Thursday, February 17, 2011

The Federal Budget Deficit Could Be Closed Just By Eliminating Corporate Welfare Programs

According to the CBO the 2010 projected annual federal budget deficit is $ 800 billion dollars.

That means our government is spending 800 billion dollars more each year than it takes in in taxes....

I wonder if we can make that go away just by eliminating all the various corporate welfare programs we currently run....

First lets eliminate government subsidies for rich corporations (they don't need it anyway; and they're already subsidized through tax loop-holes)

Annual Savings: $ 200 Billion

Next, lets eliminate all the redundancies in DoD that are really just give-aways to large defense contractors....

Annual Savings: $ 150 Billion

Ok - so now lets put in place pooled-pricing negotiation for the Medicaid Prescription-Drug Benefit and all other health-benefits programs. All that stuff was just a massive give-away to the drug lobby anyway.

Annual Savings $ 200 Billion

Then we can really tackle pesky medical costs by fixing Medical Patents (eliminate corporation's ability to patent genes, stop the 21-year medical patent problem).

Annual Savings $ 100 Billion

And we should also close at-least half of the corporate tax loop-holes. Didja know that Exxon (the richest Corporation in history) paid no taxes last year? That's gotta stop.

Annual Savings $ 125 Billion

And let not forget to bring back the Estate Tax for the ultra-wealthy

Annual Savings $ 100 Billion

Lets see, now; How are we doing thus far?

Total Savings:

$ 875 Billion per year

Sweet; $75 billion extra. Let's just put that towards paying down the debt.

Damn, that was easy.

But nothing on the list above will be proposed by any democrats or republicans (not even the tea-partiers).

Lobbyist will make sure that never happens.

Friday, February 11, 2011

Definitions of Life and Cancer

There is an interesting slashdot discussion about how our definition of life and cancer may be about to change. That discussion inspired the observation below.


Life: The decision of about 4 billion cells to be 'you' for a while.

Cancer: The decision of some of those cells to form a 'tea party'.