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Comment by ra1n85 | Hacker News Reader

It's not. Defense comes in at 15% of federal spending. Social security and medicare combined come in at 4x that amount.

Source:http://federal-budget.insidegov.com/l/120/2017-Estimate

Yeah and they take a very specific tax out of everyone's paycheck to pay for those two programs.

If you want to have an argument about them that's fine but they have separate budgets and should be discussed separately.

They are both taxes. All else equal, taxpayers would happily pay 1pts more income tax and 2pt less social security, or vice versa. All my tax dollars are the same color.

Lumping social security in with taxes? You must be very good with numbers.

I'll ignore the ad hominem.

Minus SS, it's still less than 21% of total federal spending.

If you're going to concede that point (ss) then the same applies to Medicare. This completely destroying your argument coincidentally.

It doesn't. Defense spending is not 60% of the "budget". Further, it's not a large component of the total federal budget.

    > I'll ignore the ad hominem

Insulting someone's intelligence is not an example of the ad hominem fallacy.

Those are non discretionary and funded by totally separate channels.

And?

Mandatory spending is more than twice that of discretionary. Of discretionary, defense makes up less than 50%.

I'm not sure where you are getting your numbers: care to elaborate?

This[0] directly contradicts you:

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

Here: http://federal-budget.insidegov.com/l/120/2017-Estimate

Mandatory: 2.56T Discretionary: 1.08T

Better link.

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

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