Agreed, 100%! Try telling that to leftards though. All I hear from them on a balanced budget is that the last POTUS to do it was Clinton. But it was really Gingrich and the Tea Party movement that forced 'Clinton's balanced budgets'. We all know that when unchecked, demontards will spend money like drunken sailors on shore leave with their rich daddy's credit card. Newt had no problem shutting down the government to make his point to Slick Willie. I think the current republican leadership needs to look back at that and LEARN from it. Because if they continue to go down the road of appeasing the left, as they tried with this most recent CR that Trump and Musk crushed, things will never change.
Agreed! Not to single her out, since time can do things to all of us, but she wasn't horrible *looking* when she was younger, imo. Yes, time has not been kind to her face, but regardless I think she's a pretty good example of beauty (if we want to go there as far as she's concerned) being skin deep, but ugly going right to the bone. And brother, on the inside she's about as ugly as it gets.
Thanks for taking the time to reply. Everything you just mentioned as a problem seems like a legitimate problem to me as well. I took issue with what I perceived to be a proposed sweeping solution that would result in penalizing productive legal immigrants. As you no doubt realized based on my reply to your original post, I'm very big on the distinction between legal and illegal immigrants. A distinction which the left and the media rarely seems to make.
"I guess the main problem I have with the system, is that their are people accessing it and not paying into it."
I agree 100%. I think we need to secure the border, then address this. If both can be done simultaneously, all the better.
"We also have individuals who work hard for 10 years and become a citizen, and decide to pull social security and leave the country."
I agree that this is a problem. And it's a tricky one. What comes to mind as a possible template for a solution could be payout restrictions similar to vesting with employer benefits like a 401(k) or a pension plan. Better yet, if it could be enforced, maybe the benefits should be conditional on remaining in this country? That seems pretty reasonable. Being married to a legal immigrant, I know that it would be fairly easy for someone to leave the country but still claim their permanent residence as the US. That would be wrong, but I get the motivation. It's got to be very tempting when the exchange rates are considered. A person can live quite well in some countries on a relatively small amount of US currency. But just because one can do something, doesn't mean it's the right thing to do, or should be legal.
I don't have the solution for keeping these huuuuge govt entitlement program solvent. Simple math can identify the problem, which is more money going out than is coming in. For SS some contributing reasons are obvious, the primary reason being the varying rates of reproduction for the different generations. It's hard to pay for the boomers when subsequent generations have been reproducing at a reduced rate. For other entitlement programs, the solution may be as simple as running them efficiently. So, I'm hoping that once DOGE gets done weeding out obvious ridiculous pork in the budget, they'll be able to focus on making government agencies and programs more efficient. Maybe they can remain solvent by being efficient. It's certainly worth a try, imo.
Of the many comments I've seen about TDS, that one really hits the mark imo. To put it in that context makes anyone with any objectivity realize the scale to which they're suffering from what is accurately described as a remarkable delusion.
