Slashdot Mirror

It doesn't solve the problem at all or come anywhere close to it. However to address the first claim.. http://thinkprogress.org/security/2011/08/05/289395/u-s-defense-expenditures-dwarf-china-iran-north-korea/ Per that article the US only spends 6 times more than a handful of countries combined. And according to this article http://www.globalissues.org/article/75/world-military-spending the US spends less than 1/2 of the rest of the world combined. And Alternet has it's usual smear pieces saying that Defnse spending is actually $1 trillion. But if you go here http://investmentwatchblog.com/us-spends-more-money-on-defense-than-the-next-17-countries-combined/ they say that the US only spends as much as the next 17 countries combined. But as a percentage of GDP.. The US ranks 3rd on that specific list. And lets not forget.. Those Defense costs INCLUDE the spending on all 4 wars we're in. And if you go here http://www.wallstats.com/blog/total-military-and-national-security-spending-in-the-us-federal-budget/ you can see a breakdown of what exactly entails "Defense" spending. So what goes into Military spending? Are you going to cut the VA? Vet benefits? Vet health care? Enlisted salaries? The FBI?, TSA? (YES PLEASE), Border Security? ICE? CIA? "Defense" does not mean Army/Navy/Air Force/Marines only.. This is NOT to say that there isn't waste or room to cut. Merely that nothing substantial will be gained from it. And to the rest. You didn't list any numbers as to exactly how much you planned to rake in with those taxes and whom would pay them. Remember.. Almost 50% of the country has no tax liability at all. And neither they, nor those who rely on their votes, will allow them to be taxed in any appreciable way. Also consider your tax increase plan. Right now the top 25% already pay between 86 and 87% of ALL the taxes. The earning breakpoint to be IN the top 25% is a family AGI of only $67,000. Which means that a family with 2 working parents making $33,500 each should be subject to an 8% increase in income taxation. Now.. I know you said 20%.. But the readily available charting goes from 10% to 25%.. And the break point to get into the top 10% is $110 for a family. So there's only about $40k difference between the top 10% and top 25%. Meaning one doesn't have to move very high up the chain in family income to get from the top 25% to the top 20%. But still.. For your plan to work out it means that, in order to spend as much as people do and pay your taxes, incomes for everyone will have to rise by your stated amount (13%). eg.. If I have $100 to spend on video games and, with taxes, I buy 5 games at $20.. If your tax increases go through I now only have $92 to spend. In addition the games, with taxes plus your 5% VAT, now cost $21.. I only buy 4 games at $88 and maybe buy some pop or something with the remainder. What the VAT does, as every tax does, is take money out of the private sector. That's 1 game developer that didn't sell a product where he normally would. And trickle the effects up and down the supply chain.. You've also reduced the GDP of the country by 13% (8% income plus 5% VAT).. A real world example would be the gas prices/taxes here in the US. With higher gas prices states are losing money on gas taxes. Consider $.05 per gallon tax and a family with a fuel budget of $100. At $1 per gallon the family buys and uses 100 gallons of gas.. The state collects $5 in taxes. Gas prices double. The family spends $100, gets and uses 50 gallons. The state collects $2.50. The state sees their decrease (which they have and is one reason they're considering

Actually, Defense still counts for almost 2/3rds of the federal budget. http://www.wallstats.com/deathandtaxes/

Your numbers are incorrect. According to the source itself, defense takes up about $965 billion of $3,818 billion worth of spending, or about 25%. Pensions ($793 billion), Health Care ($882 billion) and Welfare ($496 billion) take up $2,171 billion, or 56% of the budget.

To give some perspective, the interest payments on our debt alone are $207 billion, which is more than we pay on Protection, Transportation, and General Government combined.

"Entitlements" account for the vast majority of the budget.

Actually, Defense still counts for almost 2/3rds of the federal budget. http://www.wallstats.com/deathandtaxes/

Reagan knew what Kennedy (JFK) knew: tax cuts INCREASES private investment

Yes. And faced with fiscal realities, Regan also pushed through 130 billion in tax raises. No business makes more money by taking less in. That's just a fantasy. If you're throwing 100 million in tax cuts to chase 1 million in growth, you're going to be stuck in a massive national deficit, like we have been for the past few decades.

What you "know" is incorrect. The interest we pay on the national debt is $251B. The total revenue from income taxes is $1121B. And that doesn't count other taxes, such as corporate or excise taxes. If you tally up all of the United States revenues (excluding Social Security taxes), you get $1633B, more than six and a half times the debt interest.

