But not military spending naturally :) Actually not as hard as you might think. The 12 million everybody promises to get back to work? You get over half of that if nobody does anything to intercede. (barring that the idiots don't actually let sequestration happen that is or Europe fails or China suddenly slows to a halt, it has a slowed some, or all of the above in one cataclysmic perfect storm where it doesn't matter who is in charge, we're screwed)

Even if growth continues at the average rate it has done in the U.S. for the last 2 years adding 140,000 jobs a month, that 6.7 million jobs in 4 years. Any even slight improvement in economic growth, gets you to 12 million rather quickly, especially if public sector jobs stop disappearing as they are now. So the politicians make it sound like they're promising the moon, but in reality they're promising something that might happen anyway. As impressive as 12 million sounds, given that in 4 years there will be 4 years of more people trying into get into the job market and 140,000 jobs a month is the bare minimum to keep up with that and we lost well over 8 million jobs in 2007-9 and have only gotten 1.8 million of those back (along with losing some more public sector jobs since then) ... well ... suddenly 12 million stops sounding quite as impressive ... but a very good start I grant you.

The more substantive question is what will all those jobs be?

Actually that's the last thing you should do. Wherever 'austerity' has been tried it's been a disaster. It killed off the beginnings of a recovery here in Britain, for instance, and took Greece's economy from the brink of collapse to actual collapse.

Not exactly true for the UK...
You do need to balance the budget, and cuts are a part of that - especially with a deficit like Labour left us...the trouble with that here, now, is the cuts and balancing aren't being applied intelligently. There's far too many U-Turns, almost at the drop of a "YOU CAN'T DO THAT!!!!!111" from more than 3 of the Great Unwashed, and the incompetents across the Commons that left us the mess in the first place.

We've got a two-party coalition behaving like the Heath "Conservatives" of the 1970s, where we need another Maggie...all 3 parties have never lived in the real world with the rest of us, so have no concept, other than party ideological lines, of what is required...and it's showing. The Gods help us all when Labour get back in power, in 2015. It's gonna be bankruptcy and mass strikes all over again.

Despite the idiocy from the coalition, they (claim to - not actually been bothered to look up the figures at ONS or whatever the new QUANGO that has neutral oversight...) have reduced the deficit by 25%....at an extreme cost of more debt, and badly applied restructuring/cancelling of spending.

Facepalm level is high to severe, and doesn't show any sign of lessening, any time in the next 10 years...

Nope. When you don't have money to pay for non-essentials, you should stop going into debt to pay for them.

Greece and Britain have been in economic trouble for a long time (just like the US and most Western countries). We all kept rolling on fumes and wishful thinking, but people realized that when they can't even make the interest payments on our debts there's a serious problem.

To me, government essentials include courts, police forces, emergency services, national defense, and a good transportation network. Education is as big priority too, but government has been doing a poor job for the past few decades on that one so it needs to change anyway.

Public broadcasting in the US is not a major news player, and it does some good with educational shows, but other broadcasters have gotten into that too and now practically all the kids channels do those. So if we cut the budget and pulled it into the Dept of Ed with an explicitly education focus, that would be fine.

Just a point of clarification.

Deficit is the amount the government is over budget each year
Debt is the total amount owed

The deficit has been around 1 trillion dollars a year for the past four years
The US Debt is around 15 trillion dollars.

To be fair, with the exception of the fringe parties and Die Linke, none of the parties really engage in attack ads here. The problem is, they don't actually say anything. The SPD and CDU are so similar in terms of their policies, we might as well just be voting for the same fucking party each time.

Whichever party ends up being the senior partner in any coalition, the mantra is always "tax, tax, tax". It's getting fucking silly now. Not that we have ever had much alternative. All Die Linke and Bündnis '90 want to do are tax, and all the FDP want to do is cut taxes for the rich.
I was going to point out the error in cbean85's statement, but you've done it superbly in one quote. Thank you.

That may be true, but you have to start somewhere. Little things do add up.

Kindof sad. Mit Romney might be a lot of things, such as a Merman, a bigger menace to the world than George Bush, and completely and utterly untruthworthy, but this reeks of desperation.

This SUPERPAC shit in the US is out of control. It's almost as disgusting as the drug ads all over American TV. That country is a dying whale bleeding out, and it's gonna drag a lot of us down with it.

I hope to Jesus the free world stops them from invading Iran.

I got a chuckle out of this one currently in circulation: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u2eojFZ0c20