Cite? This is quoted so many times that people think it’s true. I understand that half of all prisoners in on FEDERAL charges are on drug charges, but that excludes non-federal offenses like murder, assault, robbery, etc.
This is a very convoluted way to prove your point.
Your link, from the Independent Institute, in an effort to Bash Bush ™ - which is getting old in my opinion - advocates including portions of NASA, the FBI, the Justice Department, the Department of Energy, the State Department, and virtually all of Homeland security, and the VA into the costs of DoD. It also wants to include DoD’s portion of the interest on the national debt. Did you include that in all of your other calculations? This is a convention I’ve never seen before.
So yes, you’ve proven that finding another $300 billion can be done. The handstands that you had to perform to do it belie your facade of being an honest broker in starting this thread and are disingenuous, at least in this instance.
Social security is actually in fairly good shape. The tax rates are 12.4%, if we raised them to about 14.2% then it would be 100% solvent for 75 years. Even Cato admits that
http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=3122
The most obvious are those that advocate raising taxes and/or reducing benefits without making any modifications to the program’s pay-as-you-go structure. To make Social Security solvent over the next 75 years, either a permanent 15 percent increase in payroll income taxes, or a 13 percent reduction in benefits, or some combination of the two would be required. If we wait until the program is on the brink of bankruptcy, the payroll income tax rate would need to increase by 4.5 percentage points (to about 16.9 percent) and gradually increase until it is more than 50 percent higher than today’s rate.
So you can slightly increase the tax rate, slightly raise the cap, slightly decrease benefits, slightly increase the retirement age, etc and the system will be fine.
It is more medicare and medicaid that are long range problems. The unfunded liabilities of these programs are 3-6x bigger than social security.
We need to do what Taiwan did in the 1990s. They rebuilt their medical system from the ground up to make it as efficient as possible. We could probably cut a trillion out of medical spending and cover everyone if we did it right. However in order to do that you’d have to piss off a lot of powerful people (hospital industry, physician industry, pharma industry, private insurance industry) as well as piss off people who don’t like government intervention and frighten a fickle public.
So it needs to be done, but I don’t think it will. At least not yet.
I don’t get your point.
You have the department of defense. Then you have appropriations which are not in the budget.
Within the budget you have deparments like homeland security, veterans affairs, department of state and various other programs that are partly defense devoted (department of energy, NASA, DOJ).
The link I posted had a chart explaining which departments added to the defense budget. I wouldn’t include the interest issue. But the dept of homeland security, veterans affairs and state add about $150 billion alone. Add in appropriations not in the budget and other smaller parts of programs like energy, NASA, etc. and it adds up to about $300 billion extra in defense.
If this cite is correct, the military spending is grossly underreported, and is actually 1.44 trillion annually in true costs when everything is factored into it. Also, take a good at the top 15 spenders on military. We outspend them all, and probably 12 of those 15 are our allies! If much of Europe doesn’t feel the need for that kind of spending on the military, why does America?
Eh, who said anything about Bush? The OP never mentions him, and the article he links to only mentions him once, in neutral terms, saying that he was the one who submitted the most recent budget they’re discussing (the article was written in 2007).
It makes sense, there are costs that are due to what most people would consider National Defense in other departments then the DoD, so adding them in when figuring out the cost of National Defense seems pretty obvious, and indeed calculating the cost we spend on defense while ignoring, say, the cost of nuclear weapon stockpiles, or the VA, or the interest on debt we used to finance previous defense expenditures is pretty obviously incorrect.
- Dwight David Eisenhower in his farewell address
Sure, one can logically add thing to DoD’s budget to increase it. But then we are no longer making honest comparisons between DoD and other budget items.
Why doesn’t security that DoD provides to the State Department throughout the world be posted to the State Department?
Why doesn’t NCIS and the other services investigative arms go against the FBI or state’s budgets?
Why doesn’t all education costs incurred go against Education?
Why don’t retirement costs go against social security?
