Exploring where and how the Federal Government spends money
usaspending.gov
usaspending.gov
Take the Deparatment of Commerce for example:
- Out of $9.7 trillion, it's only allocated a paltry 0.49% ($47.9 billion).
- Out of that 0.49%, only 1.33% or $637 million is budgeted for the International Trade Administration
The ITA is one of the 3-4 arms of of government responsible for maintaining/overseeing that the international trade agreements are being followed. Good luck holding China accountable to cheats.
Let's also look at the law enforcement arm:
- As a category, Administration of Justice makes up $104 billion.
- That sounds like a lot but it's only 1% of the Federal Budget, trying to cover everything from interstate crimes to white collar crimes, corporate crimes, and compliance.
Medicare is an interesting one:
- Prescription costs are small portion (7 to 14%? It's a bit confusing); it's actually everything else that costs a bundle.
- Paying out the services are the bulk of the cost.
- Calculating per served (about 66 million on medicare), it costs tax payers about $24k a year. Which is on par with the middle to upper tier market plans.
Of course, Medicare tends to cover the least healthy Americans; whereas private insurance covers the most healthy. So the pool of money that would be injected-in is (in a single payer system) is instead out of circulation.
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama-health-forum/fullartic...
Medicare Advantage is a siphon from Medicare funds to corporate shareholders under the guise of for profit efficiency.
My high deductible plan where I have to pay out of pocket with pre-tax money, whereas the insurance company makes 15k to 35k a year and pays nothing on average is a clear-cut case of double dipping. Then effectively cutting off people before they retire, then collecting money from guaranteed tax dollars.
Our private health insurance is designed to extract the most wealth with the minimal amount service.
There's a huge class of non-productive wealth extraction business models and that's become a huge strain to the US economy. These classes of businesses need to be pushed aside; in favor of wealth extraction businesses that are actually productive.
But for this to happen I think the right funding in the right areas of government are super important.