Some say Reagan won the Cold War...

[giblets]

The war in afghanistan and the current cost of medicare, medicaide and all our other entitlements aren't the problem, it's the unrestrained growth of their cost. Afghanistan and Iraq didn't have fast-rising costs, in fact their costs are going down as we wind down both wars. Medicare does.

So you're admitting that we aren't currently spending too much on entitlements and won't have a problem unless we substantially increase our entitlement spending in the future.

[DaShi]

No, you can't. The Taliban emerged after the Soviets had left Afghanistan (and even after the USSR had disintegrated).

Ah, right.

[Kitschum]

Well, if we accept the Karzai government's pedigree from the Mujahideen-that-destroyed-the-USSR, then you could say the same about them and be right.

[Dr Strangelove]

Actually I think that an argument could be made that Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin won the cold war for us. In 1985 when he assumed control of the Communist party the USSR had no net debt. Within a few years it's debt rose to $200 billion. The Soviet Union's debt wasn't due to the arms race, Gorbachev's approach to Reagans arms programs was to negotiate arms reductions, not to attempt to match America's military expansion. The main problem was that Perestroika was so poorly managed. The Soviet Union had balanced its budget on the profits of state monopolies. Gorbachev divested those monopolies without procuring sufficient alternate funds. Despite that I don't think that debt was the real cause of the collapse of the Soviet Union. The economy of the Soviet Union doubled in the late 1980's, even accounting for inflation. A national debt of $ 200 billion wasn't that much compared to a GNP of $ 2 trillion. The policy of Glasnost allowed the expression of nationalist sentiment in the republics that had long been suppressed. From 1989 to 1991 incidents of civil unrest in the republics increased in intensity and in frequency. Even Russian nationalists began clamoring for the dissolution of the union, amongst those was Boris Yeltsin. Yeltsin became president of Russia in July 1991, the hardliners attempted a coup in August. Yeltsin rallied his people and defeated the hardliners, within a month the Soviet Union had dissolved. The essential causative forces behind the dissolution of the Soviet state wasn't debt caused by military expenditures, it was the release of long pent-up repressed ideas.

OTOH maybe blame chould not be placed on those who released the repressed ideas, but instead on those who repressed them in the first place. from that perspective we could place some of the blame on the Romanovs, who oversaw the conquest of central asia, the caucasus, and the baltic states. You could blame it on Lenin's stroke. After trying hard-core communism Lenin realised that the Soviet Union wasn't making the economic progress he had hoped for and he relaxed party control of Soviet life. He died and Stalin took over. We all know what Stalin's approach to government was like. The next point at which something might have been done to avoid the inevitable was in 1964. Nikita Kruschev had done much to liberalize Soviet society but a bad harvest gave his opponents the leverage to remove him.
In the final analysis maybe the blame should be placed on Brezhnev and Kosygin, whose leadership inflicted a 18 year period of stagnation on the Soviet Union.
We can also ask whether the union was salvageable under any conditions. There would have been only 2 ways of saving it: (1) Utterly suppressing the nationalism of the republics out of memory. (2) Giving the citizens of the republics more reason to pledge their loyalty to the union than to their nationality.

[Tupac Shakur]

So you're admitting that we aren't currently spending too much on entitlements and won't have a problem unless we substantially increase our entitlement spending in the future.

Entitlements are the most expensive components of a federal budget that ran a deficit of around $1.2 trillion in FY2010.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_United_States_federal_budget

[giblets]

Entitlements are the most expensive components of a federal budget that ran a deficit of around $1.2 trillion in FY2010.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_Un...federal_budget

Why are you posting the same information twice?

[Tupac Shakur]

I didn't. That should be obvious from the different links.

[giblets]

I didn't. That should be obvious from the different links.

They both give a breakdown of the 2010 budget. All you did was add a link that mentions the deficit as if anyone doesn't know it exists.

[Hauldren Collider]

So you're admitting that we aren't currently spending too much on entitlements and won't have a problem unless we substantially increase our entitlement spending in the future.

I think we are spending too much on entitlements, but the current level of spending isn't enough to totally wreck the country, it would be possible to close the gap I think. Difficult but possible, although not necessarily reasonable. However the Democrats insist that even a reduction in the increase of spending constitutes a "cut".

[Tupac Shakur]

They both give a breakdown of the 2010 budget. All you did was add a link that mentions the deficit as if anyone doesn't know it exists.

No. The first link dealt with US federal expenditures over the long-term. The second-link was about the FY 2010 US federal budget.

[Dr Strangelove]

Well as I pointed out, in 1990 the USSR had a measily public death of $ 200 billion, a debt that amounted to a mere 10 % to 20 % of its GNP. If that's bankruptcy then most First World governments today are bankrupt many times over that.

[Fake Boris]

Entitlements are the most expensive components of a federal budget that ran a deficit of around $1.2 trillion in FY2010.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_Un...federal_budget

You don't need the military campaigns, but people need to pay healthcare and retirement anyway (public or private).

[Tupac Shakur]

Soldiers needed to earn an income anyway. So did the people at defense contracting firms and other support organizations.

[Aeson]

So pay the soldiers to go build homes, bridges, roads, ect... rather than to blow them up.

[Tupac Shakur]

Soldiers are trained to blow **** up, not build things.