I am not arguing that China would attack the US. It would indeed be foolish.

My issue is that the balance of power would change. China has been a very aggressive nation since it fell under Communism in the 40s. One of the biggest advantages the US has in the pacific theater is the stealth bomber as a deterrent from Chinese aggression - it would allow us, in the event of war, to cripple China's railway system, which is very critical to their trasportation of war material to the area of battle.

Should China have the ability to detect our bombers, it would be virtually impossible to penetrate Chinese airspace to hamper their war efforts, thus shifting the balance of power in the pacific theater to China.

This would allow them far more leeway in saber ratting with Korea, Japan, Taiwan, or any other problematic country. Not a worthwhile exercise for a measly $50b.

Never?

Maybe not in the next 20, or even 50 years... but never is a long time.

OT: Very bad way to make 50B. If Obama did this, he would get thrown out of office. Worst idea I have heard from a president. In fact, worse than invading Iraq (currently holding the #1 spot :p)

I doubt it’s true though.

Oh, it's 100% false, why even consider doing such a thing?

OT: I don't think China would attack in the next 20 years, why would they? They are still dependant on the USA for income and industry growth. 50 years though I could not say. But I imagine by then the B2 bomber would have been long out of service.

There is no way this is true. The amount in question is about 2% of what China is owed. It would be pointless and is obviously fake.

One

Big

Ass

Mistake,

America

 Ha ha!1 So damn clever!

If this doesn't appear in other sources, I'm afraid we'll have to consider it bogus. I didn't take the time to search for it though.

Anyway, USA's debt is getting too big, that's for sure. China is showing a lot of signs that they want to start ditching US dollar assets, and even making some concrete steps towards it:

http://www.businessweek.com/globalbiz/content/may2009/gb20090522_665312.htm?campaign_id=rss_daily

While this won't happen overnight, neither will the steps that USA needs to take to fix the situation (and those steps will be painful).

The problem nowadays is that USA is saying one thing and doing another. They say they have to stabilize housing, but keep racking up debt which makes interest rates go up (hurting the housing market). They say they have to keep deficits under control, but there's no end to the bailouts. We have bank bailouts, auto bailouts, pretty soon state bailouts and whatnot. Raising taxes is considered unamerican, so apparently there's nothing the government can do except raising money from expense cuts and things as shown in the OP.

Would be nice if they just decided to shrink government...

How much savings can come from that?

Shrinking government would probably also add to the recession's job losses... There's no easy way out, unfortunately.

But by spending money we don't have, they are weakening the dollar, which will hurt our investments.

And you could save billions or trillions of dollars a year by shrinking the government....I am talking all aspects.

For example, we spend ~$500b on the military a year. My solution? Close most overseas bases, and shrink the number of troops we need. I believe we could save $100B a year if we didn't have to throw out so much money to bases outside America. We don't need to protect the French from the Germans anymore.

And lets work on better, more affordable healthcare. We're spending 20% of the federal budget on medicare/medicaid. I wonder how much of that is inflated due to overcharging at hospitals....We could fix that.