Spending less than half of the government's budget
In
this post,
![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif)
lonfiction talks about his desire for a politician (or an average person, for that matter) to "put your money where your mouth is." In other words, don't just tell the electorate you're for education: show it by increasing the budget for education. It's a good, passionate argument.
Unfortunately, it reminded me of
this editorial from the March issue of
Kiplinger's which my father pointed out a few weeks ago (and I inconveniently forgot to write about). In it, Knight Kiplinger starts off by saying "If you really want to know what people value most, look at how they spend their money." Basically, the same argument Lon is making. Kiplinger goes on to look at the various chunks of the federal budget*. Kiplinger talks about how little, as a percentage of total tax dollars, each field gets. After enumerating most everything the average person thinks about (including the Department of Defense, which has a whopping 21% of the budget), he notes that he still hasn't accounted for more than half of federal spending. "So where do the majority of your federal tax dollars go? To your fellow citizens, in direct payments and benefits." He explains how those payments and benefits make up 56% of annual federal spending. "[A]bout one-third of all federal spending goes out as Social Security benefits and Medicare payments."
His summation: "the vexing problem of reordering national priorities is that 65% of the current federal budget (56% in transfer payments and 9% in interest on debt) is virtually untouchable." Good and read the entire article: he spells it all out simply and clearly).
Finally, there's
this AP article which talks about the nearing difficulties of continuing Social Security and Medicare as they have been. Quoting from it: "While the Social Security trust fund will have resources until 2041, the more critical date in terms of government revenues will occur in 2017. In that year, Social Security, which has been providing billions of dollars in surpluses to the government for over two decades, will start having to pay out more in benefits than it will receive that year in payroll taxes.
"At that point, the government will have to start replacing the money it has borrowed from the Social Security trust fund. It can do that only by increasing borrowing from the public, raising taxes or cutting other government programs. The elimination of the Social Security surplus is a key reason that experts are projecting sizable budget deficits in future years."
Did you catch that? We've been borrowing from Social Security (yes, yes, I know that wasn't a secret, and it's been going on for many years), but that fund will soon be unable to loan the general budget any more money.
All in all, a sobering look at the finances dictating the federal budget. We can complain about insufficient funding for education, too much money being wasted on science, even overspending on needless wars; but all of those pale in comparison to the 56% gorilla sitting over there in the corner. We've got entitlements which were designed during the Great Depression as stopgaps and assistance programs for a populace living shorter lives, but those programs have become so institutionalized that politicians feel they can't even talk about them.
You want fiscal responsibility in our leaders? Make them talk about Social Security. Not "how do we keep funding it," but rather "does it make sense to keep looking for bandages to keep the system limping along."
* Something I've been talking about since I was actively involved with the Artemis Project: to wit, everyone complains about over-spending on space and science, but those expenditures are less than 1% of the federal budget.
