http://www.warresisters.org/piechart.htm
With so much of the federal budget devoted to militarism the amount available for social services and infrastructure is limited.
One result of this is the common belief in the US that taxes are too high and that social services are the cause. Since people only get visible value from about half their taxes they rightly feel this way. They are not getting a good bargain.
Whether the US can continue to use militarism (hard and soft) to extort wealth from the rest of the world remains to be seen. Even the Romans ran out of options, eventually. Policies not Politics ---- Daily Landscape
Secondly, there is a slight of hand being perpetrated that they are trying to emphasize. Things like Social Security and Medicare are not government programs. They are mandatory insurance programs that the government administers. They were added to the budget during the Viet Nam war so LBJ could disguise the true size of the military spending.
The government acts as a collection and dispersal agent for these funds. The funds are collected for a segregated purpose and spent for the same purpose when needed. Social security and medicare could be spun off into a government owned corporation like the post office and then it would be obvious that the money is not part of the "budget".
Your remarks just show how successful the policy of obscuring the true uses of federal funds has been.
And as the original posting shows distructive spending gets counted just the same as social programs in the "GDP". Policies not Politics ---- Daily Landscape
But in any case there is hardly any difference between a mandatory insurance policy run by a government and a tax.
