he is reacting against what he feels inside, which is the steady loss of his power as a man. the faster that power recedes, the more frantically he asserts it. he is raging against the dying of the light. these last embarrassing decisions are in fact his death throes. it is sad, really. unfortunately what happens to men also tends to happen to the systems they create. for the last 80 years our world has been covered by a system formed in the final months of world war ii. it s features define our life. free and open global trade routes guaranteed by the u.s. navy, a universal currency called the dollar and overseein it all one supreme power, the worlds largest economy, the united states of america. it s been a great system in mos ways. but for many reasons, including the passage of time, that syste is dying. what comes next is not entirely clear but how to influence it t america s greatest advantage is the most important task that faces any u.s. government. nothing else comes
for one thing, we could modernize our rail system to avoid the 1000th of ailments we have every year and the mushroo clouds over ohio that sometimes result in that. $100 billion is more than five times the entire discretionary budget of the department of transportation. there is just $13 billion in th dot budget for transit and less than $3 billion for amtrak. remember that? the artery that connects the cities on the east coast quick? then there is the faa, the agency that is supposed to prevent planes from crashing into each other. they got $20 billion in the las budget. given that planes seem to be coming very close to hitting each other lately it might be worth funding the faa. but zelenskyy s political party needs it. and with that money we could do things that matter long term like building a wall along the southern border. we could build for of them for that. that would save in addition to lot of other things, hundreds o
mark, that is the issue . money in social security should be there but it is not. a lot of it isn t because politicians can t keep their grumy fingers off of it and they use it for other stumpt the problem with social security we cut the pay roll tax. if we increase it to the level it was, i don t think we would have a problem with social security. entitlements need to be on the table. entitlements are 13 percent of the total budget. the big pot is defense spending. we spend trillions on defense. federal pension that is 22 percent of the federal budget. we give pensions to members of congress and let s look at that and look at entitlements and look at the big honey pot and the big spending. i am all with mark in bringing down the pensions of the politicians. here are the facts, in 2009, we had a stimulus spending.
you have front runners that become mayor . they will not support it it was a nonstarter and never going to work in the stave . you have a better chance of succeeding. at least it was a plan . it is no law that said you cannot change 401 k s. that is future and new hires and for their plans. you don t have ill defined benefits and by the way the private sector doesn t get. there is a pension liability in the state of the california. vicki is right. government services are starting to get cut in cities in california . so i tell you, it doesn t cut it when you have things like let s raise the retirement age to age 52. the fact is, these things are going broke. right now the budget 26 percent of la s budget is
spending cuts all all. there is a stimulus increase. it s unbelievable to me. what is that mark? you are saying we have a revenue problem. we took away a trillion out of the budget by giving tax cuts to rich people and you need to put that revenue back. by the way, we spend another trillion. they are tax rates . they are not tax cuts. they are tax rates . how much they bring in. what are you talking about? 84 billion a year . that is 84 billion that is enough to cover government spending for a week and a half. the issue, dc lives in a bubble land. they are in 1996 bubble land menitality with the real estate going up in the dc area and so disconnected with the rest of the country. victoria. i cut you off. finish your point.