Thread: Mattis: ‘Sad State of Affairs’ When Most Young Males Can’t Qualify for Military Serv

Mattis: ‘Sad State of Affairs’ When Most Young Males Can’t Qualify for Military Service

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AP Photo/Manuel Balce Ceneta 26 Sep 20181,804

Defense Secretary Jim Mattis on Tuesday called it a “sad state of affairs” when most of America’s young males cannot qualify for military service due to obesity or drug use.

“It’s a sad state of affairs when 71 percent of the 18 to 24-year-old males in this country cannot qualify to enter the United States Army as a private,” he told cadets at the Virginia Military Institute.
“That’s a baseline that you’ve got to be at least, you know, not obese, not using drugs, you know, a high school grad, and real baseline. And the army establishes it through army regs, and it is not an exaggerated one,” he said.
Mattis said having only 29 percent who qualify for military service is a “real problem.”
The Army did not meet its recruiting goals by thousands this year, the first time since the height of the Iraq War, according to a recent report by the New York Times. According to the report, the Army has been allowing those who do not meet the standards to sign up.
The article also cited the hot job market and the recent increase of the size of the military as contributing factors to recruitment problems.
“Today, we don’t need as large of military, but we need one big enough. And when are you drawing from only 29 percent at the beginning, only 29 percent is your total recruiting population — it creates a real problem for us,” Mattis said.
The retired four-star Marine general said he worried that the U.S. would not be prepared for future wars to ensure the nation’s freedom.
“We’re not going to hang onto these freedoms because our grandfathers fought on the beaches of Normandy or because our fathers fought in Vietnam,” he said. “Every generation, as President Reagan put it, is going to have to fight to keep this experiment alive. It’s a big concern to me. I don’t know what we can do about it.”
Mattis called the quality of lunches served at schools across the country “crummy,” and said Congress has not figured out how to help solve the problem, and encouraged cadets to get involved in the school boards in their communities.
“Most of America’s problems are solved at the local level. And that’s going to have to be where this one gets solved,” he said.
Mattis said recruiters are honing in on parts of the country where youth are more physically fit, but said, “they’re not going to be enough, in the long run, if we don’t turn this around.”
“And there’s parts of the country, by the way, that are much more physically fit than other parts of the country, and our recruiters know it and they hone in on those areas,” he said.
“Take the fitness that you’re expected to maintain here into every walk of life, not just your family but your parish, your school district, your local communities, and get out there and start working with the kids when they’re young, because once they’ve gone over the edge, it’s very hard to bring them back.”

https://www.breitbart.com/big-govern...ource=facebook

Debt Threat Rises: The Government Will Soon Spend More On Interest Than On The Military



“It’s very much something to worry about..."

Thu, 09/27/2018 - 15:06
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Authored by Mac Slavo via SHTFplan.com,

As debt and interest rates rise, the government is about to be in a disastrous situation. Very soon, they will spend more money paying interest on the national debt than they will on the bloated military budget.



By the year 2023, interest payments on the national debt could surpass the entire budget for the Department of Defense, according to the New York Times. The ballooning debt is being spurred by an inability by those who claim authority over the economy to stop spending and the hike in interest rates. With more and more money being robbed from the unborn and spent by the government and more going toward interest, political “leaders” will find it harder to do pretty much anything.



While many are worried about the crumbling infrastructure, others say it’ll be more difficult to make emergency moves like pulling the economy out of future recessions. Which is strange, because the government causes recessions and doesn’t “fix” them,they simply put band-aids on gaping wounds. This mentality that the government will save people when they are $21 trillion in debt is a delusional one, other economic experts have said.
In about 5 years, more than $900 billion in interest payments will be due annually, easily outpacing spending on several other socialist programs.


Already the fastest-growing major government expense, the cost of interest is on track to hit $390 billion next year, nearly 50 percent more than in 2017, according to the Congressional Budget Office. The inability of the government to rein in spending will eventually result in an economic meltdown the world had never seen nor is prepared for. The government literally cannot steal enough money from producers in the form of taxes to get out from under this problem anymore.
“It’s very much something to worry about,” said C. Eugene Steuerle, a fellow at the Urban Institute and a co-founder of the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center in Washington. “Everything else is getting squeezed.” Gradually rising interest rates would have made borrowing more expensive even without any additional debt, but the government never cuts spending. In fact, Republicans, who are supposed to be “fiscally conservative”, while holding all three houses of government, approved a budget bill in February that raised spending by $300 billion over two years. All of these problems will add to the financial pressure.
The deficit is expected to total nearly $1 trillion next year for the first time since 2012, under the Obama Administration.

Former chairman of the Federal Reserve, Ben Bernanke, has even begun to sound the alarm on the government’s spending problem. At a recent round-table discussion with reporters at the Brookings Institution, Bernanke, former Treasury Secretaries Henry Paulson, and Timothy Geithner all expressed concerns that the next economic crisis will come with policymakers being unable to do anything about it. –SHTFPlan

The trade war will also make things difficult for those already struggling to make ends meet as jobs are lost and prices are raised to cover the cost of tariffs. The economy’s immediate future is looking incredibly bleak.

https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-...erest-military