Dr M Khalid's global village blog

WASHINGTON  — After weeks of increasingly dire warnings, the   White House   scrambled to adjust to the political and economic reality of deep and indiscriminate spending cuts that kicked in Friday and would, over time, hinder the economic recovery. In a sign that the warnings may have gone too far, President Obama   sought to dial back some of the rhetoric. Most Americans, he said, won't immediately feel the effects of the complex process known as   sequestration , which is expected to unfold like a slow-motion budgetary car crash. "The longer these cuts remain in place, the greater the damage to our economy — a slow grind that will intensify with each passing day," Obama said after meeting congressional leaders for less than an hour in the Oval Office. "This is not going to be an apocalypse.... It's just dumb. And it's going to hurt." The pain of $85 billion in across-the-board cuts will kick in next month when agencies are forced to order air...

All told, the U.S. government   spent about $718 billion   on defense and international security assistance in 2011 — more than it spent on Medicare. That includes all of the Pentagon’s underlying costs as well as the price tag for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, which came to $159 billion in 2011. It also includes arms transfers to foreign governments. (Note that this figure does not, however, include benefits for veterans, which came to $127 billion in 2011, or about 3.5 percent of the federal budget. If you count those benefits as “defense spending,” then the number goes up significantly.) U.S. defense spending  is expected   to have risen in 2012, to about $729 billion, and then is set to fall in 2013 to $716 billion, as spending caps start kicking in.   Defense spending has risen dramatically since 9/11. Here’s   a historical chart   of U.S. defense spending since World War II in inflation-adjusted dollars. There’s a b...

“Fiscal cliff” is the popular shorthand term used to describe the conundrum that the U.S. government will face at the end of 2012, when the terms of the Budget Control Act of 2011 are scheduled to go into effect. Among the laws set to change at midnight on December 31, 2012, are the end of last year’s temporary payroll tax cuts (resulting in a 2% tax increase for workers), the end of certain tax breaks for businesses, shifts in the alternative minimum tax that would take a larger bite, the end of the tax cuts from 2001-2003, and the beginning of taxes related to President Obama’s health care law. At the same time, the spending cuts agreed upon as part of the debt ceiling deal of 2011 will begin to go into effect. According to   Barron's , over 1,000 government programs - including the defense budget and Medicare are in line for "deep, automatic cuts." In dealing with the fiscal cliff, U.S. lawmakers have a choice among three options, none of which are particularly a...

The Collapse of The American Dream Explained in Animation http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=endscreen&NR=1&v=mII9NZ8MMVM comments: "Absolutely amazing. Amazingly conceived, amazingly portrayed, amazingly explained, amazingly innovative, amazingly imaginative" "Great video. It will take a long, long, long time for America to even put a dent on its current debt. Everyone won't work together because they want their dream now and not suffer for a moment to erase this debt. When it falls, Great Depression 2 will be much more painful and massive like WW2."