I get so tired of hearing this. Here is a chart I whipped up using a table I got from: http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/budget/fy2011/assets/hist03z2.xls.
I left out the Housing and Finance line items along with the post office because I could not make heads or tails out of that, serious book cooking going on there apparently. Everything else looks extremely straightforward on this table.
Comparing 2008 (the last year of the Evil Bush, surely a year in which the warmongering Bush would have let little old ladies and children die to fund his thirst for blood) to the estimated 2010 final numbers; here is how it breaks down in Millions:
Social security edges out National defense for the last four years (actually going all the way back to 1993) But that is not the whole story.
Once you add all the Health and Human services budgets up, and even throwing the VA in with the Defense Budget here is how they stack up. HHS is Social Security, Income Security, Medicare, Health, Education, Training, Employment and other Social Services. Defense is National Defense and Veterans Benefits. All other is Transportation, Administration of Justice, International Affairs, Natural Resource and Environment, General Science and Space Technology, Government, Community and Regional Development, Agriculture, and Energy.
So not only is our HHS outlay about three times that of our Defense Budget, but as the chart clearly shows all spending has went up appreciably since 2008, even defense.
There is just no way to get around that…as long as you believe Whitehouse.gov numbers. Which I don’t. I am willing to bet it is much more money, and skewed much farther towards ‘benefits’
-KOOK
silverfiddle 46p · 768 weeks ago
Andrew33 103p · 768 weeks ago
Foxfier 31p · 768 weeks ago
Or they do something like this bit of fraud, where they put everything on the military they could manage, added their estimates of the current conflicts, added in 80% of the service on the national debt and removed "trust funds" from the figure. The only definition they offer of "trusts" is social security-- so that's a fifth of the nation's spending removed from their consideration.
Andrew33 103p · 768 weeks ago
Foxfier 31p · 768 weeks ago
I'd much rather we stop funding things like the UN (other than our membership dues) and the ISS. (As much as I hate to say it, card carrying geek that I am)
If folks want to think of us as "just another country," they can do so on their own dime.
Of course, I'd also like to cut spending in country by cutting the number of mandatory regulatory hoops one must go through for most anything, so I may as well throw a pony on top of it all while we're wishing.
Andrew33 103p · 768 weeks ago
Foxfier 31p · 768 weeks ago
Andrew33 103p · 768 weeks ago
Foxfier 31p · 768 weeks ago
Watching the debt roll up while we give away money, spend far too much on "research," waste money to try to make the nation accident free?
Bugs the heck out of me.
Andrew33 103p · 768 weeks ago
KOOK 91p · 766 weeks ago