Additionally, the long term trend (average over the previous decade) is that the debt is for the interest payments to grow at half the rate at which revenues are growing.

There's a lot of fear mongering going on about the American economy. It's very persuasive, but most of it is based on lies. We should absolutely reduce spending. We should also raise revenues. Repealing the Bush tax cuts, trimming back on military spending, removing the tax cap for Social Security, and applying some form of means testing to SS & Medicare are all reasonable approaches. Just don't find yourself falling for the FUD that we need to privatize everything right away or go bankrupt, because it's simply not the case.

Source

The death and taxes site has a much better breakdown of how the money is spent, IMO. You can find the Drug Enforcement Agent (under the department of Justice) spends about 2 billion per year.

I'm an academic research mathematician who'll soon be leaving his postdoc to look for work in the financial sector.. or any other interesting sector. I've had a lovely time doing postdocs in interesting new cities, but I'm done with the moving, long distance relationships, etc. I love programming too since like age 7, so anything goes. I promised myself however that I'd try several interesting things before taking any job that required a security clearance, i.e. NSA.

Inside academia, there are literally hordes of well qualified PhDs who'll never ever get proper research jobs simply because the number of good secure research positions grows slower than the national population while every such position produces numerous qualified people (ignore the hordes of under-qualified people graduated by some faculty). We understand this population model when we call the variable rabbits, yet we ignore it when we say academics.

Academia and industry may be losing many of the best-of-the-best to Wall St. but we've more than enough qualified people for all the high level jobs. If society wants more people in a particular field, then society must allocate the resources. You could for example quadruple the NSF's budget by shaving off just over %2 of the $900 billion military budget.

Don't like how Wall St. extracts so much money from the venture capital and IPO process? Fine, allocate $10--$50 billion for federally backed public interest venture capital operations, hell back it from social security, surely better than 3%. There will be no shortage of young engineers choosing $60k per year working on their own ventures over whatever salaries Wall St. offers. Just don't complain about people not doing socially useful work in saturated job markets, especially ones so supersaturated that all the young people end up in long distance relationships.

p.s. If we actually invested like $20 billion of social security receipts towards, then we'd see employers complain even more about a lack of qualified people, meaning people who'll do highly skilled work for little money.

When you include non-DoD defense spending the total amount spent on defense far outstrips any anything else for 2010.
I think these guys do a good job of showing where the money goes on a macro level without losing too much detail. http://www.wallstats.com/blog/death-and-taxes-2010-released/

The problem is that the baby boomer generation promised itself SO MUCH, we're going to go bankrupt from entitlements. Social Security is a small part of it. The real meat is Medicare.

Not really. http://www.wallstats.com/deathandtaxes/ . Social Security has had a surplus. The only way it's contributed to the debt is that the surplus is spent for other programs before it's collected.

Defense is the single highest budget item by far (895B). Then comes non military discretionary spending(520B). Medicare(491B) and Medicaid(297B) combined don't even match it. Health costs are going up and this spending will become more important in the future, but to use a medical analogy we have to fix the gaping chest wound before we can focus on the infection that might kill us later.

Where the hell did you get those numbers, because they don't match reality Federal Budget Breakdown.

Especially if you at the numbers analytically. That 23% defense spending is misleading in a lot of ways. All of the Veterans' programs aren't included in it(Dept. of Veteran's affairs). Nuclear weapon maintenance(Department of Energy) isn't included in it. Dept of Homeland Security isn't included in it. The deathandtaxes poster has a pretty good breakdown that shows this.

We should increase military spending and decrease social program spending...

For 2011
Military+Security spending = 1.5 trillion
Debt Service = 0.25 trillion
Everything else = 2 trillion

It looks like we already spend WAY too much on the military.

social programs which are conclusively ineffective

Most of the social spending is in social security (prevents old people from starving) and medicare/medicaid (prevents old/poor people from dieing of treatable illness). Which of those do you propose to eliminate?

Thats because we fight their wars for them. We are the worlds mercenaries. We fight while they pay.

We should increase military spending and decrease social program spending...

For 2011
Military+Security spending = 1.5 trillion
Debt Service = 0.25 trillion
Everything else = 2 trillion

It looks like we already spend WAY too much on the military.

social programs which are conclusively ineffective

Most of the social spending is in social security (prevents old people from starving) and medicare/medicaid (prevents old/poor people from dieing of treatable illness). Which of those do you propose to eliminate?

Four sentences, four exclamation marks, two personal insults, one point to make, and a rather short-sighted one at that.

