In case you're curious, here's a breakdown of the president's FY25 budget proposal:
The two pink regions represent approximately 5% of the defense budget and 5% of the domestic discretionary budget. The whole interminable fight before we finally agree on a budget will be entirely about those two slivers—or less. Those fights will seem very important when they happen, but keep this chart in mind for perspective. As with academic squabbles, the fighting is intense because the stakes are so low.
i love how our click-baity jpg-driven media happily sucks down bandwidth for images, videos, and metric crap-tons of javascript while absolutely refusing to publish basic charts like this
obviously charts would undercut their ability to issue false characterizations of the topic in question
and when they use charts, they cherry-pick the start/end dates, ignore inflation, and totally fuck with vertical scales
of course this is all in service to their much-prized 'objectivity' /s
Please educate me.
What makes expenditures “mandatory”?
Thank you
stuff like social security, medicare, etc., that are mandated by existing law
of course congress is free to change those laws at any time
and i'm sure that existing retirees, traditionally the most self-abnegating group of voters, would happily sign up for cuts in services
Thanks.
I imagine also things like utilities for owned buildings, and maybe maintenance costs.
yeah, i would think 'mandatory' would also include interest payments but for some reason they break that out separately
Stuff like utilities for owned buildings is paid out of Operations and Maintenance funds in the DOD and similar general accounts for other departments. These types of appropriations are not considered "Mandatory".
One question I have been asking conservatives for over a decade is to take those five categories of spending and tell me what they should be, in an ideal conservative world.
No one ha ever been able to answer, for the obvious reason that almost all government spending is on things no one wants to cut like Social Security, Medicare and Defense.
So all the screaming and shouting about spending is always, always always and without exception, about the tiniest sliver of programs like TANF or SNAP which could be zeroed out and not make any noticeable difference to the budget.
conservatives also seem to think foreign aid is about 30% of the federal budget
With t-bone steaks for young bucks and welfare mothers making up the rest.
I think this is wrong. Conservatives want to cut Social Security and Medicare and Medicaid. That's what they mean by "entitlement reform". There are a lot of supposed centrists who want to do the same thing (think Simpson Bowles). Even Obama was in favor of some of this in his grand bargain. The problem is that most people like these things so it is politically very dicey to advocate cutting them. So conservatives find every little chunk of the budget that is less politically popular to try to get a wedge - think Foreign Aid for example. But make no mistake, the conservaive movement has always been unalterably opposed to changes the New Deal ushered in - and others have added to - from Buckley and Goldwater to Reagan and all his more modern apologists.
Cutting SS is precisely the same thing as confiscating money from someone's IRA. Right-wing jerkoffs act like the goobermint is doing freeloaders a big fat favor by sending Social Security checks to people who who paid into the system for 40 years.
I know that there are plenty of conservatives who really do want to eliminate SS and Medicare, but they don't exist in numbers large enough to swing an election.
Which is why when asked about it, they always mumble and shout about immigrants.
It is as Krugman always says; the best way to think about the Federal government is that it is an insurance company with an army. Conservatives would gladly cut Social Security and Medicare but they know it is a non-starter with their base which is why they only ever propose cutting benefits for people that won't retire in the near future.
There has been a years-long propaganda campaign to convince younger voters that Social Security and Medicare will be ‘bankrupt’ before they are old enough to receive benefits; the rightwing is hoping to lower expectations to the point that they won’t be blamed for slashing the programs. The gullible will just accept that demise was inevitable.
The cons will also wave their hands and blather about "waste, fraud, and abuse!!", but they're somehow never able to identify it. However, they have shown to be excellent about slapping on paperwork requirements and other hurdles to make sure not one penny can go to the "undeserving" that very few of the "deserving" are able to navigate the process, and thus remain un-helped.
However, the practiced cons are great at the paperwork game -- and there's most of your "fraud and abuse." All according to plan.
As I tell people when discussing these things, the federal government basically spends most of its tax dollars on bombs (aka the Pentagon) and medicine for grandma. Unless you're really serious about cutting way back on one or both of those two things, you're not serious about the deficit.
They never are. And so here we are.
On the one hand: yes, 10% of the national budget is a tiny fraction of the whole.
On the other hand: 10% of the national budget is $730 billion dollars. If that 10% were a country's GDP, it would slot in around 23rd in the world. That's still a LOT of money.
Yes. We’re the richest large nation on the planet, and since we’re the third largest in population, we can write really big checks.
Sound and fury, signifying....???
Sturm und drang...
....
???
The greatest thing to improve our fiscal situation will be the expiration of the Trump tax cuts. The second greatest will be the lowering of the Fed rate and its downstream effects on the competitive pricing of treasury bonds.
There are conservatives (the fiscal scolds) who don't know about fiscal multipliers and then there are those who are in denial about them and argue that the evidence supporting higher taxes are wrong.