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Sure, I'd love to, that is if you'd explain to me how they're going to pay off their social security obligations without slowing down US economic growth - and thus making it impossible for the US economy to pay off it's already maxed out debt - and thus forcing SSI to default or be paid off with hyperinflated money - and thus the no social security scenario that you were talking about anyhow. At least in my scenario they'd be let loose into a healthy economy and not a collapsed one. At least in my scenario, people could get money back to invest and create wealth and thus retirement income, rather than total collapse. At least in my scenario, charity resources would be maximized and not wiped out when they're needed most. The problem isn't making sure that dependent people are funded to aviod a wave of crime, the problem is making sure that those who fund do so freely to the benefit of all.

Military makes up 30% of the budget. Non-military HR makes up 34% of the budget. Thus, not the "largest government payroll" in the U.S.

The military is only a small percentage of the total federal budget.

Please Consult this pie chart before speaking out of your ass.

2. An anti-war site had the cite and nice pie chart. I checked through the NYT archives, but they apparently did a huge number of budget articles on Feb 8th, 2005 and I couldn't find which one the chart came from. Note the percentages are from Bush's proposed 2006 budget.

4. Maybe I misunderstood your question. If you remove the SS program and the SS payroll tax revenues at the same time, then the SS surplus of around 68 Billion is the extra revenue you'll have to come up with in that event, right? That could be gotten by holding spending even for one year instead of increasing it by over 68 billion. Or am I missing what you are asking?

2. An anti-war site had the cite and nice pie chart. I checked through the NYT archives, but they apparently did a huge number of budget articles on Feb 8th, 2005 and I couldn't find which one the chart came from. Note the percentages are from Bush's proposed 2006 budget.

4. Maybe I misunderstood your question. If you remove the SS program and the SS payroll tax revenues at the same time, then the SS surplus of around 68 Billion is the extra revenue you'll have to come up with in that event, right? That could be gotten by holding spending even for one year instead of increasing it by over 68 billion. Or am I missing what you are asking?

http://www.warresisters.org/piechart.htm

Here's the justification behind my "pinko" figures. Take it or leave it. Considering I live in a state with no income tax, I purchase few non-food items offline, and I don't operate a vehicle, federal income tax is pretty representative of where my tax money is going. See ya in Canada.

Are you fucking crazy? Take a look at the real distribution. Defense is about half of the budget. "Human resources" is a large chunk, but most of that is education. I'm still looking for the chart I really want, but this should serve for the time being.

Depends how you slice up the numbers. Check this very different chart based on basically the same data. Both sources are extremely biased, and it shows in both results.

I believe this site to be helpful in seeing the big picture on spending.

(And please consider that I know this sound like a trolling bait but please please:
- consider that my comment is related to the parent comment.
- I wasn't insulting someone or anything.
- Just thinking outside of the box, we are here to have a discussion after all. I am not affiliated in anyway with that website I just found it googling)

It seems the Military Industrial complex FUD budject is a little healthier this year, and considering this thread has decended way off topic, Perhaps it should be cut Here are the^H^H^Hsome facts

Just think of all the children that could have been fed with this $400 million. :( Or all the landmines that could be removed. Instead, we get playtoys for stupid white men. Micheal Moore needs to do his next expose on "science".

Why do these comments always come up when NASA's budget is neglible compared to others? In the big picture, NASA's funding has given them a hard time to find things already, since the government need the money for military funding. Oops, weren't you just argumenting against these things?

The Federal Pie Chart

NASA gets in total $15.5 billion for fiscal year 2004. Compare that to the billions in the pie chart above.

Pffl. Do you honestly think the percentage of GDP that is government spending has changed significantly in three years?

Yes. Do they not have newspapers where you live or something? One would hope you at least heard about Sept. 11th?

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On the other hand, we do waste far too much money on agriculture, and most of that is un-, if not counter-productive, and more than enough to fund space at the same level as what I mentioned. Welfare is much smaller, more like what NASA currently gets. (not that it shouldn't be cut anyway . . .)

I guess what I am saying is that we need to cut military spending a lot, whether or not we fund space, or anything else with it. BTW interest payments in the debt are almost the same as defense spending anyway, maby we should do something about that.....

The vast majority of Government spending actually goes to defense programs and funding corporate wellfare not "Socialist" programs, whatever that means. Your stats are wrong and you are an idiot. Please see this for more realistic and accurate depictions of government spending. Or note the discretionary spending figures listed here. You might also want to read some information about military expenditures.

