Interesting read. I don't dispute his claims, but I do wonder how a 25% VAT would fare with the voters.

Thanks for sharing the link. I think the more often this kind of solution is offered in the press, the more ready the electorate will be to accept a sustainable fiscal policy.

Do you hold out any hope for a Bipartisan Budget Comission approach?

It's been shut down, or at least neutered, so far. If Congress gets a sense of urgency, however...

A 25% cut? That'll just take us down to spending $600 billion a year, double what we were spending in the 90s.

You mean you aren't? sh*t, I better give DHS another call about your stockpile of WMDs.

I'd totally vote for Fareed Zakaria for president. Everything I read by him is just a smart way of looking at the world.

Actually, China is the next nearest competitor and they spend less than 14% of our defense budget. Japan and Italy are #7&8 and together spend more than China does.

Here is a list of the top 15:

1 United States 607.0 41.5
2 China 84.9 5.8
3 France 65.7 4.5
4 United Kingdom 65.3 4.5
5 Russia 58.6 4.0
6 Germany 46.8 3.2
7 Japan 46.3 3.2
8 Italy 40.6 2.8
9 Saudi Arabia 38.2 2.6
10 India 30.0 2.1
11 South Korea 24.2 1.7
12 Brazil 23.3 1.6
13 Canada 19.3 1.3
14 Spain 19.2 1.3
15 Australia 18.4 1.3

The first number is budgets in billions of dollars. The second is percentage of world total.

If you include things like expansion of counter-terrorism in other departments, the number would increase 100~200b, depending on what one considers considers defense spending by non-Dept of Def departments.

It's for in case England wants their land back

Color me crazy, but I would think that the first and most important step would be to stop spending like a drunken sailor on a 1-day pass.

His first step, which is to add another tax, seems about as effective at solving the core problem as telling a gambling addict to get a side job to pay for their habit.

I can understand why Canada has a big Navy. There is currently a big dispute over who "owns" the North Pole (like DanyBoy said) and I don't think "Santa Clause" has any claim over that region.If you ask me I'll put my money on the USA because it got a 600 Billion dollar 4% GDP military. Most other countries may have similar or lower % of GDP military but they don't even get close to the USA .

I think the USA can stay as scary with even half the military but when you have the power to tell everyone on the planet what they should or shouldn't do it's really hard to give it up.

Big-picture, that's probably a good idea, but I don't think he realizes how unbelievably painful that would be. That would be a shock so severe, starting from such a weak economic position, that it might outright kill us.

I'd be willing to give the VAT route a try, if as he suggests it would mostly eliminate income taxes for low and middle class Americans. Certainly the path we're on leads to financial ruin. I'd like to see more emphasis on cuts to entitlements and federal spending in general, although to his credit Zakaria mentions some of those.

Generally speaking, I think taxes have to increase markedly AND spending needs to come down dramatically for us to get anywhere close to resolving the Federal debt. I know of no politicians that would support such a stance, and very few individuals that would either. Which sucks.

In the 90s the military was wholely underfunded, and we're reaping the repercussions of that today. Why do you think our intelligence is so bad? Our military so over deployed? Our technology behind where it should of been to counter the new threat? The 90s are not a good bar to measure where our military spending should be.

I'm pretty sure the F-22 was cut. I can't speak to what the Navy does or doesn't need, but if we want to stay #1 militarily that matters in both size and technology. Also, I wouldn't trust all the numbers above - not everyone's budget is as open as the US's.

You remember that whole "military-industrial complex" thing Eisenhower warned about? We've got that. We've got politicians openly defending military programs purely because they create jobs. Whether or not we need the weapon is secondary.

America's military budget is ludicrously huge. Way, way, way too big to defend a nation our size, especially when neither Canada nor Mexico has made any rumblings about rolling tanks across the borders. As the world police, America's military is way too small. That's why you hear talk of being "stretched thin."

In other words, our massive military budget isn't even remotely necessary for national defense unless you include, "destroying any nation that might ever be a threat to us, ever."

You will never, ever hear a politician say that. At least, not one with the power to change anything. If a Democrat says it, the Republicans will scream, "SEE!? WE TOLD YOU DEMS ARE WEAK ON DEFENSE!" If a Republican says it, they'll call him a RINO or a traitor and alienate him; you can be damn sure he won't get the support he needs to climb the ladder.

What we need, for this and for other necessary changes, is a long chain of high-minded martyrs. People who see what change needs to be done, and are completely willing to destroy their own careers pushing for that change. Their successor will do the same. Eventually, one person will climb atop the bodies of those who came before them, and they will finally break through the political bullsh*t that's strangling us.

If we could draw upon the greatest men and women in American political history since the birth of the nation, I'm not sure we'd have enough to form such a chain. I have a sinking feeling that politics tends to murder visionaries whereas business turns them into millionaires.

We don't even need the Navy's figurative warship. *rimshot*

You're pretty wrong the F-22 was cut. That was the line the Republicans used to attack Obama. He chose to complete the current order (as in, NOT cut the program) and did not chose to purchase above and beyond that order. The only way you can consider that a cut is if you thought America was going to buy infinity F-22s.