This could go one and on. My point is piling every cost that could possibly be made, to DoD skews the debate against DoD. But then again, we are arguing on The Straight Dope so . . .
Your arguing against a point no one is making. No one said the DoD’s budget is larger then it actually is (as you say, the DoD’s budget is exactly what…the DoD’s budget is), they’re saying that defense or military spending is larger then the DoD’s budget.
The point isn’t to figure how much the DoD spends as a bureaucratic entity, the point is to figure how much the US spends on defense as a whole.
By analogy, if someone said we spent more on Science Research then just what was in the NSF budget, they’d be right, since Dept of Energy and NASA and NIH also contribute to science spending. That still wouldn’t mean that the NSF’s budget was somehow secretly larger then it was claimed to be, just that science spending as a whole encompases more then the one agency that has “Science” in the name.
What expenses are there in medicare, medicaid, education or social security that aren’t within those particular budgets?
The only examples I can think of is the dept of education at about $47 billion and the Department of health & human services at $79 billion.
With national defense, the military budget is just part of the cost. With the other programs, their entire cost seems to be within those particular budgets.
Defense may have 50% of its cost outside of its particular budget in other areas. With medicare/medicaid, it may be closer to 8%. With education it might be 5%.
The vast majority of government spending in the US comes down to 4 areas. Health care, pensions for the elderly/disabled, education and defense. For most of those programs the tax revenue is pretty straightforward. With defense, there are lots of issues outside of just the budget of the DoD.
How do you know he will be getting back more than he puts in? I know I won’t be.
Even if that is the case, why is so hard for you types of people to understand that when you set up a “retirement program” FOR ALL, that the people wouldn’t be reliant on it (regardless if they need it or not)?
If you want to tax the wealthy and redistribute wealth, do so BUT CALL IT WHAT IT IS.
I don’t want to hijack this thread, so this will be my last response. The thread pitted “liberals” against “conservatives” to start, as such, it was skewed against DoD. The comment “Granted, fiscal conservatives opposed the creation of social security, medicaid and medicare. And they oppose the creation of new entitlement programs.” clearly supports this assertion. I for one am a fiscal conservative, but a social liberal. But the OP ignored that possibility by his statement.
Since I believed that to be the case, I felt that altering the accounting rules by using activity-based accounting for DoD but no other programs was clouding the issue even father.
As noted, the OP advocated binning the portion of the interest on the debt to DoD, but he didn’t do it to the other programs. DoD performs missions that if one used an activity-based costing criteria would be assigned to virtually all other areas including social security, education, medical, homeland security, law enforcement, civil engineering, space - The list goes on and on. So costs were added to DoD but not subtracted.
So I felt that since the deck was stacked against DoD as this site leans to the left, pushing it even further by posing the question in an inaccurate way was not conducive to an accurate debate. YMMV of course.
It’s the second-largest budget item (largest if you discount the fact that SS is supposed to be nominally self-funding) so I don’t know why you immediately put “liberals against conservatives” and “skewed against the DOD” together. Unless you’re skewed yourself.
The other programs haven’t historically added meaninfully to the debt. SS and Medicare have taken in more money then they spend.
Maybe, but the OP was just giving general numbers, and I doubt picking apart the DoD budget for non-defense spending would subtract substantially from its total. But maybe I’m wrong, if you think there are substantial non-defense portions of the DoD budget, telling us what they are would add interesting info to the debate.
Eh, between this and your earlier bizarre “bush bashing” comment I think you’ve got a bit of a persecution complex. The OP added a single paranthetical reference that military spending was probably considerably larger then just the DoD’s budget, a point of view he backed up with cites when you asked him to, which made a decent accounting of defense related spending that was indeed outside of the budget of the DoD.
Like it or not, spifflog has an entirely valid point. If razncain can make the point that spending on the Department of Veterans Affairs is actually defense-related spending, then there’s nothing wrong at all with saying that portions of the DOD budget are actually better counted as health care spending, or basic scientific research, or space exploration, and so on.
