Dominant Force in West Today According to Dennis Prager is Fear of Left

Lumping everything together hides some important facts.I took this graphic of the 2018 Federal Budbget from the Wikipedia page, United States Federal Budget: So we have mandatory spending and discretionary spending as you kind of broke out with your second graphic. From mine we have these groupings: But where are the revenues coming from that pay for that? This is the part the gets obscured: So any discussion of the deficit requires that we define specifically where the deficit comes from, namely what specific revenues and specific outlays go into calculating the deficit. That must be known in order to figure out which factors cause the deficit and therefore which factors could be adjusted to reduce or eliminate the deficit.Both Social Security and Medicare Part A (Parts B, C, & D are insurance programs, two of them private insurance, funded by premiums paid by recipients) are funded by payroll taxes levied specially for them and which cannot be used for any other purpose. As such, they cannot and do no play any part in the deficit. Since they are not factors contributing to the deficit, adjusting them would have no effect on the deficit.Also, these figures are for the 2018 Budget. We need to see the figures for the 2019 Budget, which I believe was the first one based on the GOP's tax scam and which greatly increased defense spending from $623 billion to something like $800 billion (as I recall). And when we crunch those numbers, we will need to keep straight where specific sources of revenue are going (eg, payroll taxes going to Social Security and to Medicare A).Also keep in mind that Fiscal Year 2019 ended a couple weeks ago and that we are currently in FY 2020 and hence under the 2020 Budget.

OK, so then your alternative is to submit ourselves to the will of some authoritarian who tells us that he and he alone can interpret what Jebus wants us to do.Gee, try to figure it out or else submit mindlessly to some clueless authoritarian nut. Hmmm! Tough one, that! What to do? What to do?Edited by dwise1, : will of

Anymore he is best known for his essay, Why I am Not a Christian. My only copy is the German translation, Warum ich kein Christ bin.I also heard a story about his arrest and imprisonment during WWI for being a pacifist. While he was being processed into jail, the old female clerk filling out his dossier asked for his religion. "Agnostic." She shook her head and muttered, "So many different religions, but I guess they all worship the same God." That bit of unintentional humor made his incarceration more tolerable.He was a freethinker. He maintained that when a Catholic becomes a freethinker, then he usually becomes an atheist. But when a Protestant becomes a freethinker, he simply creates a new denomination.Edited by dwise1, : becoming a freethinker