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A significant chunk of the "defense" spending is VA. Interest kind of shouldn't count? It's the cost of borrowing for our past spending on, you guessed it, mo
by loeg 2mo ago
A significant chunk of the "defense" spending is VA. Interest kind of shouldn't count? It's the cost of borrowing for our past spending on, you guessed it, mostly social programs.
- kasey_junk 2mo agoDefense spending used to be a higher percentage of our budget than now, so if anything you should assign more of that to the debt. About 16% of the spending is straight up defense spending and about 5% is the VA. I personally think it’s crazy to severe them and wish the va was part of the DoD. But people can disagree.
- loeg 2mo agoAnd CHIP, and SNAP. Whatever. You can certainly say social safety net spending isn't exactly 90%. But it's, you know, most of it.
- kasey_junk 2mo agoChip and snap combined is less than 2% of the budget and shrinking fast. You can tell it’s nowhere near 90% because even if you counted every single non-DoD dollar as social safety net it would only be 84% of the budget.
- loeg 2mo ago84% is near 90%!