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Also, there is a reason to keep inflation stats low whether they are true or not.

Our entitlement spending has mandatory increases tied to the COLA based on inflation. That is just a side note and not necessarily tied to this article.

Also, the comment about India and China has merit.

In China, they realized that concentrating industry in the major cities was actually causing labor shortages and wage inflation. Some manufactures are leaving China for low wage nations. So, China, started running roads and rail and pipelines and power lines to rural areas. They are building 40 nuclear power plants over the next 15 years for cheap power.

They have, according to recent article in either Time or Newsweek, I forget which, going into farming areas and from the ground up, building new 1 million population cities with high rise office buidlings, places for apartments and homes and I mean real subdivision type home similar to ours, and places for factories and stores and entertainment. Thus, the 29 cent an hour rural worker can start making the $1 to $2 an hour wage like the "big city" guys. They now have a many middle class (4 to 5 times the buying power so a $2 an hour worker is making $10 an hour in buying power) as our entire population and are growing it about 50 million a year. Millionaires in China are growing in number by about 12% a year. Car sales double digit, cell phones? 1 and 1/3 as many owned as in the U.S., Computer sales doubling ever couple of years.

Yet, the prices are staying low, and giving those middle class the buying power to be middle class even on only $8,000 a year in earnings, because they keep expanding the area to include the poor in rural areas were a $1 an hour is a 300% pay raise. India also has more middle class than our entire population and both India and China, graduate 350,000 engineers a year to meet demand.

An $18,000 a year engineer in China has the buying power of a U.S. engineer that makes $80,000 to $90,000. They have a long way to go but we have to compete with them wheter we like to or not and our government is holding us back in many ways.

The cost of inflation hits us hard in social security and Medicare and will get worse with 77 million getting ready to retire. Also, they say if you are 65 now, you can expect to live to 92 and under 65 (thats the 77 million soon to retire) will live to 100. That is 35 years they will draw from social security and Medicare. Is it any wonder they say we have an $84 trillion unfunded liablity in social security and Medicare?

Our budget for 2007 is 2.8 trillion
Quote:
Department of Health and Human Services $697 Billion 60% Growth since 2001
Department of the Treasury $495,Billion 27.8 % Growth since 2001
Social Security Administration $625 Billion 32.3 % Growth since 2001
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http://www.indianchild.com/thomas_jefferson.htm

Why the Treasury dept? Because that is where the $440 billion interest on the national debt is found.

Add Defense at $495 billion which is the smallest of the four when defense is included and you have $2.3 trillon of the $2.8 trillion budget. That means the other 85 or so deparments are all running combined in about 500 billion.

Food stamps, by the way is in the Dept. of Agriculture (they love to hide thing in other departments) and runs about 57 billion. So, now the rest of the government is down to $440 billion or about equal to our interest payment on debt. Look at those growth rates and then talk about inflation and how inflation hurts us. That is all money that has to be collected or borrowed and it in and of itself causes inflation.

What about the Homeland Serurity dept.
$ 31,030,000,000 Increase since 2001 88.7 %
Which when combined with -
Department of Education $ 63,373,000,000 Increase since 2001 58.7 %
you have another $100 billion so now we have most of government running on $340 billion.

Office of Personnel Management $ 70,139,000,000 Increase since 2001 31.9 %
Go to the site and click on the plus sign by it and then the plus sign under the category that comes up and you get a breakdown like this portion of it
Quote:
# Payment to civil service retirement and disability fund $ 27,532,000,000
# Government payment for annuitants, employees health benefits $ 8,765,000,000
snip-----------
Civil service retirement and disability fund $ 61,309,000,000
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http://www.freedomworks.org/budget/

There are some offseting income revenues that are included in the breakdown, so it is pretty unbiased and accurate.

But, bottom line is that socialism is driving our national debt and every COLA increase drives us further into debt.

No Child left behind should not be a federal program. If it is to be one, it should be at the state level.

The Department of education was established in 1979. For about 175 years we had the best education system in the world without a Federal Dept of Education. Socialism was dragging it down, however and by 1979 had declined significantly. So what do we do for a solution? Throw money at it with socialism from the federal level instead of just setting high standards and telling the states to comply with it or lose jobs when business had to leave to find high skilled workers. We solved nothing. We only made the problem worse.

You could write book after book on what socialism has done to inflation, government spending, national debt, loss of jobs and exports in consumer goods, and loss of respect in the world. Who respects France and yet socialism here will soon make us the France of the Americas.