10 replies on “Federal spending at a glance.”

  2. Given that they’re funded through separate taxes and so aren’t in the budget, it seems reasonable not include them in the…uh…budget.

    But let’s include it. Do you have any idea where that leaves our military vs. non-military spending? I’m guessing it doesn’t get our military spending down to be less than non-military, which strikes me as a totally arbitrary and reasonable target.

  3. I remember a bar graph of budget breakdown by spending type. If I recall correctly, education was on the order of 10 billion, environment around 1 billion, and war around 200 billion. Might our priorities be a little skewed?

  4. Bad guess, Waldo. My recollection is that it reduces Federal spending to less than one-third (perhaps less than one-quarter) of total Federal spending. And since the Democrat Congresses of the 60s, and because there are, of course, no guarantees that the money collected for Social Security and Medicare will actually be paid for those misnomered “entitlements,” it IS included in total Federal tax receipts for purposes of calculating the deficit.

    BTW, Tim, its not spending for “war.” It’s spending for defense and peace. Or is Washington an insufficient authority for you on that point?

  5. “Social[ist] Security”

    Don’t make yourself look like a jackass with this sort of crap (“LIEberals,” “Defeatocrat,” “Spendocrats,” as well as the other side with “Bu$h,” “RepubliKKKans,” and everything of that ilk also qualifying). If you want to suggest that social security is a socialist program, then fine, make the argument. I’d probably agree with you, but this mispelling and bracketing suffixes is just dumb and only serves to hurt the discussion.

    Anyway, I actually did some searching, but all I came up with is this: http://www.cbo.gov/budget/budproj.pdf#search=%22%22social%20security%22%20budget%20billion%202007%22

    On page four, it lists then-predicted 2007 spending on Social Security to be $579 billion, and Medicare and Medicaid spending together to be $644 billion. This makes the total of the two programs $1,223 billion, and definitely puts military spending under the 50% mark (to 28.7%, by my calculation, including only Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, and descretionary spending).

    Now, that having been said, I think it’s perfectly reasonable for this chart to exist as only descretionary spending, as that’s the stuff that congress has to actually approve each year, and thus you can hold your congressperson accountable not only for not doing something about it, but for actively taking part in the creation of a descretionary budget you probably don’t approve of. However, it does inflate the seemingly huge size of the military budget, with regard to percentage-of-tax-dollars.

    After having done a small bit of research to understand the context, I’m actually quite happy to have this website to refer to. Some of it is quite startling.

    P.S.

    “BTW, Tim, its not spending for “war.” It’s spending for defense and peace. Or is Washington an insufficient authority for you on that point?”

    Debate the merits of peace if you will, but a lot of that money has gone to such things as overthrowing Afghanistan and Iraq, which is definitely not peace, though we’re now spending a lot of money to return them both to peace. Hell, I stand behind the overthrow of the Taliban in Afghanistan, but what we were doing sure as hell wasn’t making peace: it was ousting a horrible and desctructive government.

    I know that the Department of War was long ago renamed to the Department of Defence, but a rose by any other name…

    So, to answer your question, yes, Washington is an insufficient authority, at least for me, on that point.

  6. I should also point out that the military gets more funding via emergency supplemental requests each year. This amounted to $81.9 billion in 2005 and $72.4 billion in 2006. There are no numbers for 2007, since as an emergency supplemental request will be filed during that year (assuming it happens again), and thus doesn’t exist yet, as far as I understand it.

    I don’t think this is included in the chart already, since emergency supplemental funds for 2007 aren’t part of the descretionary budget and thus aren’t yet available, but I could very well be wrong. I’d look into their sources, but I don’t have the time at the moment, as I’m at work currently.

    This doesn’t tip the scales past the 50% mark for the military if you include manditory spending, but it’s still a pretty significant bump in their funding, and I would suggest, the first candidate to be cut (and if midterm elections give democrats a majority in one or both houses, it’ll be much easier to reject it, as many Republicans are already upset about the practice of the Whitehouse making these requests, rather than asking for the money in the budget).

  8. Yes, James, Washington is an insufficient authority on that point. For example, Washington has declared prisoners of war “enemy combatants”, then, when told they couldn’t have those, invente the term “mandatory military internees”. With those kinds of definitions, do you really expect me to take it on faith that attacking Afghanistan and Iraq is “defence” and “peace-keeping”? I’ll use my own moral compass and dictionary definitions, thankyouverymuch. It’s war.

  9. To be fair to military spending, its at least spelled out as neccessary spending in the Constitution

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