Breaking Down the Federal Budget
In a previous post, Andrew responds to my assertion that the democrats are responsible for increasing taxes.
Get real. All the unbalanced budgets that have raised teh national debt by trillions and trillions of dollars in the last 30 years have come about under republican presidents. Sure, the republicans never actually raise taxes because they’re more concerned about winning elections than actual fiscal responsibility, but they’re the ones SPENDING 20% of the GDP.
Sigh. In regards to high taxes I didn’t say the sole responsibility of high taxes was because of democrats I said they were mostly responsible. In the following sentence I criticized the current president, who in case you were unaware is a republican.
While I take the point that military expenditure make up a large portion of my taxes I would like to point out that the social program expenditures for the 2008 look like this:
* $608 billion (+4.5%) - Social Security
* $386 billion (+5.2%) - Medicare
* $209 billion (+5.6%) - Medicaid and the State Children’s Health Insurance Program
* $324 billion (+1.8%) - Unemployment/Welfare/Other mandatory spending
For Military expenditures:
*$481.4 billion (+12.1%) - United States Department of Defense
* $145.2 billion (+45.8%) - Global War on Terror
Even without factoring in Social Security, the federal government is spending more money on social programs than the military. The social programs clearly are costing more. It’s also wise to point out that we are currently in the middle of a war and yet we spend much more on social programs then the military.
Let me expand on this point. Even if you don’t agree with the military action in Iraq you would most likely agree that it’s reasonable to see an increase in budget for the department of defense. In this way, one can say that increases in military expenditure are transitory, they expand when the military is engaged and retracts when we are at peace. This same point can not be made about social programs. Over the long term, social programs trend towards expansion. Complaining that the military receives a large proportion of the budget during war is not the same thing as complaining about how much of the budget is always devoted to social programs.
Furthermore, only a fool would argue that the bulk of political support for Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, Child Insurance, Unemployment, and Welfare is not democratic. Giving more money, and as consequence power, to the federal government is mostly the work of the democrats. They favor large more expansive government. In particular, the kind that never goes away unlike military budgets.
Doing some rough calculations, not including social security, social programs (Medicaid, Medicare, and Unemployment) make up about 30% of the budget. Including Social Security it’s about 50% of the budget. Military expenditures make up about 20% of the budget. I will grant that the bulk of increase over the last couple of years is attributable to the Middle East wars. I would hasten to add this increase is transitory and will be reduced as those conflicts come to an end. The same can not be said of social programs.
When I said:
I would also like to point out that the most of the policies that will lead to the federal goverment receiving over 20% of the GDP comes at the hands of liberal and democratic policy.
What I was actually referring to was these paragraphs in the original piece I linked to:
First, there are some differences between the Senate and House versions of the 2009 federal budget, but however the details are ironed out, the Democrats will kill President Bush’s 2001 and 2003 tax cuts. If his promised veto is overridden by Congress, it will mean a minimum tax hike for every American taxpayer of about $3,000 annually.
The increase could be even more, though, because buried in the Democrats’ budget resolution are 17 “reserve” funds of additional taxing authority. Even without the reserve tax hikes, allowing the Bush cuts to expire will mean that 20.3 percent, or one of every five dollars, of gross domestic product will soon be consumed by government.
Proposed action that will push the Federal budget into taking 1 out of every 5 dollars the economy produces finds strong political support among democrats. As always, this is the case.
April 16th, 2008 at 3:00 pm
God, don’t remind me. Seriously, our forefathers would be vomiting into their tricorne hats if they saw how bloated our federal government had become, what a burden the federal tax was. Hell, they were completely against a federal income tax from the beginning!
It’s unbelievable how much some people rely on the federal government to provide them with life. This might sound cold, but if you can’t hack it without a heap of government help, maybe you weren’t meant to make it. Social programs stifle favorable human adaptation, allowing those who can’t really make it to leech off those who can. And so we breed better and better leeches.
April 16th, 2008 at 4:15 pm
technically we aren’t in a war. We are in a “military engagement” or some other bulls*** political term. Still, i agree, our government largely wastes our taxes.
April 16th, 2008 at 5:17 pm
Just for the numbers - the federal budget has increased by an average of 9.9% per democratic term and 12.1% per republican term, over the past seven presidential elections. Meanwhile, the GDP has increased by an average of 12.6% per democratic term and 10.7% per republican term. Republicans lower taxes only by shoveling the consequences of their irresponsibility onto successors - federal debt increases by an average of 4.2% per democratic term and 36.4% per republican term during the same time period. And despite that, they still lose to democrats in terms of GDP growth.
The federal government is now spending 243.7 billion/year on interest alone. And 72.6 billion on veteran’s benefits, which in my mind is a military-related expenditure. Those two together easily surpass Medicaid.
“Total requested Dod/WoT spending is $699 billion, or 65% of total net Discretionary spending.”
“I would hasten to add this increase is transitory and will be reduced as those conflicts come to an end.”
Aren’t you the one who has argued that we should stay in the middle east for decades if that’s what it takes? And for extending the war to Iran? Yes, these are policies that will cause reduction of federal budget.
“This might sound cold, but if you can’t hack it without a heap of government help, maybe you weren’t meant to make it. Social programs stifle favorable human adaptation”
Accepting the deaths of a sector of the population is problematic from a practical standpoint because people who ‘aren’t making it’ have an unfortunate tendency to cause problems for the rest of the population over the course of their downward spiral - especially if they feel they have nothing to lose. If you’re terribly concerned about genetic drift, you could suggest making sterilization of an individual and his/her extant progeny a prerequisite for receipt of entitlement money. However, I doubt this would be a popular proposal.
On the subject of budget: “The IRS estimated that there were about $345 billion in uncollected taxes” (in 2007)
April 16th, 2008 at 5:53 pm
Source for the numbers please.
April 16th, 2008 at 11:08 pm
The link you posted was the budget -request-, rather than the amount of money that actually wound up being spent. Often there are discrepancies between the two figures, so to me it makes more sense to use data from completed years. I also think it’s a bit odd that Bush requested less money for interest this year than what wound up being spent last year, considering that the federal debt has increased by 3.6% during the last year. And for all the ’support the troops’ rhetoric, he is also requesting substantially less for veteran’s benefits than was spent last year.
The link equivalent to what you posted but for a completed year would be:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_federal_budget,_2007
It’s also worth noting that the DoD budget itself doesn’t include things like maintenance of the nuclear arsenal (9.3 billion/year from the budget of the department of energy), and secret research projects, which are never officially added to budgets.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_budget_of_the_United_States
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_debt_by_U.S._presidential_terms
Clinton was the best president a true conservative could hope for! The data can be located here for those interested:
http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/budget/fy2007/pdf/hist.pdf
April 17th, 2008 at 11:13 am
So Steve, how did it feel when Dan tore you a new one?
Dan, well done.
April 17th, 2008 at 2:15 pm
God bless Bill…. Of course, I’m sure Steve is right and years from now we’ll all be discussing GWB as the greatest president in our fine country’s history.