About jkamin

jkamin

Location:

(USA)

Joined on:

06/05/07

Contact:

julia@citizenjoe.org

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  Business & Money

  response to  Max Joseph, Erin Bosworth, Tom Van Buskirk, and Ariel Schulman's post Missiles and Mortgages

  not so bad information

  Cute, fun way to show how the feds spend our money.

  I agree with JessicaT that in general the best way to talk about budgetary spending is to compare it to GDP, but the point of this video is not to talk about total spending - rather to talk about relative spending of different budgetary priorities (eg. education vs. military spending). Toward that end, it doesn't really matter which percentages you use. (Worth noting: JessicaT's point on education spending is spot on - federal spending on education only accounts for about 10% of public education).

  What is really missing from these stats and so is somewhat misleading, however, is that they only cover "discretionary" spending - that is how much Congress votes to spend on each year - and leave out "mandatory" spending, which accounts for over 50% of federal spending and which almost all goes to Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. If you look at total spending, health care gets bumped up to 25% and military spending goes down to about 20%.

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  Commented on June 5, 2007 by - jkamin