Dems bleeding Millennials (Page 2)

Mama say Trump is da Debbil

Maybe we can try cutting down on some military spending too, ya think?





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No

I think that SS can be addressed, by some means testing and dropping in ceiling altogether. Health care is tough, who knew?

Well then, no real room for debate there.

I thought you guys were "America First" acolytes?

Tony, I absolutely agree with you, Pax Americana has resulted in no major wars since WWII. But the cost is high and I think if we are going to seriously tackle a $1T deficit we need to take nothing off the table. When Trump was candidate Trump he thought the same thing. Below is an excerpt from a July 2016 interview with DJT, it's the usual word-salad but I think his thinking is clear

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/22/us/politics/donald-trump-foreign-...

I am more optimistic about NK. My guess is they had a melt down at the nuke plant and said, 'f-it, this is not working'. Or maybe they have come to realized they cannot compete with US missile defense. They can spend years developing a nuclear capable ICBM but if we shoot the thing down, all is lost. And I mean all, not just the missile that we shoot down. The US has interceptor ICBMs capable of shooting down a missile out of NK. We also have countless interceptor missiles on Aegis destroyers capable of shooting the missile down in the boost phase.

A little history. What caused the collapse of the Soviet Union? Capitalism! In the 1980s the USSR was spending like 20% of their GDP on military spending....the US was spending like 4%. (these numbers are very approximate) Then Ronald Regan said we are stepping up the game! He said we are going to the next level....SDI or Strategic Defense Initiative in what was to become known as 'Star Wars'. He started a program of missile defense whereby we would shoot down an ICBM after it had gone exo-atmospheric. Up until this time the only defense was MAD or Mutually Assured Destruction. If they launched we'd empty our magazine of ICBMs on them. Both sides would lose ala the move "War Games". But now Reagan proposed a defense against incoming ICMBs - we would develop defensive weapons to shoot down incoming missiles. He proposed ground based and space based lasers and he proposed a system of missiles specifically to shoot down incoming missiles. In essence, Regan said, "All in!" and pushed our chips out on the table. The Soviets, already on the verge of financial collapse, folded.

The US continues its missile defense program and are continually improving it. Trump's defense budget includes $11 billion dollars in 2018 for missile defense. The NK total GDP is about 12 billion! In short, capitalism and our economy win again. The old cliché 'money is power' is true.

This is all just my theory as to why he seems to have caved. Frankly, I think he might actually have achieved his ultimate goal and that was to be seen by the international world as a player. He has the leader of the free world coming to negotiate with him! He actually is now a player. His nuclear program is what brought the US to the table. So he can claim victory in that sense.

Another theory is he is young and likely sees the world differently this his papa and grandpappy did. He likely surfs the internet and realizes his country could be so much more and he could be a hero to his people for bringing them out of the dark and into the real world. He doesn't have to carry the mantel of isolationism that Kim Jung Il and Kim Il Sung carried all those years.

I may be wrong, I often am, but I think we are about to see real and significant change in NK.

Who gets the credit? Trump and Kim Jong-Un spent much of late 2017 and early 2018 trading threats of annihilation. Then Trump announced his 2018 defense budget of $12 billion in missile defense that included adding 20 more ICBM interceptors to add to the 40 we already have. IOWs telling NK, you are just piszing in the wind, you cannot compete with us militarily, we will destroy you. And Trump was just the man to do it. Ironically, I think the liberals in the media helped by perpetuating the story that Trump was a nut about to nuke NK. So maybe Kim was thinking, 'this is no Obama or Bush or Clinton, this man is a nut!'. :-)