If you want to stop counting the budget by how much is allocated to specific agencies and departments, and you want to start counting the budget by how much is related to specific functions (health care, defense, law enforcement, etc) then it is unfair to count defense-related health care and defense-related law enforcement as a defense function, if you are not going to count law enforcement-related health care or health care-related law enforcement as costs to those particular programs.
Why should the VA treatment of a non-service connected disabled 90 year old man count as defense-related and not health care or care for elderly related costs? A very significant portion of VA health care costs are for diseases that have nothing to do with treating the wound of war, it is just that a veteran caught the flu or had a heart attack many years after his service ended.
Why should the $150 million DOD spends on breast cancer research be treated as a defense-related expense? Breast cancer isn’t threatening to invade the country.
To make apples-to-apples comparisons, if it is fair to label things funded in other departments as actually being defense-related, then it is fair to add the billions of dollars DOD spends on health care to the “health care” slice of the Federal pie.
ETA:
DOD spends $42 billion a year on health care. There’s at least $2 billion in science and technology-related funding that is not directed at weapons systems. There’s billions more, but my edit window is closing.
I think you do need to count veterans benefits as part of defense spending. Much of the cost of the Iraq war, for example, will be in the form of future benefits owed to veterans, even though much of it will go to things like college tutions or hip replacements 60 years from now that has nothing directly to do with fighting a war.
Its basically a form of payment for soldiers (and other military personnal), for serving in the defense of the country. As such, it should be counted as military spending.
Why is this your last post? Your points are valid.
I don’t consider the interest on the debt related to defense as part of defense. I said so in an earlier post. My statement on an extra $300 billion was taken from appropriations, homeland security, state department, veterans affairs and other budget items.
Even if you just include the original DoD spending, it is still 3.3 trillion that goes to a handful of programs. So what do fiscal conservatives cut to balance the budget? The issue was not meant to be a ‘cut the defense budget, ‘wink, wink’’ type of thread. I was asking a serious question. I get the impression that many people feel there is tons of useless pork in the government. However most spending comes down to education, health care, defense and education. So if anyone wants to make major cuts in the government, they have to cut those areas.
Either way, the intent of the thread was to point out that most government spending goes to those 4 areas (education, health care, pensions, defense) and how would fiscal conservatives deal with those areas?
If you want to continue the debate and only include the $664 billion as defense spending, then by all means do so. I don’t mind. I was just under the impression that the DoD was only part of total defense spending, whereas issues like education or social security had their costs totally contained within the numbers I had posted.
If social security had an additional $200 billion stashed away in various programs, and I knew about it, I would’ve included a rider adding that there was an additional $200 billion in the SS program. But to my knowledge, there is not.
But do you count those benefits as defense related, education related or health related? I think that was part of the confusion.
Either way, the simple fact remains that we probably spend 3.6 trillion or more on pensions, health care, education and defense. So anyone who wants to shrink the government or balance the budget w/o raising taxes will have to drastically cut these 4 areas.
I started this thread because I feel fiscal conservatives/libertarians haven’t really given a roadmap on how they’d balance the budget w/o raising taxes. I assumed they’d just cut entitlement programs, but wanted to see where/how they would cut them.
As I said, a large portion of the VA health care budget is for diseases that were not caused by the war.
But in any case, what does the cost of educating a child have to do with whether his/her parent may be in the military? There are about 180,000 children going to schools, and if DOD wasn’t paying for their education, the states would be. If we’re talking about functional categories of budgeting, this is quite obviously a public education bill being paid for by a different government agency.
ETA, again: Personally, I think the sine qua non of a fiscal conservative is the belief that tax cuts are effective to stimulate the economy and often raise government revenues. I have yet to meet a fiscal conservative in Washington who believes anything different, and I’m not one to be rash in categorizing the views of my political opposites. I do not believe this part of the “wisdom” of fiscal conservatism is nearly as strongly held outside the Beltway. I think a lot of people in Real America either think fiscal conservatism simply means balancing the budget, or just think is sounds really cool and moderate to be socially liberal and fiscally conservative… even if they really aren’t.