First, stocks don't have to "crash" at all. Ever heard of "long-term plans", "gradual processes" or "phasing out"? It's being done all the time with old technology and other things nobody needs any longer. Old corporations change to offer products people do need, or die. Which brings me to:

Second, this is exactly how it's supposed to be. That's what stocks are for. To offer a market for investments in corporations, following their perceived usefulness and thus potential for profitability or expansion. We don't change our demand to accommodate corporations (as much as they'd love that and are going for it). There is a demand and corporations compete to satisfy it. To call for society to keep old bad habits because otherwise suppliers of those old bad habits couldn't supply anything is very far up your ass of choice.

(To illustrate with somewhat wild examples, just for you and because I like your style so much: Found a cancer/HIV cure in the jungle? Can't have any of that, think of the pharmaceutical industry. Stocks would crash. World peace meme, people all over the world rising in masses to tell their governments they don't want them to shoot for whatever reason at other people ever again. Better send in the military and disappear those people, do you have any idea what losses the arms industry would take? Perfect solar panels with 100% efficiency? Scrap those fast, think of the energy suppliers. Replicators and teleporters, too. The industries they'd replace are just too big to allow those gadgets.

Please notice how that paragraph is parenthesized. I'm aware that these examples apply only partially.)

"It's a tiny investment; Nasa needs about $6 billion a year to keep Constellation going. It's literally a drop in the bucket compared to many other appropriations."

If it were a GOOD investment I would agree. But we already have other launch vehicles that can fill that need. And they WORK.

"The country needs a manned space program."

No we don't. We may WANT one. Which makes the project pork.

"$700+ billion economic stimulus"

Sound economic policy. Also a one time event.

"$125+ billion per year for new healthcare obligations."

That is paid for. And actually provides a benefit.

"We could easily cut a trillion or so dollars from our national budget and not even notice the difference."

WTF!?! Math FAIL. Eliminating a trillion dollars from our budget would require the elimination of all discretionary spending (including NASA) plus another 500 billion or so. That means elminating much of the defense budget and/or cuts to medicare and social security. I think seniors might notice the cuts to their checks. Millions of unemployed defense contractors and soldiers might be noticed. Etc.

http://www.wallstats.com/deathandtaxes/

Your logic makes no sense. You complain about government wasting large sums of money yet you argue that the government should spend money on this project because it would only waste a small amount of money compared to those other projects. The project fails on technical merits. Even if it was technically sound, killing it would be justifiable from a monetary standpoint.

The real pork can be found in the $901 billion defense budget and the $696 billion social security program.

I've always thought that Social Security was a Ponzi scheme (redistrubuting wealth from younger workers to older people until the game is up), not pork. Can you elaborate on how SS is pork?

While I agree with you that cuts are necessary, it must be said that Obama is increasing NASA's funding despite canceling Project Constellation. The cancellation seems more politically driven than anything relating to the federal budget. Even if NASA's $18 billion budget were left the same, it would still be only 0.5% of the total federal budget. The real pork can be found in the $901 billion defense budget and the $696 billion social security program.

(DoD is something like 16-17%, but they've long done tricks to put war spending on "emergency budget" rather than the general budget so it could be more than that)

Eh? Not even close. The 2010 federal budget is 1.421 trillion dollars. The DoD got 664 billion of that. They get 47% all by themselves. In addition, another 16% of the budget goes for things labeled "National Security" that aren't administered by the DoD, for a total of 63% of the 2010 budget sucked up by military and para-military spending.

The remaining 37% is divied up among EVERYBODY else, and I do mean everybody. That includes the Department of Transportation, the Department of Justice, the Department of Health and Human Services, NASA, the Department of the Treasury, the National Science Foundation, the Department of Education, the Department of Agriculture, the Department of Labor, the Department of the Interior, the Department of State, the Department of Veteran Affairs, the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Housing and Urban Development, the EPA, the Department of Energy, the Department of Commerce, plus an equally long list of non-departmental organizations.

For the best visualization of the Federal Budget see http://www.wallstats.com/

Neither Medicare nor Social Security shows up because they're not part of the discretionary budget. They're non-discretionary.

A better site is Death and Taxes where you can zoom in and see what it really looks like.

If you look at the US discretionary budget the military accounts for over 60%, over 70% in shitty years. As for total budget war makes up about 25%, non-military defense programs an additional 14%. Veteran's pay an amazing 1.6%. Comparatively, NASA gets around .5% of the total expenses. http://www.wallstats.com/deathandtaxes/ (discretionary is in the middle, total in the bottom right).

1/15th is 6.6%, parent is outright lying.

And as mcgrew says, war is easier to not have than... Old people? Sick people....?

