Whenever people start talking about the budget, listener’s eyes glaze over and they start drooling. They can’t conceive of numbers so large and find it impossible to equate the same types of budgeting they do at home to be writ large at the governmental level. Trust me, the politicians spending our money are banking on that. They want a stupid, ignorant, malleable dependent populace. They don’t want you to learn how they are spending and wasting your dollars, largely to either stay in office or to give it to people ideologically opposed to our way of life and thinking.
But I’m going to try anyway.
- Hussein just asked for 3.9 trillion dollars for his latest budget.
Right now, go to this page. It shows the average person (us) what just one trillion dollars looks like. http://www.pagetutor.com/trillion/index.html
Now, having seen what one trillion dollars looks like, recall that B. Hussein’s budget is 4 times that. Where does all that money come from in order for him to give it all away?
Revenues: 56% of it, 2.2 trillion comes from tax revenues. Individuals, corporations, duties on foreign goods, excise taxes, etc. Over half of it is our taxes. This is money the government has mandated that you give to them. You earned it but they take it.
29% of the revenues, 1.12 trillion dollars come from Trust Funds from Social Security, Medicare taxes.
15% of the revenues come from borrowing. We borrow $561 billion dollars to make up the shortfall from what we take in, to what B. Hussein wants to pay out.
Now, where does all that money go?
Expenditures: 65% of it, $2.56 trillion dollars—more than all of the tax revenues taken in, go to pay for Medicare ($999 billion), Medicaid, Social Security ($900 billion), welfare, food stamps ($106 billion), and unemployment ($47 billion). This is all called “mandatory spending”. They are by their definition entitlements but the government says we HAVE to do this spending. So, when they talk about cutting the federal budget, they are not looking here.
“Discretionary spending” equals 29% of the spending dollars, $1.16 trillion. This is where the defense budget ($640 billion), education ($72 billion), International affairs—also known as foreign aid—money we simply give to other countries—($38 billion), Energy/Environment ($38 billion), and transportation (fixing our roads)($26 billion). This is money we spend that “we really don’t have to spend”. Makes me wonder then, why we ALWAYS cut the defense budget first. Why not cut the amount of money we simply give to foreign countries—especially places like Pakistan and other sand pits in the Middle East. We give them money to continue to hate us.
“Interest on the debt”—6%, or $252 billion. So we borrow $561 billion in order to pay $252 billion in interest (no principal—just interest) on our nation debt. If we’d shitcan the Energy Department, Education Department, and stop giving billions to countries that hate us, we’d cut that $252 billion down to $104 billion. We take in $1.12 trillion for Social Security and Medicare, but pay out $2.5 trillion. More people today are on food stamps than ever in our country’s history. http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/09/23/why-are-47-million-americans-on-food-stamps-its-the-recession-mostly/ Almost 47 million Americans take food stamps—1 in 6 of us. And they can stay on food stamps longer even if they get a job. If the area where they live is deemed “high unemployment” they can keep getting them even if they no longer “need” them.
Here are more recent facts for you. http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2014/09/not-looking-for-work-why-labor-force-participation-has-fallen-during-the-recovery
Today, nearly 7 million Americans simply stopped looking for work. They are not counted in the unemployment rate. Another 6 percent (perhaps some of those 7 million) are now collecting Social Security disability payments instead of looking for work. I mean, why flip burgers and sweat if I can get paid a similar amount to sit on my fat ass? The drop in employment participation rate totally accounts for the drop in the unemployment rate.
It all comes down to priorities and these always change with the ideology of the sitting administration. Conservatives are more prone to spend on defense and greater self-expansion and reliance. Liberals are more prone to spend on social programs and creating greater dependency. This is why the defense budget is always the sacrificial lamb at budget cutting times under liberals. If we just spread the wealth and give people money, they will like us more and we won’t need a military. They can’t see that once a military is too weak to defend its nation, the bad guys will have no obstacle to simply taking over. They don’t understand that you cannot coexist with someone who is hell bent on killing you—whether or not you give him the money to buy the machete he cuts your head off with.