Politics - A Discussion with Sean

After discussing our China problems with Schmike and the further causes of our economic situation with Sean, I want to note the gist here. The three largest negatives on the national balance sheet are Medicare, Social Security, and military. Here are how Sean proposed that we fix them, and I agree.

Social Security
This is probably the most controversial because it does actually involve keeping money from people who expected it, but make the checks issued by social security proportional to the recipients ability to take care of him/herself during retirement. That is, if you made a good salary your whole life and invested and saved so that you could support yourself during retirement, the check you get from social security should be less than someone who paid in to social security his/her whole life but couldn't save enough to live off of for the last 20 to 30 years of his/her life.

Medicare
Since so much healthcare is billed to the government, prices have been inflated because the government paying the bill does not lead to an accurate reflection of demand in the market. Basically, no one will say no to health care because of the costs. If we could get an accurate reflection of the cost of healthcare and use that as the basis for the amounts that get billed to medicare, we could save a lot of money.

Military
There are a couple of ways to look at this, but basically they all involve laying people off. Closing over shores bases means that the military would need fewer people. Ending wars would mean that the military would need fewer people. While equipment is extremely expensive, personnel is the largest expenditure the military, and most businesses for that matter, incur. Furthermore, the lifetime benefits granted to military employees, while wonderful, are unmaintainable given the current economic situation, and should probably be rethought. I'm all for giving all people, including military personnel, some sort of lifetime benefits commensurate with their service, but the benefits for military service are probably out of whack.

If a politician came along who would actually talk about these things, propose enacting them in order to balance the budget and start paying down our debt to china, I would vote for him/her in a heartbeat, assuming he wasn't completely terrible as far as social issues go, and that is a story for another time.

Thanks for laying it out so plainly Sean.