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70% of U.S. Government Spending Is Writing Checks To Individuals
An anonymous reader writes with this excerpt from Investor's Business Daily:"Buried deep in a section of President Obama's budget, released this week, is an eye-opening fact: This year, 70% of all the money the federal government spends will be in the form of direct payments to individuals, an all-time high. In effect, the government has become primarily a massive money-transfer machine, taking $2.6 trillion from some and handing it back out to others. These government transfers now account for 15% of GDP, another all-time high. In 1991, direct payments accounted for less than half the budget and 10% of GDP. What's more, the cost of these direct payments is exploding. Even after adjusting for inflation, they've shot up 29% under Obama." It's very hard to lay blame on only one part of the U.S. government, though; as the two largest parties are often fond of pointing out when it suits them, all spending bills originate in the House.
I hate to be the guy saying "why is this on Slashdot", especially since I've been posting these very budget numbers here for years, when it has been relevant to the thread, but WTF? This is a blatant political click-troll story. It's not news (been this way for many years), and it's not "for nerds".
Sure, I guess we could rehash the same old "NASA's budget is trivial in the scheme of thing" posts, but really.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Also, one of the listed examples was "farm subsidies". That is not something that can be assumed to be a "check to a person". A lot of large farms are corporate. So farm subsidies in some cases are just corporate welfare.
Perhaps this "checks to people" idea assumes that corporations are people too.
Also not sure what this is doing on Slashdot...
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Riiight,
because after 40 years in the military, getting a pension check means you're a "Taker".
F.U. and Romney too.
taking $2.6 trillion from some and handing it back out to others.
Ummm, what else is the government supposed to do with the money? If it gave the money back to the same people who paid the taxes in the first place, it wouldn't make much sense, would it?
This year, 70% of all the money the federal government spends will be in the form of direct payments to individuals, an all-time high.
Including medicare, medicaid, and Obamacare? So the payments for drugs and health care are counted as going directly to individuals. OK, and other than the military, what's left? Highways, schools, NASA, and the post office -- and we've been cutting all of those.
So in short, article is saying that taxes are money transfers (which they had better be, or they'd be really stupid), and that health care and social security are going up, and everything else but the military is getting cut. That's news?
an eye-opening fact
Maybe if you're retarded.
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Which is why this statitistic is utterly meaningless without a thorough breakdown of where the checks go and why.
I mean technically every tax payer who gets a refund gets a check from the government, but (barring EIC) it shouldn't really count because that money was never the governments in the first place.
All the people who work for the government? I presume most of them get checks or they would stop showing up to work.
Social Security?
Military pay and pensions?
But I guess we are supposed to assume that 70% of the money we pay in taxes is spent on welfare on top of the 50% that goes to foreign aid and 30% on interest and 400% on nasa and 50000000% on foreign wars....
The problem with your reasoning is that it presumes that money is given in exchange for work of equal value, but of course the very basis of business is that you pay less than what the work is worth, and the difference is your profit. So this notion of a 1:1 connection between money and value is simply mistaken, and not only that, it's impossible in a capitalist society.
No you don't understand capitalism.
In a free market people don't exchange something of lessor value for something of greater value or vice versa, one of the parties would never agree. What happens is we meet and discover we value things differently.
If I hire you do a job, I do so because I value the "work" less than my money. That might be for any number of reasons: maybe I don't have time to do it myself despite the need; maybe I have a lot of money I don't need for anything else; maybe I don't know how to do the work and so If I chose to invest time instead of dollars the costs would be much greater; etc.
You on the other hand have offered to do the work because you have time, and want something else more and believe that you could satisfy that if you had more money. You value your time and labor less than my dollars.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html