Re: Explaining the Democrats’ Success (The Ugly Truth).
Posted: Mon Nov 12, 2012 8:33 pm
Droopy wrote:And?
I put in $3,000, and got back the following:
Military $810.00
Includes $20.48 for Nuclear Weapons
Medicare and Health $642.00
Includes $0.04 for Maternal, Infant, and Early Childhood Home Visiting Program
Social Security, Unemployment and Labor $366.00
Includes $17.78 for TANF (Welfare)
Government $135.00
Includes $0.94 for Postal Service
Veterans Benefits $132.00
Includes $10.97 for Education, Training, and Rehab for Veterans
Food and Agriculture $129.00
Includes $80.67 for SNAP (Food Stamps)
Housing and Community $117.00
Includes $10.56 for Disaster Relief
Education $75.00
Includes $0.45 for Corporation for Public Broadcasting
Energy and Environment $57.00
Includes $6.00 for Energy Conservation
Transportation $39.00
Includes $0.32 for High Speed Rail
International Affairs $36.00
Includes $0.31 for Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria
Science $30.00
Includes $17.70 for Space Flight Research
Interest on Debt $434.00
What we have here then, is $810 for the fundamental function of a legitimate government - the protection of its citizens from national security threat - and, roughly $1,800 eaten by the welfare state, entitlements, social security (which is essentially a welfare program), "government", interest on the debt (which Obama has flung into orbit), and "science," "energy and environment," "transportation," and "education," any of which contain both programs that could be justified, rationally or constitutionally, but all of which are riddled with pork, rent seeking, crony capitalism, and constitutional dubiousness (the departments of education and energy, respectively, shouldn't even exist at all. Nor should the EPA).
I made arbitrary (and generous) cuts to the numbers in some of these, just to be fair and allow some room for legitimate functions here, while taking account of substantial quantities of pure fraud ("Science," for example, is going to contain tens of billions of dollars of government research grants targeted at keeping the AGW gravy train on its rent-seeking and power concentrating tracks ($106.7 billion between 2003 and 2010. 72 billion just since 2008)).
It’s fascinating that you lumped the $132 in veterans’ benefits in with the welfare state rather than with the functions of legitimate government. But anyway, for the sake of argument, let’s grant you the veracity of your philosophical position and claim that national defense is the only legitimate government activity on this list.
Even granting that assumption, I still find your analysis of the federal budget absurdly hypocritical. Why? Because if you are only in favor of programs that can be rationally justified and that aren’t riddled with “pork, rent seeking, crony capitalism, and constitutional dubiousness”, you absolutely must admit that the military industrial complex sucks off of American tax payers hundreds of billions every year in pork and crony capitalism. It’s constitutional dubious because in in order to justify its own existence, the military industrial complex manipulates its puppets in Washington into a state of near-continuous military interventionism around the world when we aren’t in a declared war.