For the visually inclinedFollow

For those who would otherwise fall asleep at the mere mention of governmental budgetary analysis.

/shakes fist at Samira/

Edited, May 5th 2010 10:57pm by Timelordwho

Except that it excludes non-discretionary spending (except in the "total budget" area, which is not presented to scale with the rest of the poster). This allows people to continue to hold to the false belief that defense spending is the largest single expenditure by our government. Cause you look at the poster, and there it is, right?

If we included Medicare, Social Security, and Income assistance, the entire section which makes up the whole poster right now would be in one corner with those three programs taking up the rest. I get that that artist gave reasons for including just discretionary spending, but IMO by ignoring the impact on our economy from the really big stuff, it's not going to lead to better decisions, but worse ones.

Edited, May 5th 2010 7:33pm by gbaji

895 Billion on the capacity to kill people for being stupid. <50 billion educating people so they aren't stupid...

You could teach the entire world to not be stupid for that kind of money and no longer need to kill people.

Medicare/Medicaid, Social Security and the Military alone now cost more than the country is taking in via taxes each year. Forget every other thing the nation spends money on, we start the budget in a deficit from just those items. Forum chatter and charming rhetoric aside, I'd like to hear from someone actually in public office what their plans are to slash those budgets. The reality is that no one will or, while an individual might, there's no political will for it throughout their party. Witness the failure of Bush to gain support for his Social Security privatization plan and how quickly the GOP rallied around "protecting Medicare" as a health care debate talking point.

Your uncanny prescience must be a heavy burden, gbaji. Forced to predict the follies of other men years in advance and watch them flow their slow course, it is a torment without end.

Get back to me when someone even tries.

Ok. Get back to me when you have some kind of proposal for how to even go about doing that so that anyone might think the reference was something other than Kumbya singing hippies complaining that the world isn't perfect.

Yes. But that would be a more temporary thing. Don't forget that revenues are down right now because of the financial situation. When business recovers, revenues will return to more normal levels (without any need for tax increases), and it'll be sufficient to cover those again.

By lumping an extra half a trillion in yearly spending on top of that, the Dems have made that an unlikely way to reduce or eliminate the deficit, meaning that we now must push some combination of tax increases and spending cuts to avoid ever increasing debt.



The elephant, as you clearly stated, was in the room 2 years ago, and 10 years ago, and 20 years ago. I think it's relevant to point out that when you're already right at the edge of what you can afford, it's kinda dumb to go on a spending spree. That new spending tipped the equation from "manageable spending" to "unmanageable spending". My prediction had to do with the Dems knowing this going in, and planning on using the "fiscal responsibility" argument later to convince people to raise taxes to pay for it.



Red Herring Joph. It's a legitimate topic in a longer term view of our economy, but the immediate issue is not those things, but the new spending programs created in the last year or so. How about we repeal the health care bill? That'll save us a few hundred billion dollars a year right there and not actually cost us anything since no one's yet received anything from it. How about eliminating all non-loaned money in the two stimulus bills? How about we go back through all the stuff the Dems passed on purely partisan basis and just strike them out? That would put us back into reasonable territory, wouldn't it?

Then, after we've eliminated the immediate crisis, we can tackle the bigger long term spending issues. See, the problem is that the new spending we're doing today, if unchecked, will become long term spending that can't be cut easily over time, just as medicare and social security have. Let's focus on nipping those in the bud now while we have a reasonable chance to do so without millions of people becoming dependent on them first? Cause that would be the smart way of doing things, right?

Social security, medicare and medicaid add up to about 1.5 trillion. I can only assume this is what gbaji is referring to.

Social security is a retirement income program where people pay in throughout their working careers and get money back when they retire. Everyone (who has worked a certain portion of their life) gets it upon reaching age 65.

Medicare is health insurance for the elderly. Same deal.

Medicaid is health assistance for the poor or disabled. It is about 7.5% of the total budget. This is the only portion of this which anyone could logically claim is going to those who cannot provide for themselves. The former two are basically retirement plans: they are not optional, of course. They are minimal and people pay considerable amounts to supplement them.

The fastest growth in medicaid is nursing home care. Now you might think this is covered by medicare, since many old folks end up in nursing homes. It is not, at least not for very long (~30 days via medicare and if you have private long term care it usually runs to about 90 days beyond that is out of pocket or medicaid. Since medicaid does not kick in until 90 days you must have some ability to pay to reach that point).

Also, I don't think the disabled, the poor or the elderly in nursing homes are "too stupid to figure out how to provide for themselves".

Which makes it more amusing that you refuse to speak about it now. Too busy whining about Democrats to talk about it, I guess.

I have to admit though that the irony of saying "I'd like to hear someone talk about these because no one is willing to confront the real issue" and having you react by talking about any possible Democratic spending except these things... well, it wasn't lost on me.

Edited, May 6th 2010 8:53pm by Jophiel

Not at all. I'm focusing on the absolute largest parts of the budget. You can eliminate all the health care bill and stimulus and whatever you want and we still won't have any money left over after we factor the Big Three.

So hey, crazy me, I kind of think those Three are a more worthy topic of discussion than crying about the Democrats. You obviously think crying about Democrats is more important. That's a fair choice for you to make but it won't fix the budget.


Yeah, hi. Welcome to the point. Glad you could finally make it.

And to think the Republicans blame the Democrats for wanting to kill grandma...

Yea, we know. ******* moron.