

Obama’s 2011 Budget Proposal, Department by Department (Infographic) - bengebre
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2010/02/01/us/budget.html?hp

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timr
One 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.

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xenophanes
Isn'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.

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adamc
Social 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.

~~~
xenophanes
Yes, private pensions have different rules and regulations about when to put
money in, take it out, etc. For one thing, social security forces you to
contribute. If you would rather spend your money on something else (in
general, or just this month), you can't. Sometimes that hurts people who are
trying to make rent. Sometimes it's inefficient b/c they could have used the
same money for something better. Private pensions, if they get nothing else
right, at least are voluntary.

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maukdaddy
$251 billion (+33%) in interest. That is a staggering figure.

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rms
<http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Politics_is_the_Mind-Killer>

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jasondavies
Unfortunately 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.

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dantheman
Some 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
1\. 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.

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dantheman
Excellent feedback, I didn't know that VA wasn't DOD.

Is the chart only about the executive branch? Does it include congressional
spending & the federal judiciary?

~~~
las3rjock
I believe that the budget proposal on which this chart is based is only for
the executive branch.

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mattwdelong
Next 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
Have 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?

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evanjacobs
I'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
You're hardly the first person with this idea. There are many corporations
already working in this sector--they're called government contractors.

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InclinedPlane
I 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.

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matty
Related: <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.

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Perceval
It'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.

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pkaler
This is the expenses side. It'd be nice to see an infographic on the revenue
side. (Taxes, etc.)

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warfangle
Mass transit is being cut, as is R&D, healthcare, and so forth. Joy of joys.

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maukdaddy
Looks 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.

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olalonde
If only we could change "National Defense" by "Startup Fund".

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jbooth
What, no giant red box marked "Socialism"? And they're underfunding the death
panels!

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robryan
They 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.

~~~
robryan
Guess 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.

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mquander
Your 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.

