“In their blind loyalty to their mega-donors, Republicans’ fixation on giant tax cuts for billionaires has created a revenue problem that is driving up our national debt,” said Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse in response to new Treasury Department figures.
This would be an excellent time to scale back a little bit of spending on our nuclear arsenal.
Russia is no longer the world-ending peer threat the USSR was, and has become chaotic enough that MAD no longer makes complete sense in the current context anyway. Us disarming some additional warheads would be unlikely to encourage them.
China, on the other hand, is building up an arsenal. If history is any indication, the size of the arsenal they build will be in some relation to the other existing arsenals. Thus, if we reduce our arsenal, they will need to make fewer warheads to reach some kind of parity with us. If they don’t need to make extra, they won’t, those things are expensive to keep around.
So, we can have an outsized effect on future nuclear arms totals if we scale the US arsenal down now. And we’d save some money every year.
You are forgetting that Russia officially has bigger nuclear arsenal than US. Yes, likely it isn’t, but that’s just a guess. US scaling its arsenal down would not do a thing, without starting with a treaty like we had in the past and currently it isn’t the greatest time to easily get it.
I don’t think China is particularly concerned about matching the Russian arsenal as much as ours. Russia, in addition to being a loose ally that needs them, would be a much more nearby threat, where a pretty broad array of strategic tools can be employed. It’s the US that the nukes will pretty effectively guard against into the future.
Do you think China and Russia are friends? At most they are allies working together to weaken the West. They have their own disputes and also share a border.
So long as Russia can ship their cheap Siberian resources to China via pipeline and rail, it’s unlikely to really be in Xi’s interest to actually sever that relationship any time soon. Now that the west is actually militarizing, Russia becomes more useful. Keeps attention from being focused too much on him, helps with the destabilization crap.
For Russia’s side, I don’t think they’d ever gain much from invading China. If they did, I do not think the PLA would need any nukes to destroy Russia. Frankly, I think Poland could probably do it at this point.
It’s not about friends and enemies though. It’s about benefit. And the benefit, is what it brings against the west, who are much more likely to be foes in the coming decades than Russia is. And the west’s nuke stockpile is mostly the US one.
It’s worth adding that for the last two years of Clinton’s Presidency, the US actually had a budget surplus. The talk heading into the 2000 election cycle was about what we were going to do with this surplus. Had that trend continued we could have been debt-free as a nation - but instead we got more “fiscal conservatism”. Or as Dick Cheney put it: “Reagan proved that deficits don’t matter”.
In 2021, the US collected the most tax revenue in 44 years. Anyone consider spending may be a problem?
You’re right it really is Reagan’s fault.
It was piss trickling down the whole time!
Reagan has been dead for well over 9 years
Which makes it remarkable just how many modern issues he directly and indirectly caused. Now to be fair, much of that also went to Nixon.
44 years ago was the start of the Reagan era austerity that never stopped and is a direct link to pretty much every government revenue issue we have today.
None of that refutes or even replies to my comment.
Dude the impact of people’s actions don’t stop when they die.are you 6 or stupid because surely you don’t think that the policies of a president, and arguably the most influential one of the last 100 years, stop having an impact when they die let alone when their term is up.
All I said is that Reagan has been dead for over 9 years
2021 was the year where the second most people lived in the US, only to be succeed the the next year. 2022. 2023 has yet to be determined. 2021 was also the year with the second highest US GDP only to be success by the next year, 2022. 2023 has not concluded, so no official numbers can be given.
Facts are fun. I can keep going if you would like.Corporate bailouts are fraud and waste. PPP was mass fraud.
Meanwhile American struggle for groceries.
Considered? Yes. Found to be? No, clearly we aren’t spending enough, especially in the areas of education, healthcare, and housing. Tax enforcement, antitrust, corporate fraud, bribery, and anti-regulatory capture come in close seconds.
Spending more is the solution? Baltimore spends more per student than almost any other school district in the US, yet their kids are performing dismally:
