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Comment by chickenpotpie | Hacker News Reader

“Americans pay many fees and taxes that go to environmental concerns”

Doubt. Environmentalism is a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of US governmental spending.

Edit: it’s .2% of the budget. Defense is a whopping 14%. We spend 70 times less on environmentalism than military and we’re not even at war. Source: http://saveepaalums.info/EPA+costs+to+taxpayers

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And your point is what? You just provided the exact evidence to what I already stated. Parts of the gas tax, excise taxes, vehicle sales tax, recycling fees, etc... are all fees that Americans pay that are supposed to go to addressing impact on the environment. But the government only spends 0.2% on it. Where did the money go? That is exactly my point. Most of it went to pay pensions that the government over promises on and doesn't budget enough for. Any business that did that would be out of business or switching to 401ks, which most have done.

1) most of those taxes aren’t specifically for environmental policies. For example, vehicle taxes go to fund roads 2) no, most of government spending does not go to funding pensions and there’s absolutely no evidence to support that. That claim is absolutely ludicrous.

Newsflash, most taxes have loopholes in them to allow the money to be used on things other than what they were intended for [1]. Vehicle taxes are used for multiple purposes, not just roads. Currently, 7.2% of GDP goes to pensions [2], and that is just the federal government's part. States' contributions would easily double that figure.

[1] https://reason.org/policy-brief/how-much-gas-tax-money-state...

[2] https://www.usgovernmentspending.com/pensions_spending

In case you need me to Google that for you some more...

US GDP is currently 21.43 Trillion dollars.

7% of that is 1.5 Trillion dollars.

The 2020 Federal budget was 4.79 Trillion dollars.

So, pensions are roughly a quarter of federal government spending every year and growing.

Since when is a quarter “most of”

You’re disagreeing with yourself

If you plotted all the other things the government spends money on, pensions would be the biggest chunk. Stop being dense.

By comparison, the US only spends 3.4% GDP on the military per year.

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