Reply #12: The "defense" budget is the largest contributor to the national debt by far.

[toddwv]

Especially if you remove Social Security and Medicare from the general outlays. They shouldn't be included there anyways because SS and associated programs are covered by a TRUST fund.

Interest on the debt is staggering. The Republicans handed over the budget in 2006 and the interest on the debt was over $400,000,000,000 a year! Anyone who understands compounding interest understands that that is pretty much like handing over a race horse after you break one of its legs. To be fair, it was $300,000,000,000 a year when the Republicans took over Congress in 1995.

So I think that the first thing that should be done is to raise the top marginal tax rate back up to 65% and pay off the debt as cuts are made. We could cut $400,000,000,000 from the "defense" budget and still be spending twice as much as the next 4 countries COMBINED!

This would have the additional affect of lowering our petroleum consumption because the US military is the single largest consumer of oil on the planet. Would prices follow? Probably not because, as most of us know, we no longer live in a supply/demand paradigm economically speaking.

http://www.warresisters.org/pages/piechart.htm