Marc Card Military: Fill & Download for Free

My experience with public showering is vastly different from everyone else’s. The common theme in most answers was that no one is looking and no one cares. I call BS on that. In the Army when you arrive at a training post you go to a replacement center for a few days to inprocess. You get haircuts, dog tags, military ID cards, and you do several other things before you enter Basic Training. In replacement (April 1992) is where I first experienced public showers. There were a few older men but the majority of us were 18–24. We all showered before lights out and this older white guy makes a comment to this younger black guy, “You know, you’re not that big! In fact your junk is pretty small. I thought all YOU guys were supposed to be big?” Another white guy joins in, “Yeah I saw that too?” When the first guy made the comment; he made it with a sense of satisfaction like ha! I’m bigger than a black guy and I’m white! I win. The black guy’s response was quick and loud.“I never said I had a big dick. Who says I’m supposed to have a big dick? Who started that shit? I didn’t start that rumor. I’m 17 years old, why is your old ass looking at me? You like me? I look like a little boy to you or something? Do I look like the the little boys you used to touch? Hey everybody look out for these two fags here. They’re dick gazers. They like looking at dicks!” Then everyone jumps in “Why are you looking at dicks fag?”, “We got a couple of queers!”, “If I catch y’all looking at my fuckin’ dick I’m gonna kick your faggot ass!”After that no one made any comments or dared to look at anyone during shower time. If the size of your penis is the issue with public showering you can always beat others to the punch and make fun of it yourself people laugh and then no one really talks about you or it because that fact is already out there. Maybe the thought of mass showers with men is just disgusting to you then I will tell you that you’re correct. It is disgusting and unnecessary but in the military you will just have to deal with it and yes people are sneaking a peek or noticing your penis. I accepted that fact a long time ago it was just nothing most of bothered to comment on.

My opinion on this has changed 180 degrees in the past few years, but perhaps not in the direction you'd guess.Given my upbringing and background, military service was just not something that was ever in the cards for me. I knew one kid from my school that joined the Marines after 9/11, but otherwise, I was surrounded by doctor/lawyer/scientist/programmer types of people. I had a great uncle in the Navy, but again, no one in my family served and military service often runs in families. My dad wasn't considered for Vietnam because he was in the medical field and that suited him fine.And so, as of a few years ago, I would have vehemently insisted on not being involved in war in any way. I'm pretty darn close to a pacifist and am strongly against neo-liberal, spreading Democracy by the barrel of a gun type foreign policy. I'm also skeptical enough to see through politicians' ploys of making one war seem just and humane, while ignoring the plight of others. I realize it's all geopolitics and realpolitik.However, I've now worked at the VA for 2 years and my opinion has changed. I see the honor associated with serving ones country. Indeed, it can be a very liberal idea (absent the killing part, of course). That is one reason why liberal NY Congressman Charles Rangel supported a universal 1 year conscription bill (Rangel Introduces Legislation Reinstating Draft And Requiring Women To Register In Selective Service System). There is nothing more liberal than the notion of "from each according to their ability." The draft is essentially a way of carrying that out.More importantly I revere the courage, bravery and self-sacrifice in those that have served and have met the past 2 years. Before, I might have only presumed people served out of necessity of lack of options. I have a true deep respect for actual Vets now, whereas before it was respect in the abstract. I also see the generational divide. Even for Korea, when my father-in-law served in the Air Force, military service was for "my kind of people." Obviously Vietnam changed all that.At the same time, I also see the ravages it takes on people's lives, even absent major injury. Minor concussions, PTSD and minor service disabilities can essentially end the life you might have planned. But that's why it's called sacrifice, and if you believe in the principles of the US, you should believe in defending them. Just because I don't believe in agricultural subsidies doesn't mean I can't hold back .4% of my paycheck and pay for what I think is okay. That's not what commonwealth for the common good is; otherwise it's a vouchers system for everything form schools, to cops.As an oldish, bookish, kind of guy, I'd hope I'd be used usefully; not killing people with my gun, but sitting back in some military hospital, dealing with the brain injured, most likely.So, no I would not dodge the draft, I would serve, hopefully in the most honorable way I can. While I still respect those that conscientiously object, go Thoreau and refuse to see themselves as a cog in a war machine, that's not me anymore.

