{"id":710,"date":"2011-01-09T17:17:55","date_gmt":"2011-01-09T21:17:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/zzzptm.com\/wordpress\/?p=710"},"modified":"2011-01-09T18:40:40","modified_gmt":"2011-01-09T22:40:40","slug":"a-scary-story","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/zzzptm.com\/wordpress\/?p=710","title":{"rendered":"A Scary Story"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/2010_United_States_federal_budget\">Looking at the Wiki article on the 2010 budget,<\/a> I noticed that total tax receipts for 2010 were $2.381 trillion. Total mandatory spending was $2.184 trillion. That&#8217;s very close to 100% of tax intake. Before the USA spent a nickel on military affairs, a further $664 billion, the USA had to borrow about $1.3 trillion dollars.<\/p>\n<p>The problem isn&#8217;t in goofy discretionary spending programs, although they deserve to be cut. The problem is in the swelling amount being spent on Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid&#8230; and interest on the national debt. I&#8217;m not talking about repealing so-called &#8220;Obamacare.&#8221; We&#8217;re looking at the unsustainability of our three biggest social safety net programs.<\/p>\n<p>Something has to give. The question is what?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Looking at the Wiki article on the 2010 budget, I noticed that total tax receipts for 2010 were $2.381 trillion. Total mandatory spending was $2.184 trillion. That&#8217;s very close to 100% of tax intake. Before the USA spent a nickel on military affairs, a further $664 billion, the USA had to borrow about $1.3 trillion [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-710","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","category-us-government"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/zzzptm.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/710","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/zzzptm.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/zzzptm.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zzzptm.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zzzptm.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=710"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/zzzptm.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/710\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":712,"href":"https:\/\/zzzptm.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/710\/revisions\/712"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/zzzptm.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=710"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zzzptm.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=710"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zzzptm.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=710"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}