Socialist programs? Wtf is that? How is this insightful? Maybe SOCIAL programs, but socialist? That is absurd. I have pride in my country too, but it is very unfortunate that people like you live here. This ain't the red scare, buddy.

You know, to the libertarian, it does not matter for any of those things. The Bad Shit (tm) happen long after the greedy-ass self-centered fuck is dead and buried.

There are greedy libertarians just like there are greedy liberals and greedy conservatives. They are not the majority of our party. I would much rather give a percentage of my money to organizations that I know are doing good work, rather than having the government take my money and spend it on entitlement programs that do not work.

It has nothing to with being "self-centered," it has everything to do with personal freedom. The freedom to give my hard-earned money to those people that I wish to have it. Why should you be able to come along and force me to redistribute my money to the people YOU want to have it? How is that the right thing?

Well, that and a completely out of touch view of what percentage of the government budget goes towards social/public institutions versus libertarian favorites - guns and bombs, bombs and guns. I'll give you a hint - it's already heavily weighted toward the latter.

I notice you offered no proof whatsoever. You say we are "heavily weighted" towards spending on the military? You are probably not even counting the money spent on veterans, but let's pretend for a minute you are. Take a look at this pie chart for fiscal year 2004, put together by ANTI-WAR protesters:

http://www.warresisters.org/piechart.htm

Notice the majority of the budget for 2004 is spent on non-military spending. Now, read the rest of the page and see what they left out, which skews it even more towards non-military spending: a little thing called Social Security.

I like your l33t name there m0rhp3us0. It's almost as mature as the thoughts in your post.

I'm amazed at how much ignorance you crammed into one post:

I dont live in the US nor frankly care - Funny how often you'll hear Palestianians or Iranians talk about how they want to live in America for its opportunities, even though they hate its politics...
democratic theocracy - Where the hell did this come from, because Bush is religious? America is pretty anal retentive on seperating church and state. Lets compare this to other countries...say...Italy with their full support of Catholicism.
The sooner the US falls - You think the world would be better without the US? Wow! America only helped shape global world politics 3 times last century, WWI, WWII, and the cold war. If America's influence wasn't there, we all know it would have been worse. Amazingly, even the French strongly agree (accoring from recent polls at least) that the world is a better place because of Americas influence than without it.
americans are unwilling to pay minor costs associated with social services but are willing to pay huge costs associated with running the worlds largest prison population. Check out this flamingly liberal site http://www.warresisters.org/piechart.htm. It's devoted to spinning numbers to show how little America pays on social services. Social services get anywhere from 34% to 55% of the budget, while military gets 17.5-47%, and prison costs, well, its far too small to even merit it's own category. These numbers kind of fly in the face of your statement, doesn't it?

In short, it's may be exciting to be a 14 year old anti-US activist...but m0rph3us0, you have to grow up a little.

Move on - helps busy people be effective citizens.

Make them Accountable - Make Media and Politicians Accountable.

Fallout Shelter - News and Views from the shelter.

Citizens for Legitimate Government - Undo the Coup - opinion and discussion.

Petition to Senate to investigate "Oddities" of 9/11 - by Lori R. Price.

Education for Peace in Iraq Center - Speakers & projects.

War Resisters' League - promoting peace.

American Friends Service Committee - Quakers for peace.

Black Radical Congress - Election reform and voting rights.

Z-Net - Activist Community.

why did federal tax revenues nearly triple from 1980 to 1988?

Because of GDP growth and increased dependence on regressive forms of taxation.

The US national debt is a low percentage of the US GDP.

Tell that to the currency traders who have been dumping dollars for euros like mad over the past month. The truth is that the present value of the U.S. deficit in perpetuity is about $44 trillion, which has us teetering on the brink of insolvency at our current tax rates. Look at the pie charts in the back of your federal income tax instruction booklet; do you see the slice labled "interest on the national debt"? Now open Barron's or the Wall Street Journal and have a look at historical interest rates. If you ignore the brief run-up in the several months preceding the 2000 election, you will note that they have been at all time lows. What do you suppose would happen to the size of that pie slice representing interest if rates returned to 1982 levels? Here are some hints: David Stockman, "Read my lips...," Paul O'Niell, Mitch Daniels.

There is no way we can support the health and pension costs of the baby boomers as they retire without a radical rebracketing of income tax rates, and there is no reason not to select Sweden's simple brackets, based on the clear emperical evidence of their excellent society in terms of education, worker training, unemployment and inflation rates, parent support with daycare, social services, etc. Swedish unemployment levels are not what anyone associates with a "socialist" or "welfare state." They simply have a two-bracket, steeply progressive, egalitarian income tax that grows their middle class while ours in the U.S. is shrinking.