Simple. Joe Biden signed up for an account at Mint.Com. Our financial problems are over!

(Serious aside: The Fed could/should employ a team of designers and information experts (a la Edward Tufte or this guy) to help improve the transparency and operational efficiency of the government. Mint.com has some great examples of boring/old data presented in a fresh, informative, and visually-attractive manner. There's plenty of scientific evidence showing that aesthetics can improve cognition. The Obama administration have done an admirable job on this front compared to their predecessors, but there's still more to be done, particularly at the congressional level)

(Second aside: Mint.com were purchased by Intuit yesterday. Ew.)

According to WallStats, NASA's funding for 2010 is $18.7 billion. According to The New York Times, the amount of bailout funds committed by the U.S. Government to Bear Stearns and AIG (both of which are fraudulent companies) is $82 billion. That is 4.4 times the amount of funding that NASA is receiving next year. If the manned space program is canceled, let it be known that it was due to debacles such as this.

Try this...

http://wallstats.com/deathandtaxes/ - WallStats: Death and Taxes ...it doesn't get into the nitty gritty of, say, a congresscritter getting moneys - but it goes into fairly reasonable detail.

Death and taxes 2010

Not quite what you are talking about... but the venerable Death & Taxes: http://www.wallstats.com/deathandtaxes/

Agreed. The system makes no sense. There are people for whom an old car is not especially polluting, because they only drive it an average of 5 miles per week. Possibly it is a second vehicle that they keep at a country house. Perhaps they are usually outside the United States.

Giving away taxpayer money causes inflation. The inflation is not only in the dollar generally, but also in the price of new cars. Those who focus on the free taxpayer money they are getting may not realize that the dealer has raised prices.

To me, the "Cash for Clunkers" program seems like government corruption. General Motors failed because of consistent bad management, in which most of its cars were rated poorly by Consumer Reports.

Now taxpayer money is being used to support bad management, and the taxpayer money goes to support people who have enough money that buying a new car is a goal, instead of finding a job, or getting through university.

The U.S. government has no money. In the entire history of the world, it is the entity most deeply in debt.

I've discovered that U.S. citizens do not want to believe that their government is corrupt. When they are presented with evidence of corruption, most avoid awareness.

For that kind of money they could put a copy of the ``Death and Taxes'' poster:

http://www.wallstats.com/deathandtaxes/

in almost every schoolroom and courtroom and courthouse in the country.

William

Want a free market solution to keep tyrants from getting high tech weapons? How about we stop using half our entire government budget to subsidize the military industrial complex. If there is anything that is decidedly not free market, its using Tax dollars to purchase products from select companies, decided almost entirely by lobbying efforts. http://www.wallstats.com/deathandtaxes/

A very simple reason.

See it for yourself...

poster guy:

http://www.wallstats.com/deathandtaxes/

Or at least learn from it and similar presentations.

William

For a prettier chart http://www.wallstats.com/poster/
 
5% of the total budget is a BIG HUGE deal and you could probably cut more than that anyways... If you also brought your healthcare over to the evil socialist ways like france or canada or pretty much any 1st world nation. That could save you another 5%. Baby boomers dying will lower SSI costs as will restructuring payouts. Maybe another 1% or 2% there. If you want more than that you are seriously grasping as my/your figures are superbly optimistic. A 12% drop in spending with a 5% increase in net taxation totally brings the us out of the 13% budget deficit you have. This will allow you to spend the rest paying off your debt. Though its worrying that 100BILLION a year means it'll still likely take a few hundred years to pay off. And the debt has increased 1.4trillion last year. And that was before the market crisis where promises were recently made for a 8trillion dollar bailout. Welllll I guess with a 100% cut in spending you could pay the debt in a mere 10 years! Assuming people all sent their money in to the pure volunteer ran government and the entire country didnt collapse in chaos... which it would. I dunno, Maybe you should just file for bankruptcy?

But don't forget, the US tax structure hides the same costs you pay in Europe in the UK at the pump for petrol. In the US we simply aren't given the choice / incentive structure to decide if we want to support a petroleum based economy... We pay for it with our federal taxes like it or not (and as a result the fed taxes imposed on the gasoline at the pump can be much lower). In the Europe/UK model it is presumably the people who use the roads who end up paying for the infrastructure since the taxes are collected at the pump.... Take a look at: http://www.wallstats.com/deathandtaxes/ It looks like the D.O.T. gets $63.4B out of the $383B in non-defense spending in 2009 (16.6%) or 5.4% of the ($799B+$383B) total spending including defense.