Obama’s 2011 Budget Proposal, Department by Department (Infographic)
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
If we're going to come to terms with the national deficit, we're going to have to accept the fact that military, social security and medicare expenditures are going to have to shrink. The problem is not poor people: it's old people and wars.
And personally I'd count social security and medicare in the same sort of category. It's the government spending a ton of money inefficiently providing services that should be provided by the free market, and saying this helps people.
It's good to help people, but it's not the right role for Government, which isn't very good at it.
On the other hand, the military spending may be a lot of money, but at least it's in one of the areas the free market has the hardest time with -- it's spending money in an area where the Government actually has some expertise and some business doing anything.
As far as whether it helps people, it unquestionably does. Maybe it hurts other people (those who pay taxes), but that income transfer would not likely happen under private plans. So it is not an apples-to-apples comparison.
SS is a big income transfer from blacks and hispanics because they don't live long enough to collect much. It's a modest income transfer to women and the poor.
Again, we can't keep slashing at the smallest parts of the budget and hoping to shrink the deficit. It's nothing more than political theater, designed to appease a vocal minority who don't have a sufficient understanding of the problem.
Of course I would like to slash at social security too.
There may be better and faster plans too, I don't know, but this one would work without hurting anyone.
Most Government social services are not designed to be efficient wealth redistribution and nothing more. They do other stuff like get involved with medicine or retirement. There is no good reason for that.
Even if you advocate forcible wealth redistribution, that is no justification for most Government social services. It'd only be justification for having one single program that gives no-strings-attached money to poor people straight out of the federal budget.
I think taking people's money by force is bad.
I believe the reason that we have as many social services programs as we do is because this country has learned that helping out the poorest of our citizens significantly raises the productivity, happiness, and health of the country as a whole. Public health programs that keep those below the poverty line vaccinated prevent outbreaks of dangerous diseases. Unemployment insurance helps those who have lost their jobs get back on their feet before they become homeless and less likely to become employed, or desperate enough to commit crimes. Reduced-price meals for poor students ensure that they are focused on their studies rather than on trying to feed themselves, and therefore more likely to get the most benefit out of their education. The entire idea behind healthcare reform is the idea that if we work to insure every citizen, it will benefit all of us in the end by keeping us healthier, and hopefully driving down costs as a result.
I don't like my money being taken by force either, but to think that the free market would provide any meaningful wealth distribution without being directly forced to is just naive.
Correct. You shouldn't be surprised, this is the basic libertarian view, and it's not rare at YC.
> You don't have any faith at all in 100 years of social progress?
What progress? I don't see progress in social services programs. So, correct, I guess. I do see "social progress" in the sense of, say, people having less fist fights, but I don't think Government is responsible for that.
As to the rest, it basically says you aren't a libertarian, aren't a free market advocate, and don't want to be. It does not engage with libertarian ideas, or criticize them, or say anything new. It just repeats things libertarians have heard a thousand times, and refuted a thousand times. If you want to know more about libertarianism or free markets you can google them, but I don't think you do.
In very short what you have said is, "Government programs are useful" which does not address the issue of whether they are efficient or wasteful relative to the free market alternatives that could exist instead (remember TANSTAAFL).
_The Machinery of Freedom_ by David Friedman
As to vaccines, I wonder what proportion of the population wouldn't be willing to pay for their own vaccines. For any vaccine that we make 300 million of it's gonna be cheap, so the unwilling people would either be very poor or have some philosophical objection to vaccine (weird religious view, anti-science, etc).
So the problem is only the size of, say, one million vaccinations.
Existing big drugs companies today voluntarily give away substantial amounts of free medicine to poor people. My friend is a recipient. They do it to create good will and word of mouth and that kind of reasoning. I imagine if no one else was willing to do it, and one company stepped up and provided vaccines for poor people for a high profile disease, thus staving off a public health risk, it'd make them look so much better than the other companies it'd pay for itself.
Or maybe that wouldn't work. It takes creativity to solve these problems. I don't see anything that makes this problem, in principle, more difficult than a variety of others. Also, it's not like the Government is offering a good solution. The Government's approach is to not find a way to do it for a profit, and not find a way to persuade people to do it voluntarily, and instead just to do it by force.
America's free-market healthcare system is extremely inefficient. We pay roughly twice that of the UK (as percentage of GDP) and all the indicators (life expectancy, infant mortality, etc), are roughly the same.
In the last two years, in the face of the stock market crash, Social Security has remained solvent and stable. If it had been privatized, as Bush wanted, it not only would have made wealthy bankers more wealthy (redistribution of wealth upwards, which tends to happen in free markets) by infusing the stock markets with billions, but it would have sent Social Security into the gutter with the rest of the pensions and 401Ks.
In fact, lack of regulation in the markets, aka more free, lead to the great recession and the 10% unemployment that we find ourselves in.
I could go on about the inefficiencies of the free market, and there are equally many cases where purely social programs also fail. In the end, the middle path -- a mix of free makets and socialism, a mix of laissez faire and regulation -- works best.
One of the market distortions in health care is tax subsidies for employer provided health care plans.
You blame recession on the free market. But how can that be? We don't have a free market. We have huge market distortions in all sorts of key areas. Those are more than capable of causing recessions.
If you're hoping for a completely free market, that's like wishing for the second coming of Christ. I think a pragmatic mix of free and social markets makes more sense.