A shrinking middle class puts us on a collision course with riots, not unlike those the president's father faced a dozen years ago.

People like you also run around telling everyone that the US spends way too much on defense...

Indeed I do.

So you know, the original income tax [tax.org] was first instituted to help fund the civil war, at 1/2% tax. It was later repealed, as it was found unconstitutional in the courts for the government to tax income.
[snip]
Fast forward to today, and take a look at how far we've let the government tax our earnings... today, the top 1% wage earners pay 38.6% [fairmark.com] of their salary in taxes, accounting for ~ 29% of the total (top 5% wage earners paid 50% [allegromedia.com] of all taxes in 1999)
[snip]
And where the hell will all this money go? into improving the internet infrastructure? Nooo, that's a private business. The money and accountability will disappear, probably into Medicare, Social Security, and all the other social programs that government isn't supposed to be in.

Although I basically agree that the U.S. government isn't fiscally responsible, isn't it funny how people who complain that taxes are too high never complain about the military budget? It's always complaints about welfare and social security, not education and transportation. I suspect that these two links (here and here) illustrate the problem clearly... different people are listening to different sources of information. Mars and Venus, I tell ya' :)

What it boils down to is that individual spending projects need to be evaluated individually. Sure taxes were lower once, but then again there was no Department of Energy or Department of Transportation back then, was there?

Government control is not a road we want to walk down folks. Yes, control of communications through taxation. I can't understand why the crowd complains when little things are being taken away, and the same people just turn around and hand the big ones over willingly.

On a related note, there was no FCC in 1913 either. But there is now.

Good point! Thanks. :)

The official number for the Department of Defense for 2003 is $380 billion dollars. (As with all that follows, this number is based on the president's proposed budget for the year. Congress wouldn't dare cut it significantly, though they often add some pork.)

Now that's ridiculous enough. It's a good deal more than we spent during the Cold War, more than any other country on the face of the earth, and several times that of all of our potential enemies combined. Meanwhile, we're slashing funding for social services.

Then there's another $17 billion for nuclear weapons, that politicians have thoughtfully placed under the Department of Energy budget, for a total of $396 billion. (Both of those figures, incidentally, are also from the CDI's website, only for FY 2003).

My suspicion is that the original poster probably got his numbers from the War Resisters League, which puts out a great little flyer called Where Your Income Tax Money Really Goes. Their purpose is not so much to discuss year-to-year policy decisions as to emphasize the degree of the tax burden that is the fault of military spending.

They come up with a total figure of $776 billion for 2003. $437 billion is current military spending, which is the DoD budget, plus DoE nuke programs, plus portions of the budgets for other federal programs which are used in large part for military purposes (CIA, Coast Guard, NASA, FEMA, etc.). Then there's $339 billion in military spending: $57 billion in veterans' benefits and $282 billion in interest on the national debt (80% estimated created by military spending). Neither of those are discretionary from the point of view of the annual budget process, but they are definitely indicative of how runaway military spending increases our tax burden.

None of this, however, is particularly relevant for the original context of this discussion, because sales taxes are state and local, not federal. My personal opinion is that we can solve the whole problem by doing away with most sales taxes, which are regressive, and funding government primarily through a steeply progressive income tax (both personal and corporate).

> Actually RICH people pay most of the taxes. And those people own corporations.


a quick google search turned up this document:

Further Examination of the Distribution of Individual Income and Taxes Using a Consistent and Comprehensive Measure of Income

i'll restate my comment, with data from the above document, that refutes your assertion.


the problem is:

99% of the people pay about 70% of the taxes

while

the remaining 1% of the people (who pay about 30% of the taxes) run the largest corporations that give most of the campaign contributions

additionally

46% of the taxes pay for military expenditures, which allow the largest corporations to secure the biggest federal contracts (paid for with tax dollars)


what a fair system.
(campaign contributions remind me of recursive algorithms)

War Resisters League
American Friends Service Committee
Friends Committee on National Legislation
Education for Peace in Iraq Center
Peace Action
Industrial Workers of the World

NOW IS THE TIME TO OPPOSE THIS WAR! SILENCE IS COMPLICITY!

Check out this link for a different perspective.

Synopsis: The government distorts how our income tax dollars are spent because it includes Trust Funds (e.g., Social Security), and the expenses of past military spending are not distinguished from nonmilitary spending.

War is useless. www.warresisters.org!

Anuses are useful. goatse.cx