7 ms·
Obama’s 2011 Budget Proposal, Department by Department (Infographic)
- warfangle 17y agoMass transit is being cut, as is R&D, healthcare, and so forth. Joy of joys.
- maukdaddy 17y agoLooks like mass transit is actually staying the same at 8.38 billion. Edit: Looks like there are two different "mass transit" boxes with differing figures.
- maukdaddy 17y ago$251 billion (+33%) in interest. That is a staggering figure.
- dantheman 17y agoSome Observations, I always find it interesting how the break it up. 1. Normally the FBI & DOE are not considered national defense 2. Why is Medicare separate from health? 3. Why are veterans benefits & Military Retirement not considered national defense This diagram is very misleading as criminal investigations is squirreled away under Administration. From this breakdown you can't actually tell how much is being spent on each top level category, which defeats the purpose of this type of graph.
- las3rjock 17y ago1. The Department of Energy appears in at least three places in the chart: once under "National defense", once under "General science", and once under "Energy". I assume the amount under national defense consists of the allocations for nuclear weapons stockpile stewardship and nuclear reactor production for the U.S. military. I will agree that it is strange that the Federal Bureau of Investigation has been categorized as "National defense"; the rest of the Department of Justice seems to have been catergorized as "Administration". 2. One could categorize Medicare with Health, but one can already do that with the chart as shown by considering those two rectangles together. It is interesting to see that Medicare, by itself, has a larger allocation than everything else in the Department of Health and Human Services (and there are pieces in the Health rectangle that probably belong in the Medicare rectangle, e.g. "Grants to states for Medicaid" and "DoD Medicare-eligible retiree health care fund"). 3. The Department of Veterans Affairs is a Cabinet-level department independent from the Department of Defense. 4. It looks like the Department of Justice and the Department of Treasury have been lumped together under "Administration". I will agree that some aspects of this breakdown are strange, but I don't think it defeats the purpose of this chart.
- jbooth 17y agoWhat, no giant red box marked "Socialism"? And they're underfunding the death panels!
- jasondavies 17y agoUnfortunately the colour spectrum is unfriendly to those of us with red-green colour blindness: it's hard to differentiate between positive and negative percentage changes without looking at the tooltips. Aside from that, nice treemap.
- timr 17y agoOne thing that should immediately pop out at even the casual observer: the traditional bugaboos of the right (social services for poor people, welfare, etc.) are a tiny, tiny minority of the budget. You can cut them down to an expenditure of 0, and you won't really change the bottom line. If we're going to come to terms with the national deficit, we're going to have to accept the fact that military, social security and medicare expenditures are going to have to shrink. The problem is not poor people: it's old people and wars.
- xenophanes 17y agoIsn't the 560 billion for "income security" a social services thing? Isn't it giving money to people who don't have jobs, or make very little money? So that's quite a lot of money in the welfare/social services category. And personally I'd count social security and medicare in the same sort of category. It's the government spending a ton of money inefficiently providing services that should be provided by the free market, and saying this helps people. It's good to help people, but it's not the right role for Government, which isn't very good at it. On the other hand, the military spending may be a lot of money, but at least it's in one of the areas the free market has the hardest time with -- it's spending money in an area where the Government actually has some expertise and some business doing anything.
- adamc 17y agoSocial security provides money, which is about as efficient as it gets. Are you positing that private pension benefits are somehow spent more efficiently? As far as whether it helps people, it unquestionably does. Maybe it hurts other people (those who pay taxes), but that income transfer would not likely happen under private plans. So it is not an apples-to-apples comparison.
- Nwallins 17y agoHow is the revenue from social security different from that of other federal taxes (esp. income)?
- 17y ago
- robryan 17y agoThey should cut military spending and focus more on nuclear type weapons, sure they will no longer have the same power in tactical ground warfare but it would be basically saying, sure you may be able to out maneuver us now but we can defiantly blow you off the face of the earth if you try.
- Perceval 17y agoBiden recently wrote an op-ed in the WSJ explaining the administration's goals for the U.S. nuclear arsenal: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704878904575031382215508268.html http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405274870487890457503...
- robryan 17y agoGuess my message was taken the wrong way? I'm not advocating nuclear weapons but rather scaling back military spending and using them as a deterrent to other countries so that the current US defense force size doesn't need to be maintained.
- mquander 17y agoYour message is insane. I don't even know where to start. Why would we prefer to have nuclear weapons as a deterrent instead of having a conventional military as a deterrent? Which is more favorable, defending one of our allies by deploying nuclear weapons, or defending them by deploying a few ten thousand soldiers, planes, and warships? Why would we want to put money into weapons we can never use without tremendous backlash and moral misgivings, instead of ones we deploy regularly to serve our interests? The current U.S. defense force size doesn't need to be maintained; we haven't used a significant portion of it to defend us or our direct allies from a military attack since World War II. We use our military proactively, as a tool for enacting our will. We cannot hammer a nail if our only tool is a bulldozer.
- pkaler 17y agoThis is the expenses side. It'd be nice to see an infographic on the revenue side. (Taxes, etc.)
- evanjacobs 17y agoI'm going to start a business to sell services to the US government. Even if I only capture 1% of the market that's $36 billion per year!
- las3rjock 17y agoYou're hardly the first person with this idea. There are many corporations already working in this sector--they're called government contractors.
- InclinedPlane 17y agoI think he was making a dot-com (v1) boom joke. Wherein the overly simplistic business model math involving capturing just X tiny percent of a huge market was obvious justification for the profitability of a web venture. Turns out, there's no reason to assume that anyone can capture 1%, 0.1% or even 0.0001% of any market, merely because it's a small value doesn't mean it's easy to achieve.
- matty 17y agoRelated: http://www.wallstats.com/deathandtaxes/ http://www.wallstats.com/deathandtaxes/ I always thought this was a pretty good visual representation of budget distribution. Note this reflects the 2010 budget, not the proposed 2011 budget.
- Perceval 17y agoIt's not that good really. The site you linked to only displays the discretionary budget. The NYTimes infographic is much better, because it also includes all mandatory spending. Mandatory spending is over 50% of the entire federal budget, and includes pretty much all of the 'welfare state': social security, medicare, medicaid, unemployment and other income supplements, veterans' benefits, student loans, and on down the list. Displaying only discretionary spending is a rather tendentious way of representing the federal budget, because it makes defense spending look like the largest expenditure. Such graphs are usually linked to by people decrying U.S. militarism or imperialism or the military industrial complex. This is not to say that the U.S. does or does not spend too much on the military, but simply to point out that the visual effect of cutting out over 50% of the budget biases people's perceptions and provides undue support for politicized arguments.
- mattwdelong 17y agoNext book on my reading list is The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, so that I can finally understand all of this Economic mess the world is in. Of course it won't give me a full understand, but I have been told it will send me in the right direction. Recently, I have been trying to understand what exactly a dollar is. From what I can tell, its pretty useless. I've determined that money != wealth.
- jeffcoat 17y agoHave you discovered that if you have something that someone else wants, and they have something you want, and you swap, then you can both end up happier? Have you discovered that it's tricky to carry with you for exchange purposes every conceivable desire of the guy that owns the grocery store, and thought that it might be handy to introduce an abstraction layer?
- dpatru 17y agoFor understanding money, you might try reading Murray Rothbard's "What has government done to our money?", available for free in both written and audio at mises.org.
- rms 17y agohttp://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Politics_is_the_Mind-Killer http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Politics_is_the_Mind-Killer
- olalonde 17y agoIf only we could change "National Defense" by "Startup Fund".