. We also can't cut from the 748 BILLION dollars that was requested for the 2012 budget... yes, that's right. 748 BILLION. That's the equivalent of what we pay in Social Security.... Yeah, now I know you're all thinking "Why do we need this much money to go into defense? We aren't even being attacked!" And I would have to agree with you. None of this money is going to pay veterans benefits or their salaries-they're only proposed to have 125 billion dollars. Oh yeah, have I mentioned that in next years budget, we have a 1.5 TRILLION dollar defecit? Yeah, we're in the trillions now. These are all legit numbers, for the record. They come from the US Census Bureau, so I'm not making them up. Oh, by the way, if you aren't asking the aforementioned question, then you really shouldn't be reading my blog, because it's probably not "corrupt" enough for you. Jon Stewart says that we should look at our parties as corrupt and not corrupt, rather than liberal and conservative. We talked about this in my... HONORS ECONOMICS class, which I know I've been coming back to a lot, and I'm sorry, but it's truly a fun class. I really like it.
Back on topic though. Yeah, the way my group decided we should cut things-300 from social security (I know you can't actually cut from that), 300 from defense, 74 from medicare(again, I know) 25 from medicaid, and then scattered amount down, but we cut none from disaster relief and education, but you all should be aware of my feelings on education cuts by now, especially because I keep coming back to that, and I will until our education system is treated the way it should be-taken as seriously as defense and medicare, and the other top spenders of our government's money. But, our problem was, we were still short. Since we couldn't bring ourselves to cut from veterans benefits, or cut more than the 300 billion dollars we were already cutting from defense, we raised taxes. Yes, go ahead-complain. But, we really only taxed the top 1% of the population. For every 1% that we taxed them, we received 16 billion dollars... so we raised their taxes from 23% to 35%... bringing us all the money that we needed to "balance" the federal budget. Yes, I understand that may seem like a lot, and it probably is, but all the programs that we didn't cut from (which is only disaster relief with 11 billion and education with 71 billion-from a federal level) really wouldn't have given us enough, so we still would have had to increase taxes, or cut from our defense spending, and since one of the guys in our group was really for not cutting, we really didn't want to get into a debate about it, since that would have been obnoxious, and a serious time waster.
I may not have the same opinions, but I do make a valid point with what we cut. Most of our defense money is going into funding our allies, but we still haven't received all the money back that we invested during World War 2 under FDR's lend-and-lease program.... and if we were to actually collect and call on that... it might be enough to help us get out of the trillions of debt... yeah, really.

So I'll post more on politics on Thursday, and tomorrow.... is a book review day. I'll think of something.... who knows? Maybe I'll review Twilight, but rip it to shreds is more apropos.

SIGNING OFF-The music fanatic.