Baraka_Guru

I don't deny that health care and social security cost a lot. I would imagine that they would be more affordable, however, if you dismantle much of the redundancies and wasted spending within the military budget.

Also, I would imagine that cuts to the military budget could run deeper before hitting detrimental effects compared to cuts to health care and social security.

There are ways to reduce the costs of health care in the U.S. There is a huge potential for improvement there. I don't know enough about social security in the U.S., but when you start yanking too heavily on things like pensions, income security, and basic items such as food and shelter during a recession and shaky recovery, it's going to cause problems.

If you think health care and social security need reform, then so be it. But when looking at annual budgets, hacking and slashing can have huge consequences.

The challenge is in looking at the relative situation. Comparing China to America using the same criteria isn't very informative. For example, the individual savings rate in China has averaged around 40%. In America, it has fallen to zero a few years ago. Still, historical U.S. patterns are measured in fractions of a percent. We're looking at variances of less than 2% over several decades.

How fucked up is that?

The challenge for all of us is that China is a big wild card. There is little precedent for this. They're the opposite of America in a way. America went from a near free-market economy to a mixed economy during the industrial age and before the information age. China is going from a communist economy to a mixed economy during the globalized Internet age.

It's difficult. But interesting.

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Knowing that death is certain and that the time of death is uncertain, what's the most important thing?
—Bhikkhuni Pema Chödrön

Humankind cannot bear very much reality.
—From "Burnt Norton," Four Quartets (1936), T. S. Eliot