I've got bad news for you: Yes, although it is not imminent, default is inevitable. Those who don't think so are indulging in one or more of seven fallacies.Fallacy 1. The current debt is manageable.The public debt (not counting SSA "Trust Fund" obligations)—is about $13 trillion. Interest payments on that debt take up about 10 percent of our tax revenue. That can be considered manageable if you ignore two things.First, you have to ignore that current interest rates are at absurdly unsustainable lows. If interest rates return to merely the average rates of the last 20 years, then instead of taking up 10 percent of tax revenues, interest would gobble up 20 to 30 percent of revenues, and send that percentage on an upward trajectory. That's a whole different ballgame.Second, our public debt is just one of many liabilities competing for taxpayer dollars. That SSA Trust Fund and unfunded SSA liability are two more, totaling about $27 trillion. Medicare and Medicaid--the big kahunas of unfunded liabilities--are about $90 trillion. When you add it all up, the U.S. has over $135 trillion in total liabilities. So the public debt is only about ten percent of our total liability problem. To say "we can handle it" is like saying we can handle $500 per month in credit card interest 'no problem' while ignoring $4,500 per month in mortgage, auto loans, children's tuition, and all other fixed obligations, all before considering "discretionary" spending. And on income of $4,000 per month.Looking at public (bond) debt in isolation from other liabilities, especially in comparison to our income, and calling it "manageable" indicates a kind of financial myopia.Fallacy 2. We have overcome a far worse debt-to-GDP before.In 1945, the U.S. had over 100 percent debt-to-GDP, versus about 75 percent today (again, not counting the SSA Trust Fund) and managed to cut that ratio by two-thirds over the next three decades. So, what’s the big deal?Well, to begin with, the U.S. of 2014 is a fiscally different animal from the U.S. of 1945. Debt is created by accumulating deficits, and the deficits that had caused the run-up in wartime debt largely evaporated once the war ended.Today, the U.S. has a structural deficit driven by "mandatory" expenditures such as Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, as well as interest payments on the debt. These, plus other expenditures we normally think of as "government" (military, courts, infrastructure, etc.), currently require the U.S. to borrow a fresh two to three billion dollars a day. Also, since the the average term of U.S. debt is now less than four years, the government must issue on average another four billion dollars a day to replace retiring debt. This black hole of borrowing sucks in approximately the full market value of an Exxon, WalMart, or Microsoft every month.These expenditures are not going away anytime soon; in fact, demographics dictate that they will grow significantly over the next several decades. (The aforementioned $135 trillion in net liabilities is the CBO's best estimate of the present value of those growing expenditures, net of the payroll taxes purportedly funding them.)Those surpluses during the Clinton years? Even if the Bush tax cuts and Iraq war had never happened, they would have long since vanished under the tidal wave of baby boomer retirements. This is about the opposite of our fiscal situation immediately after WWII.The second thing ignored in comparing today's fiscal situation to the post-war period is that, back then, about two-thirds of the value of the debt eventually evaporated due to inflation. The nominal, face value of the debt never actually went down. This was enabled by two things we don't have today. First, the average term of the postwar debt was about nine years, which meant that U.S. bonds were maturing very gradually, so Treasury did not have to go back to the well so frequently for more cash. This gave bondholders little recourse when inflation reared up, and the value of their bonds consequently declined. Second, nearly all of that debt was to Americans--the people who patriotically bought all those war bonds. They didn't really notice the decline in their bonds' value because it was denominated in dollars.Today, foreign investors, who own a significant chunk of our debt, would immediately notice the decline in U.S. bond values in reaction to dollar inflation. They would quickly demand higher interest on all that newer, much shorter-term debt that the U.S. is obliged to regularly reissue. Thus, inflation would not work nearly as well today as it did in the post-war period. But there is a much more compelling reason why inflation would not save us...Fallacy 3. Inflation will save us.You can’t get far into a discussion of U.S. debt without someone saying that government control of the money supply means never having to default. As several Fed chairmen have reminded us, “We can print more!” Setting aside the notion that paying people back with dollars that are worth one-half or one-tenth the value of dollars that were borrowed is a kind of default, this attitude is merely a variant of the first fallacy--considering only the public debt and ignoring our total liabilities.The U.S. (or, more precisely, the Fed) indeed has their hands on that inflation tiller. Inflation effectively transfers wealth from lenders to borrowers. But that wealth transfer only applies to fixed-interest liabilities. Today, over 90 percent of