I'm going to assume that you have won your bid for the Presidency.
1. We need to fix our crumbling infrastructure. That is going to cost about $200 billion dollars per year for 5 years. Do you plan to fix our roads, bridges, electrical grid, etc.? If so, which programs do you plan to cut to finance this expense?
2. You have said that your health care plan will cost about $50 billion per year. It may cost `much more than that. Again, which programs do you plan to cut to finance this vital expense?
3. When Hillary Clinton attempted to fix health care after the 1992 election, the insurance companies, pharmaceutical companies, the AMA and Humana ran ads 24/7 and spent millions of dollars lobbying to defeat any attempt to fix the massively overpriced mess that we call health care in the U.S.; how do you plan to pass any health care initiative in the face of the inevitable onslaught by the health care industry?
4. You will inherit a national debt of $11 trillion dollars and a real budget deficit of about $1 trillion, maybe even more, if you include the "off-budget" expenses like the wars and the CIA budget. Meanwhile, the recession is probably going to mean that even less taxes will be collected. How do you plan to reduce the deficit?
5. The government is expected to collect TOTAL income taxes of about $1.5 trillion dollars this year. Total military spending is about $1 trillion dollars per year. The remainder of income taxes collected are used to pay the interest on the national debt. The big ticket items are: Defense department: $636 billion, supplementals for the wars: $180 billion, Homeland Security: $58.2 billion, Veteran's Administration: $93.7 billion, CIA about $15 billion, and hundreds of other military related items that cost less than $10 billion each. Most of the remainder of the revenue collected by the government is FICA payments, which are SUPPOSED to pay for social security. Our government spends ALL of our income taxes to pay for our military and interest on the debt, which leaves NOTHING to pay for any of the necessary services that government is supposed to provide, like health, education, infrastructure, etc.; since the gov't insists on at least pretending to provide some minimal amounts of these services, doing so requires our government to borrow nearly a third of the money we contribute to the social security trust fund each year AND increase the national debt by an average of over $600 billion dollars per year. Nobody in Congress seems to understand that "off-budget" spending is still spending, so they official budget has a much lower deficit than the real amount of debt that is accumulated each year. How do you justify such an irresponsible increase in military spending from the level of $290 billion per year in total military spending in 2000, at the expense of vital domestic programs, especially considering that using the FICA surplus to keep the government operating in the face of the military build-up has prevented larger cost of living increases for old people on fixed incomes, many of whom can no longer afford to buy food and gas for the winter, in the face of huge increases in the cost of basic items that they need to live?
Sorry that #5 is so complex, but it REALLY needs to be addressed. We should be using that social security surplus to increase the social security checks for our elderly, who have seen their utility bills, food prices and mortgage payments double, and transportation and heating fuel prices triple, while their social security checks increased by just 2 or 3 percent per year over the last 7 years. Instead, because the current Administration has considered the military to be his only priority, our grandparents' spending power has eroded to the point that their social security income is often less than their basic living expenses. Then the Medicare copayments are set up so that they often cost a large percent of that meager income. Do we really want to force our old people to live in poverty to pay for our military-industrial complex?