There are only two options you can extrapolate from what you can see, or you can live in a total dream land where everything that happens is based on a fantasy. "By suspending judgment, by confining oneself to phenomena or objects as they appear, and by asserting nothing definite as to how they really are, one can escape the perplexities of life and attain an imperturbable peace of mind." Pyrrho (ca. 360 BC - ca. 270 BC) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyrrho

PS: Plenty of people chose to live their life based on a fantasy of one sort or another, but it's a dangerous path with no clear boundaries between there and true insanity.

SS spending has been cut in the past by increasing the retirement age for full benefits which helps because you pay for a shorter period and even more people die before receiving benefits. Medicare is harder to cut directly, but increasing premiums is an option and what is covered is also optional. Just because they keep calling it Medicare does not mean it's always costs the same amount.

but what is required to meet the law's requirements.

But, the government get's to change the law, so it get's to adjust how much they cost. As to eliminating the debt, all we need to do is reduce the growth of the debt to below that of inflation, or even inflation adjusted GDP. If it's growing by 1% a year that's actually a good thing and our economy can quickly outpace that growth over the long term. As to stimulus spending that's only a problem if it lasts for several years, the real question is if we can avoid stimulus spending once things improve.

PS: All government money comes from the same pool, US. Washington has many sacred cows, DoD, SS, Medicare, but they can all be sacrificed.

Tax breaks distort non governmental spending, which reduces economic efficiency so removing them can have a positive net effect on the economy while increasing revenue. SS and Medicare are just another type of spending that can be reduced like any other. However, the major cause of that 1.3 trillion $ deficit a weakening economy and two wars both of which should be short lived. It took 10 years to go from reducing the deficit to a 1.3 trillion $ one, and the trip back can be faster than you might think.

I don't think increasing taxes would increase revenue as much as you might expect. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laffer_curve

We could remove tax breaks, or reduce spending, but long term the tax rate is about as high as is feasible.

True when you share your physical toys you can't use them. But, when you share your digital toys nobody loses anything.

Sadly, no.

IP's are given away and there is no reason to give them back so of course there is a lot of demand and we are "running out". But don't think just because IANA runs out of IP's you will be unable to get new ones. They will just come with a price tag. It's a classic land grab, and people that got large chunks of IP space are going to start selling them as soon as there is no free competition.

One of the quick and dirty ways to continuing to use IPv4 is to have some of the huge chunks of the address space given back. Do FORD, MIT, Apple, IBM, etc each need 256^3 addresses? (http://xkcd.com/195/) IPv4 has almost 256^4 or around 4 billion IP's that's almost one IP per person on the planet and plenty to last a *LONG* time.

Wait two weeks and go at an off time and their might be 3 people in the room, assuming you brought two friends.

It is a near certainty that the average person will eventually have access to nuclear-scale weapons.

Consider, for the last several years the average doctor in the US is capable of making bio weapons that could kill millions of people. Yet, more people have been killed by lighting than said bio weapons over that time period. Capability != Threat.

In high tech fields it's less about the pay than the work rules. Unions tend to require people to have vary specific job roles and pay people during down time. That's ok if you are working in a coal mine, but a CPU fab requires a lot of flexibility both in how long you work and what you are doing from day to day. Building cars might be somewhere between those points, but the inability to let people go in the bad times makes the extremely expensive to grow in the good times.

The wage differences in the developing world are far less significant that the union rules GM needs to deal with. In a highly automated factory the machines and materials become a far more important cost component relative to the workers. Honda has started several US factories and pays a decent wage without the overhead of a unionized workforce.

There are also a fair number of Cell based supercomputers and even one hybrid out there. And even some pure custom solutions used by the NSA. (There is a reason they have their own chip fab.) And, if you include folding at home type applications, then GPU's represent a reasonable percentage of the worlds supper computing infrastructure.