our liabilities are more-or-less indexed for inflation. A significant portion of our public debt (i.e., TIPS) is directly indexed to inflation, so inflation obviously won't help with that part. Social Security is indexed to the CPI, so higher inflation will merely increase the size of checks going out (albeit with a bit of a lag). The big kahuna--Medicare--is entirely, if indirectly, indexed to the most inflationary part of our economy--health care. Notwithstanding headlines about the slowing growth of medical costs, those costs are still growing much faster than most. That growth would certainly accelerate with an increasing money supply. If the government tries to slow that cost growth from the top down by rationing treatments or limiting payments to providers in a period of serious inflation, get ready for a March on Washington with canes and walkers (and see Fallacy #6).Given that about 90 percent of our liabilities are essentially inflation-proof, inflation would merely initiate a death spiral by which our deficit monster would have to be fed with new bonds issued at ever-higher interest rates, at ever increasing frequency, until the monetization machinery blows up.I'm amazed how widespread this fallacy is even among trained economists. I have sat on a number of panels with economists glibly trotting out some version of "inflation will save us" only to see them go silent on the question of the effect of inflation on our other, much larger but less visible, liabilities. It's the look of someone when the lights have come on, and they suddenly see the whole elephant.Fallacy 4. We can grow our way out of it.The most elegant solution to our fiscal problems would be to grow our way out of them. However, our economic growth would have to be over six percent per year (real) just to keep up with the growth in mandated spending. The U.S. has averaged between two and three percent growth over the last century, and is struggling to do even that in this century.There is a particularly idiotic version of the grow-our-way-out-of-it argument that relies on government "investment" as the vehicle to drive that growth, often with "multipliers" of 2x, or 4x, or even more magical results. No doubt some government spending, perhaps in infrastructure or basic research, does provide a positive return to our society, some small portion of which may even be as high as those multipliers imply. But anyone who thinks that the problem with our growth is that the government is simply not driving enough of it through centralized allocation of capital learned nothing from the Soviet experience.Fallacy 5. We can tax our way out of it (or at least a significant portion of it).According to the GAO, U.S. government tax revenues would have to quickly climb about 60 percent higher than they are today in real terms, or by an extra 15 percentage points of GDP, just to keep our fiscal gap from growing. However, there is a good reason that GAO projects a total of about 19% of GDP in tax revenues going forward. Over the last six decades, as top federal income tax rates have bounced between 28 and 92 percent, actual federal revenues never strayed out of a narrow band of 16 and 21 percent of GDP (see Hauser's law). There is no reason to think that we could achieve anything like 15 percent more of GDP in government revenue with materially higher tax rates, especially taxes on income, considering what that would do to economic growth.Some point to European tax-to-GDP of upwards of 30 to 40 percent to suggest that such increases are possible for the U.S. But when you add up state and local taxes--providing a more apples-to-apples comparison--the U.S. is already close to 27% of GDP. And Americans are unlikely to accept European levels of taxation without European levels of amenities, like "free" college or health care in those places where taxes are highest.We are now starting to hear about a wealth tax as a panacea. To understand the futility of using a wealth tax to solve a liability problem, consider that the balance sheet of the U.S. could be viewed as the net liabilities of the public sector offset by the net assets of private citizens. Recall that our net liabilities are about $135 trillion. Our net assets (i.e., household net worth) is about $70 trillion--just over half our liabilities. A wealth tax would simply take money out of the household net worth column to reduce the government's net liabilities column. Nothing happens to the fiscal gap of $65 trillion--unless you believe that the government will magically achieve materially higher returns on trillions of dollars of "investment" than would that money staying in private sector. More likely, such a tax would undermine the incentive to save, hurting long-term growth (back to #4).Fallacy 6. We can cut spending enough to forestall disaster.According to the GAO, the government would have to cut entitlement spending by nearly one-third starting today in order to begin closing that fiscal gap. The longer it waits to begin its cuts, the higher the cuts will have to be.Keep in mind that cuts to entitlement programs are themselves a kind of default--i.e., breaking a promise to seniors about income and medical payments they are counting on and have planned their retirements around and have been forced to pay into all their working lives.But let's set aside the questionable morality of reneging on long-established social insurance commitments. Can Congress actually muster the