Let Me Bore You With The Federal Budget

First the charts. Then I'll discuss what they show us...

The source of these charts can be found here..
at 'National Priorities" and also at another page on 'National Priorities' website


What we can quickly surmise is (1) the vast majority of discretionary spending is on the military (55%). (2) Even though the federal government receives 32% of it's revenue from Social Security and Medicare taxes it spends less then 5% in discretionary money on them. (3) If we eliminated all the tax breaks the federal government wouldn't only have enough to cover the entire amount of discretionary spending, but even have a surplus left over!

I found it also interesting that individuals pay into Social Security/Medicare taxes that amount to almost 3x's as much as corporations pay in taxes (32% versus 13%). Plus an additional 46% in payroll income taxes. In other words workers are paying 78% of the load. The vast majority of discretionary goes, in many cases, back into the private investors for education, housing, transportation and military contract providers.

My Overall View Of The Entire Budget
The main beef I have is the way we spend taxpaying worker's money for our military. Over the entire federal budget we are projected to spend around $3.9 trillion in 2015. Of the entire budget 16% will be spent on our military. Much of it to protect foreign nations. Shouldn't we compensated? Each of us have to pay taxes towards our local and state police. Shouldn't foreign nations as well?

While Americans receive back directly about 60% in the form of Medicare, Social Security and in unemployment benefits, this still leaves over $1.16 trillion being spent elsewhere. Take into account the $1.24 trillion in tax breaks and that's a sizable chunk of change ($2.4 trillion) we have to work.

Does it make for sound reasoning to allow almost 1/3rd of our annual budget be in the form of tax breaks?

Provide military protections costing us over a half a trillion $'s w/o being compensated by much of it going to protect foreign nations?

Should 32% of the annual revenue derived from Social Security & Medicare go towards funding the government or instead be set aside and not factored in the budget?

Since President Obama's 2015 budget has a deficit of $561 billion (3.1% of the U.S. Economy) why not take part of it from the $1.24 trillion in tax breaks?

Lord knows how many emergency spending bills are proposed & passed beyond the budget and how many of these contain hidden provisions?

We also have those off-the-books accounting methods used by the U.S Treasury. Also check out what the 'The Pew Research Center had to say back in October 2013 about that national debt-- "The debt is about equal to gross domestic product."

THE BOTTOMLINE IN ALL OF THIS

None of this means anything. It's just a giant game of bullshit. The only reason any of this continues to work is because of either peoples ambivalence towards it or indifference. So long as that's the case everything will be just fine.

Forget I even brought it up :-)