Re:America prepares for a new nuclear-arms race
by tptacek on Friday August 16, 2024 @02:24PM
(#41268958)
In what sense is Medicare spending not medical/health spending? How is that a "rhetorical trick"?
Re:America prepares for a new nuclear-arms race
by vundercind on Friday August 16, 2024 @02:31PM
(#41269031)
Lumping much smaller items in with any of the very small number of huge items in the budget can be misleading, is all, in a “ants are really heavy! Why, this other piece of material with an ant on it is a bit more than ten kilos!”, where the other thing is in fact a ten-kilo piece of steel, sort of way.
One can do things like say, “foreign aid is out of control! Why, our defense and foreign aid spending is XX% of the budget!” to imply that the foreign aid portion of that is more than a rounding error, which it is not.
Re:America prepares for a new nuclear-arms race
by tptacek on Friday August 16, 2024 @02:35PM
(#41269062)
I'm sorry, I'm still not following. Yes, Medicare spending is a huge component of total federal spending because Medicare has lots of beneficiaries. But that's true of schools and transportation and, yes, military (which is dominated by opex).
Including Social Security in contexts where it probably shouldn’t be included is also used on its own to make other parts of the budget look smaller. Its funding source is separate from the general budget, so including it sometimes doesn’t make a lot of sense, depending on the topic at hand, but you’ll see it dragged in to make the pie larger and make other spending look smaller.