political will to make such cuts? History is not reassuring on this; spending cuts that previously passed Congress after bitter debate have been regularly reversed in subsequent votes once the impact of those cuts became plain (Google "doc fix"). Large-scale cuts also arguably work against economic growth (back to #4).Between the morality of reneging on social commitments, their unpopularity with those who lose benefits, and their overall negative economic impact, tough spending controls would be so politically risky as to be futile to seriously attempt. And that's before having to face the fierce opposition of Progressives ideologically committed to the preservation, if not expansion, of these social programs.The experience of countries facing default is that they implement the necessary austerity only when forced to as a condition of being bailed out. The US. is too big to bail (TM).Fallacy 7. Default is so terrible to contemplate, we would never let it happen.A U.S. default would knock out a key pillar of the global economy. So, yeah, it would be bad beyond measure. Nevertheless, I'm not sure who the "we" is that could prevent a default when the run on U.S. bonds begins. But I'm sure that late-empire Romans no doubt felt the same way whenever the possible sack of their city came up in conversation. ("Goths running riot through the city!? Perish the thought! We could never let that happen.").The purveyors of this fallacy, ignore an iron law of reality: Anything that cannot go on forever won't. Consequently, some bad things are going to happen no matter how bad they are, and no matter how much people don't want it to happen, if there is nothing to stop them from happening.A variant of this head-in-the-sand response is the mantra of "people have been warning us so long about skyrocketing interest and default that they no longer can be believed." (or, "C'mon. We've been hearing about this 'barbarian threat' for centuries. Enough already!") No, the U.S. is not going to default tomorrow, and probably not for years or decades to come. But pretending that rapidly accumulating debt has no consequences is willful ignorance. Call it "debt denial."Most current policy makers will probably be long retired when the SHTF, so they can get away with this denialist attitude and the easy votes it enables them to harvest. That doesn't make it right or reasonable, but it will always be politically easier to ignore the problem, in part by adopting this fallacy, than to try to defend against the charlatans that can sell it.Conclusion. In fact, the U.S. will likely try everything else first--higher taxes, spending cuts, and maybe try to sneak in some inflation--before it defaults. However, at the end of the day, our policymakers will face the choice that reality will force upon them, the choice between stiffing the Chinese or cutting off grandma.Unfortunately, I don't know of any bunker deep enough to protect us from the aftermath of that choice.Addendum: I figured I should address a couple of good points I have seen, including in my comments. They come down to this:#8 (not entirely fallacious): The market does not think default is inevitable.This shows up in both the long-term bond yields and the credit default swaps on those bonds. I will briefly address each in turn.Long-term bond yields are extremely low, representing the safest bets available for securities of their duration. The latter point should not be surprising; GE's bonds can not expect to be payable if US bonds go into default. In fact, no other bonds in the world are likely to survive a U.S. default.But what about the former point, that these bonds appear as safe as ever, safer than when our debts were at one-fifth their current level? This is probably the toughest objection to address. The market collectively knows everything I do, and much more. The market's judgment is that U.S. bond holders should fully expect to be paid back in 20 or 30 years. I know that betting against the market is generally foolish, and allow that this is the best evidence that I might be wrong.All I can say in my defense is that I thought the market was wrong in 2000 when it was discounting profit growth of Internet companies that simply did not add up. And I withdrew significant retirement sums from the market in advance of the dot com bubble burst. I wish I could say I also saw the housing bubble coming, but I didn't. I didn't even know what a CDO was in 2007. But I knew people who lived in that market, and who refused to wait until "the music stopped."In other words, as much as I respect the market, I don't think it necessarily prices in the 'black swans' particularly well, and the conditions for a U.S. default would be totally unprecedented when it happens.Credit default swap spreads on US Treasuries are easier for me to critique; as a proxy for "insurance" against US defaults, this instrument is batshit crazy; it is the quintessential "greater fool" market. My question to those who own them expecting to collect: Who in hell are you going to collect from? Surely not people with dollars. People with Euros are going to have meaningful currency to meet your claim? People with yen? Or yuan? Buying dollar bond CDSs is like buying insurance against the company issuing the policy. It makes no sense. And if it makes no sense at the point of actually trying to collect on the policy, then the probabilities implied by its current pricing can't be trusted to mean anything, either.