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Does this account for the changes in how spending is reported? Is all defense spending under defense? or is there a lot hidden under education and health? I have played with too many budgets to accept things like this at face value.
Does this account for the changes in how spending is reported? Is all defense spending under defense? or is there a lot hidden under education and health? I have played with too many budgets to accept things like this at face value.
Good question. Does the "defense spending" category include the trillion dollar wars in Iraq and Afghanistan? George W. Bush's administration conveniently swept the wars' costs into a "supplemental" budget separate from the DoD budget.
The other thing that would be good to see is the percentage of GDP that the spending represents. Here is one here: http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/spending_chart_1903_2010...
The most amazing thing I take away from that chart, having lived in both Europe and the U.S., is how little the U.S. taxpayer gets for their money in comparison, I'm guessing because spending crept up slowly without any real planning. For example, the U.S., Canadian, and Norwegian governments each spend about 40% of GDP, but somehow Norwegians and Canadians get a much stronger set of social services (including state-…
In other words, the biggest problem with our social systems is theft. The money was used over two generations to buy votes.
edit: it's interesting to try to calculate it roughly, but, it seems fair to estimate that the politicians have spent an inflation adjusted $30+ trillion beyond their means over the last 70 years ($16 trillion public debt, plus the money that should have been put aside and earning interest from SS and Medicare etc).
The other thing that would be good to see is the percentage of GDP that the spending represents. Here is one here: http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/spending_chart_1903_2010...
The most amazing thing I take away from that chart, having lived in both Europe and the U.S., is how little the U.S. taxpayer gets for their money in comparison, I'm guessing because spending crept up slowly without any real planning. For example, the U.S., Canadian, and Norwegian governments each spend about 40% of GDP, but somehow Norwegians and Canadians get a much stronger set of social services (including state-…
Edit: Please do not down-vote just because you don't agree. The second Gulf War was explicitly called OIL (Operation Iraqi Liberation). See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2003_invasion_of_Iraq#Military_... and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GoSBqs6y8uM
Does this account for the changes in how spending is reported? Is all defense spending under defense? or is there a lot hidden under education and health? I have played with too many budgets to accept things like this at face value.
$850x billion is spent on the military. That has doubled since the mid 1990s, and so has everything else roughly.
Now, if you want to consider whether the CIA is an arm of the military, that's a fair issue. If you want to look into the drug trade and how much money the US Government makes from that, that's another fair issue. Also, should the NSA be considered a military wing, because it has a $80 billion budget all by itself.... If you count those types of police state entities, then the military spending is another 5% of the budget.
And here's another graph of government spending effectiveness: cato.org/images/testimony/coulson-2-9-11-2.jpg Imagine if that were - Price vs. Hard Drive space, OR - Price vs. Computer Chip We would be paying more for slower computers! Yet when the government spends, and produces outcomes like these, the cry is always for "more funding." To make this concrete, many people on HN are involved in startups. If you showed…
I'd feel better about that graph if it wasn't so horribly spun. The vertical scale is showing a delta from the original value, not the value. It looks like an exponential explosion in spending when it's actually about 3.5x since 1970. Honestly, if I were an investor and a startup tried to sell me that chart, I'd walk out of the room. The broader point is valid, though. Education policy in the US sucks. But the detail…
Interesting that, contrary to what I had assumed, social security is completely flat in its budget share from 1987 to 2011.
The baby boomers start hitting full retirement age in 2012. Will be interesting to see the same stat in 5-10 years.
Reality has a liberal bias.
Time has a liberal bias. Last generation's liberal is this generation's moderate.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Time has a liberal bias. Last generation's liberal is this generation's moderate.
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Socially, we've been consistently getting more and more liberal since the country was founded. Gay marriage is the latest example. Despite North Carolina, polls have shown that support for gay marriage is very much generational.