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Comment by growthwtf | Hacker News Reader

The Military is actually the ~5th biggest contributor to the current national deficit, behind social security, interest on the debt, and various health programs.

The largest contributors to the debt over the last couple decades have been stimulus packages and tax cuts.

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Interestingly, you're both right, but most people don't understand how government spending works. There's two main categories of spending - discretionary and mandatory. Discretionary spending is the budget submitted by Congress where they allocate money to various things. Mandatory spending is compulsory and done without a vote or manual appropriations. Things like social security, pensions, medicare, and so on are mandatory. Discretionary is military, education, housing, transportation, and so on. And, of this spending, military is, by far, the lion's share of it all. So each dollar spent on a bomb half-way around the world is one less dollar that could have been spent on e.g. education, infrastructure, or housing - which are predominantly discretionary.

And notably, discretionary budgets are relatively small, contrasted against the overall budget. In 2024 the entire discretionary budget was "only" $1.8 trillion. So things like "just" a hundred billion might seem fairly small, but are in reality a substantial chunk of all our discretionary allocations. Then there's the military, which eats up nearly a trillion dollars of this spending. In 2024 it was $886 billion, which does not include the spending on various wars around the world.

I think the naming on the split is a little disingenuous. It's "mandatory", but it's still just laws. I get that the funding is decided differently, and I'm not making any claim one way or the other regarding whether Medicare, ss, etc should be changed, but it isn't like there's some law of nature we can't adjust if we wanted.

If you think of the government like a business, Social Security and Medicare are like pensions. Should companies be allowed to include pensions in their operations budget, or should pension planning be entirely separate?

I can guarantee you that if companies were able to include the pension fund in their operations budget there would be a massive increase in pension shortfalls as their reserves get raided for operations expenses. The whole strategy of including "entitlement" spending in the budget conversation is a part of a conservative plot to get rid of Social Security and Medicare. That's why we shouldn't include it as part of the budget.

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