Government squanders all monies they steal off of the working people of this country !

I blame all politicians, both Republicans and Democrats, especially the latter, but the lions share of the blame goes to the people who elect them. Ultimately, politicians are a reflection of the voters.

Even a conservative voter will turn liberal when you threaten to cut their sacred cow. (insert government program)

The following from the Pogo comic strip comes to mind:

"We have met the enemy and he is us."

We are our own worst enemy.

I build destroyers for the Navy. My career stability depends on defense spending but even I think we spend too much on defense as well as other areas. There should be less defense spending, zero foreign aid to countries that hate our guts anyway, zero corporate welfare etc. There should be a MUCH higher tax on the .05% with a less (but still higher) tax on the rest of the 1%. We should reform Wall Street, close offshore tax havens and stop the war on pot while legalizing it and taxing it. THEN we can pull out of these bullshit wars for fossil fuels, take a decade or two and invest in our own self-sustainability and lower our budget.

Over tax the corporations and they'll simply move their operations abroad. Over tax individuals and you remove the incentive to work and stifle entrepreneurial enterprise. When social benefits become equal or even close to the average working wage most people will opt for a lie in bed in the mornings and check the post for their weekly government cheque. The welfare benefit system which was meant to act as a as a temporary safety net for those who had fallen on hard times has and will continue to become a hammock. Welfarism, socialism and power crazed militant unions is what almost sunk the United Kingdom during the 1970s. Margret Thatcher ousted the socialists, took on the left wing unions and kicked them into touch. America should impose a heavy import levy on all goods emanating from countries which do not have the same industrial relations laws, anti-racial and religious discrimination legislation, health & safety requirements, and minimum wage commitments. The U.S.A, can no longer afford to be a dumping ground for the cheaply produced goods of the so called developing countries. Friends cannot be bought through foreign aid, ( they only laugh at us) and our virtual ''open house'' for imports weakens our manufacturing base and exports jobs over seas. Despite all the rhetoric to the contrary I feel that the U.S, should protect it's borders and offer incentives to manufactures and service providers( such as Google) to pay their taxes and remain within the U.S.A Indeed legislation should be passed to extract the tax loophole for corporations, or any company indulging in 'tax avoidance'. The system of ''corporation tax, ( tax on profits) should be replaced with a ''sales tax''. A tax on all the sales made within the United States.

What is needed is a large dose of reality which will enable the brain dead impoverished loafers to examine the reason why they are poor, usually as a consequence of their intellectual inferiority, lack of drive or laziness. If these wasters declare that the opportunities do not exist in the U.S, for ''gainful employment' then how come the millions of illegal immigrants come to the States and have no problem finding work? That was a rhetorical question as we all know the answer which starts and ends with ZZZZZZZZZs. If all the money in the world was pooled and then divided evenly throughout the population of the world, sometime afterwards most of the former rich would have their wealth back again and the poor would be bellyaching about an unbalanced economy using smart Alec, but meaningless terms as ''A trickle economy''. People can only borrow money up to a point. Somewhere along the line the banks or financial institutions will stop lending and/or demand repayment of the loans. Make no mistake, ''PAY BACK'' time is coming down the track like an express train for the U.S. treasury department and those individuals who have borrowed their way into serious debt. The old adage 'live now, pay later' is fine providing you don't live long enough to have to face the harvest of debt which you sowed in your irresponsible past. Alphonse Karr the French philosopher's adage combined with a 2000 year old quote, sums it up well , the more things change, the more they stay the same, as depicted in the Biblical warning, ''the poor ye shall have with thee always''.

No, Government needs to STOP spending money they don't have. That 19 trillion debt is monsterous and demands extreme measures to stop. There WILL be pain for those living off the tax payers when we do what must be done. There will be pain for most Americans even though it was not the working men and women's fault.

It has been the Government's fault and we can not give them one more cent of our money because we KNOW they will waste it as they have every single year for decades! I can not believe people are still talking about spending more for education!

We must cut across the board. We spend more than any other nation on education.

Money is not the problem. Our broken culture is the problem. Fatherless children are the problem. How many years have we been spending more on education and look at the results. STOP THE MADNESS!

In theory I am for a balanced budget amendment, but in reality it would be a disaster for the middle class. When it passes and there is a massive deficit to overcome, I don't trust the politicians to cut spending, especially the Democrats. What would happen is a major tax hike on the middle class to achieve a balanced budget with just a little in spending cuts.

Further, it is really a gimmick as the politicians will find ways around it. For example, if they can't come up with the needed spending cuts and tax hikes, all they would do is "project" a GDP growth of say 6 percent instead of the 3 percent which is more in line with what economists' predictions are. Therefore, they will have achieved their balanced budget with rosy revenue predictions that will not come to fruition. Then what? If it is a constitutional amendment, who decides how to get it in balance. The lawsuits will be never ending. It would seem to me that if Congress can't pass a balanced budget then the Supreme Court would have to intervene and approve any budget put forth by Congress, which is not a power of the Supreme Court, BTW. This will all lead to one big mess, IMO.

Would a simpler way be just to have any debt ceiling increase be required by 3/4 of Congress. If you can't get the 3/4 then the government defaults. This forces Congress to at least come to some tough decisions.

Spending is not the problem, the problem is lack of the fear of God.

STORY TIME! Over here in 'Straya we had a change of government a few years ago, to the Liberal party. Now just to clarify something:

Labor: Our slightly more liberal party

Liberal: Our more conservative party

I know it doesn't make sense, there's a story there but that's for another time. Suffice it to say that when I say Libs, I mean the conservative party.

ANYWAY, after a fair few years of the Labor party being in power (including during the GFC) the Liberal party won the election in 2013. They ran on a platform centered around the Australian deficit, saying that the Labor party had spent money like crazy and made terrible budgets. According to the Libs, the only way to fix this was "tough decisions", meaning cuts to things like welfare.

The thing is, ever since they won that election, Australias economy has actually gone downhill. Our national debt is increasing, despite the lowered government spending, and our GDP has slipped too. Now please understand that yes under the Labor party the debt was increasing more often than not, but the rate at which it increased was slower in almost every year (with the exception of the Global Financial Crisis, which their loans and financial actions managed to save us from).

The reason I bring all this up is just to let some of you know that sometimes, national finances aren't easy things to understand. You can blame welfare, or military spending, or foreign aid, or whatever else you want, but unless you're well-versed in national finance you really shouldn't be holding your opinion too closely. This topic is complicated, and over here we saw first-hand what happens when you base your countries budget around a fundamental misunderstanding of how international finances work. Please don't make that same mistake, it was a shitey couple of years for us.