Are These My Priorities II

After looking at my office mate's flyer and knowing what I know about the federal budget I got suspicious and went looking around for excactly what the whole federal budget is. And I found lots of charts on the internet like the one to the left showing only discretionary spending ... that is, the portion of the budget that isn't "mandatory" -- and the "mandatory" part of the budget is ... entitlement programs. They dwarf military spending -- which, interestingly enough, apparently isn't mandatory. The one major expense that easily falls under the realm of what the Federal Government should be doing isn't mandatory. And that's not scary, apparently. But giving money to people is mandatory. We're a long way from 1776.

(both graphs are clickable for a larger view)

I did find a wiki article on the total federal budget from FY2007 (I made a graph of the data, right). It puts defense spending in perspective, which is excactly what folks like the Friends Comittee for National Legislation do not want us to do. They want you to subtly get it into your head that almost half the federal budget is defense, and that's just outrageous! Get mad, write letters, march, protest, etc.

It's been said that a democracy can only exist until the people discover that they can vote themselves money from the treasury (apparently this gets attributed to Ben Franklin a lot, but others say the original author hasn't been traced .. still, it goes back 50 years and clearly there's some serious logic to it). And clearly, we're there.

Barak and Hillary and most Democrats basic philosophy is to deliver the goods to those voters, making that bar to the far left of the chart ever taller. But they don't want you to think about where it comes from. Taxes on We the People.

Speaking of that, just where do those taxes come from -- how is the load spread out?

Mostly the poor? Middle class? Theories abound. Most talk about the rich stickin' it to the middle class and the poor forgotten and trodden upon by the golden slippers of the upper class.

But it ain't true. It's propaganda designed to cause resentment so that the people will vote for still more taxes to be taken from those who pay them.

I've posted this before, but -- I see these numbers over and over again (got these from the IRS's web site) ... the top 1% of income earners pay about 23% of the taxes. The top 10% pay just at half the taxes. Leaving the other 90% of America to pay the other half of the taxes.

Higher taxes put a drag on the economy. Increased capital gains taxes actually cost the government real money. And they cost jobs. Even Barak admitted this when confronted with it. But he uttered something about increasing them in the name of "fairness" anyway.

So less money for social programs, fewer jobs, and more taken from those who produce... but it's fair because we're stickin' it to those we are supposed to resent.