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Comment by kube-system | Hacker News Reader

Federal spending on transportation, education, health, and social services outnumbers defense spending by over 4 to 1.

https://www.usaspending.gov/explorer/budget_function

And in my opinion, compared to the first half of the 20th century, pax Americana is well worth that 13.5% chunk of the budget. War is also bad for health.

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You're blending some very different numbers there, social security and Medicare are huge, while federal spending on transportation is lower and education is a pittance.

Yes, I added them together, because that was the same comparison being made by the parent comment. The reason federal spending on them is low is because transportation and education are mostly within the administrative purview of the states.

We spend enormously on education; in most municipalities it's going to be the majority of your property tax bill†. The distinction is that education is primarily funded locally, and the military is entirely funded federally. If you add up all-source funding, they might be neck-and-neck.

† People get tripped up on this because school systems are often their own taxing bodies, so they look at their city budget or whatever and see huge line items for police and fire and nothing meaningful for schools, but if you go to your county you can probably get the breakdown of all your local taxing bodies on one page and see where that misconception is coming from.

"Federal spending", I said.

What's the point of pulling out federal spending? When the federal government decides to devolve a policy issue out to the states, that isn't necessarily indication of its importance as an issue. Law enforcement, for instance, is a hugely important national issue, and is almost entirely local. I assure you that Americans care deeply about having good fire departments; the federal government doesn't fund them.

OP linked to a breakdown of federal spending.

I'm not pursuing an angle here, just lending detail.

Got it, thanks.

Whether intentional or not, it’s a common rhetorical trick when talking about the US budget. You can make anything plausibly related to health and retirement or general welfare look huge by lumping it in with social security, Medicare, and Medicaid.

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.

In what sense is Medicare spending not medical/health spending? How is that a "rhetorical trick"?

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.

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).

Weird, why don't US has decent train network across the country still and people are scrambling for clean water in places? China did it in 20 years while US rebuilt the WTC.

The US has the largest train network on the planet, even larger than the entire EU combined. It is just primarily used for cargo.

"Defense" spending (the US is currently involved in "defense" by its involvement in bombing Yemen, Gaza, Russia and other countries) is considered very narrowly - you don't count veteran's benefits as military spending. You don't count interest on the debt for past military spending as military spending. You don't consider international affairs spending, very wrapped up in military spending, as military spending. You don't count NASA's military work as military spending.

Everything is military spending if you consider anything two or three degrees removed as military spending.

THIS.

Well, technically those might be negative spending to the extent that they are arms sales not offset by any subsidy or aid. Certainly, the cost of disposal for many of the older shells would have been higher than sending them off to Ukraine has been.

Even the M4/M16 5.56 (223 cal) is now being replaced with the XM7 using 6.68mm ammo so that will all also have to be disposed of too (likely with the weapons). I don't want them on the streets here, and I'm not sure some wouldn't come back wherever in the world they're sent.

Arguing whether sending weapons to a government and if it is justified is a reasonable conversation, but trying to claim they are particularly expensive (when they aren't) dilutes that point. Further, NASA's military work is paid for from the defense (or black) budgets not the publicly available ones so I'm not sure that's a great argument either.

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