I blame the recession on a more-free market, not a purely free market. The banking industry needs more regulation.
Finally, there are many reasons for our healthcare mess and government is but a small part. For example, A big reason healthcare in America is employer-based is, back in the 50's, auto, steel, and other huge companies were afraid of union power and government meddling, so they said "we'll take care of the health of our employees." They opted for a more-free market (not purely obviously) approach.
> The free market does not provide forcible wealth redistribution.
The fact that you draw this distinction seems to imply that you simultaneously concede that some redistribution of wealth is necessary, but also believe that this distribution can be possible without forcible intervention.
If this is not your position, I apologize. But if it is, I think it's naive at best. If the recent economic crisis has shown us anything, it is that, without force, not a penny will be pried from the hands of the financial institutions and corporations that control most of this country's wealth, let alone redistributed.
I do not consider any wealth redistribution necessary which people can't be persuaded to do completely voluntarily. What charity is good to do is a very controversial matter, but fortunately I don't have to get into that to oppose the use of force against rich people.
Persuade people to donate, and if you can't, don't assume you're right and they're wrong about the best use of their money.
Hope that's clear.
The complaint from the right is that the federal government confiscates the wealth of its citizens and redistributes it, presumably suboptimally. Leaving aside the objections to coerced wealth redistribution, there are questions of inefficiency, corruption, fraud, etc. i.e. One can easily imagine that a free market in social services would result in a more prosperous nation.
In any case, I think the right does not distinguish between Social Security, Medicare, and other entitlements in its objections to a spendy fed.
No, that's the complaint from the Libertarians. The complaint from most of the right wing is that it redistributes to the wrong people (e.g., ones who vote Democrat).
In particular, old people tend to vote more right-wing, so you're raving mad if you think they'd ever oppose Medicare.
Whether old people and the AARP embrace Medicare in a selfish stab at the identity-politics cookie jar does not affect the classical republican (and indeed, liberal) platform. Note that I am not referring to and am in fact counter-indicating the GOP.
The are plenty of old democrats, too.
I don't agree with the money we're pissing away in the Middle East either, but you can't honestly call social services a 'tiny minority' of that budget.
The Republican party is no more eager to cut senior entitlements than is the Democratic Party -- they both use Medicaid and Social Security as political bludgeons, and neither side has made a serious proposal to cut costs.
You can try to turn this into a partisan political debate, but the bottom line is that both sides have a strong incentive to leave these programs alone (they benefit active voters). On the issue of entitlements, the primary practical difference between Republicans and Democrats is that the Republicans have a long history of attacking entitlements for poor people, in order to maintain the illusion that they care about costs.
Considering that I'm one of those people, probably not. Did you bother to look at my original post, or did you just read the last comment in the thread?
(C'mon folks...the parent comment doesn't even make sense in light of what I wrote. Don't just vote up comments because they sound vaguely like they come from people on your side of the political spectrum.)
And the Dems who objected did so because they thought that the increase was too small.
The fact that the Repubs have been horrible does not imply that the Dems are no worse.
1. Normally the FBI & DOE are not considered national defense
2. Why is Medicare separate from health?
3. Why are veterans benefits & Military Retirement not considered national defense
This diagram is very misleading as criminal investigations is squirreled away under Administration. From this breakdown you can't actually tell how much is being spent on each top level category, which defeats the purpose of this type of graph.
I will agree that it is strange that the Federal Bureau of Investigation has been categorized as "National defense"; the rest of the Department of Justice seems to have been catergorized as "Administration".
2. One could categorize Medicare with Health, but one can already do that with the chart as shown by considering those two rectangles together. It is interesting to see that Medicare, by itself, has a larger allocation than everything else in the Department of Health and Human Services (and there are pieces in the Health rectangle that probably belong in the Medicare rectangle, e.g. "Grants to states for Medicaid" and "DoD Medicare-eligible retiree health care fund").
3. The Department of Veterans Affairs is a Cabinet-level department independent from the Department of Defense.
4. It looks like the Department of Justice and the Department of Treasury have been lumped together under "Administration".
I will agree that some aspects of this breakdown are strange, but I don't think it defeats the purpose of this chart.
Is the chart only about the executive branch? Does it include congressional spending & the federal judiciary?
Recently, I have been trying to understand what exactly a dollar is. From what I can tell, its pretty useless.
I've determined that money != wealth.
Have you discovered that it's tricky to carry with you for exchange purposes every conceivable desire of the guy that owns the grocery store, and thought that it might be handy to introduce an abstraction layer?
I always thought this was a pretty good visual representation of budget distribution. Note this reflects the 2010 budget, not the proposed 2011 budget.
Displaying only discretionary spending is a rather tendentious way of representing the federal budget, because it makes defense spending look like the largest expenditure. Such graphs are usually linked to by people decrying U.S. militarism or imperialism or the military industrial complex. This is not to say that the U.S. does or does not spend too much on the military, but simply to point out that the visual effect of cutting out over 50% of the budget biases people's perceptions and provides undue support for politicized arguments.
Edit: Looks like there are two different "mass transit" boxes with differing figures.
The current U.S. defense force size doesn't need to be maintained; we haven't used a significant portion of it to defend us or our direct allies from a military attack since World War II. We use our military proactively, as a tool for enacting our will. We cannot hammer a nail if our only tool is a bulldozer.