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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
by vundercind 2y ago
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.
- tptacek 2y agoIn what sense is Medicare spending not medical/health spending? How is that a "rhetorical trick"?
- vundercind 2y agoLumping 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.
- tptacek 2y agoI'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).