> What a fantastic argument in which you completely ignore the gargantuan shadow of the US War budget against our social spending programs. Cutting the programs will never come close to the money saved by producing just a few less bombs and aircraft a year.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_spending_in_the_Uni...

In 2018, the "war budget" was 12% of the total. For comparison, education spending was 15%, health care 23%. I don't think the "war budget" piggy bank will go as far as you think it does.

The difference is that if taxes didn't pay for education and health care, people would still have to foot those costs out of pocket. But fewer bombs and aircraft carriers is pure cost cutting.

The difference is wealth transfers, which are approximately zero sum, and waste spending (paying people to consume raw materials do create useless things or destroy things), which is negative sum.

That chart is deceptive. Try this one out:

https://www.nationalpriorities.org/budget-basics/federal-bud...

This only compares our actual discretionary budget, aka the money we are able to reappropriate as we see fit, which is not locked into specific channels.

This is the only comparison that makes sense; comparing a ratio of part of our discretionary budget against the entire discretionary+undiscretionary budget is not statistically sound.

And as you see in the chart I provided, in 2015 our military spending was over half of our available budget, compared to less about 1/5th of the budget being spent in total on social programs, which were like, I'm pretty sure, the point of a government.

Sure, the point of a government is also to defend its people from foreign invasion. But you can't justify our War budget that way when you consider how the money is mostly spent offensively, as we engage in countless proxy wars, paramilitary coups, and arms deals with totalitarian nations.

We've been hoodwinked.

Funny, I'd say the chart that omits 2/3rds of the budget because it doesn't fall under a somewhat arbitrary label is the one that is deceptive.

There are no "mandatory taxes" or "discretionary taxes".

Surely you aren't suggesting the difference between discretionary and non-discretionary spending is "somewhat arbitrary". Pretty much every economist in the nation would disagree with you there.

Spending is spending, when you're trying to see where the money goes.

> Cutting the programs will never come close to the money saved by producing just a few less bombs and aircraft a year.

The defense budget is about $680 billion. Total government expenditures are 10 times that, over $7 trillion.

Take a moment to learn about the US's discretionary budget system, and the ratio of War spending vs. other programs within that discretionary budget: https://www.nationalpriorities.org/budget-basics/federal-bud...

The numbers you provide simply aren't comparable because we're dealing with two separate stacks of cash.

What does it matter what stack of money the spending comes from? Here in DC, the Metro is funded by the federal government and the states and the localities. Can we say “Metro funding is too low!” by looking at just the federal part and pretending that the other spending doesn’t exist?

Federal “discretionary spending” just means that money is allocated by appropriations bill rather than statutory formula. But the money is totally fungible—Congress can just as easily change the formula as it can change the appropriations bill.

Likewise, it makes no sense to ignore all the state spending. Defense is the job of the federal government, while social services are the job of the states. We spend a trillion dollars on education every year—almost none of that shows up on the federal discretionary budget. Does that mean you can ignore that spending? It comes out of everyone’s pockets and goes to teachers just the same as if it had been allocated by a federal appropriations bill.

There are legitimate arguments for cutting the defense budget. But the purpose of comparing defense costs just to discretionary expenditures is to deceive people about how much could be achieved by cutting the defense budget. If we cut defense expenditures to the NATO target, we would save $200 billion annually. That would fund some programs. But government spends more than $6.5 trillion a year already on non-defense things. Another $200 billion won’t be game changing.

I suspect one reason politicians fixate on the defense budget is that it provides a seemly large pot of money to fund social programs, distancing those proposals from the idea of tax increases. But that only works if you squint and don’t do the math. We would have to spend $1.4 trillion more annually to match Germany’s public spending as a percentage of GDP. And there is no reason to believe we’d be able to implement a European-style welfare state any more efficiently than Germany.

There's a lot to unpack here and honestly I've got stuff to do right now so I can't get into it. But I will mention one thing...

> We would have to spend $1.4 trillion more annually to match Germany’s public spending as a percentage of GDP. And there is no reason to believe we’d be able to implement a European-style welfare state any more efficiently than Germany.

The efficacy of social programs doesn't scale linearly with funding. That's not how you do the math. Each dollar spent has cumulative power. In truth we wouldn't need to come anywhere close to $1.4 trillion to match the impact of Germany's social programs.

This is totally wrong. The defense budget is much less than social security and Medicare.

The parent (akvadrako) is correct.

For 2017 the budgets were:

Social Security was $939 billion.

Medicare was $591 billion.

Medicaid was $353 billion.

The defense budget was $590 billion.

So Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security together are about 3 times larger than the Defense budget.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expenditures_in_the_United_Sta...

And that’s not counting the more than $3 trillion spent by state and local governments, which are all for social services and infrastructure.

That is a bit misleading. Social security is distributed back to everyone. Although higher income earners pay more than what they get out.

https://www.nasi.org/learn/socialsecurity/benefits-compare-e...

Paying Social Security taxes does not entitle anyone to receive future benefit. Per the US Supreme Court (1960), Social Security taxes are no different than any other income tax. This is not a theoretical distinction, as the US can and has denied Social Security benefits to Americans that have paid Social Security taxes for arbitrary reasons. The Supreme Court ruling was based on one such case.

What percentage of the 900 billion per year has been denied?

Why does that matter? It functions just like a regressive tax and social program. It still contributes to the deficit and is money the government needs to take out of the economy.

It’s money redistributed between consumers (progressively). Presumably the consumers will spend it on things they need, and capitalists will try to squeeze out a profit.

Unlike bullets and bombs, which is money burned.

And unlike Medicaid, which is money taken from consumers and spend specially on medical services. Which consumers may or may not need. Hence all the insurance fraud.