E0_

I guess this wouldn't be the sandbox if people were required to have their facts correct before they posted, but you are so far off as to be absurd. Look on the federal government's own web site on government spending. For FY06, the spending on defense was just over 23% of the total budget. Spending on pensions was 24.5% and health care and welfare totaled just over 31%. This is just federal. If you include, as you said, all our taxes, the percentage for defense is much lower since state and local taxes don't go for defense.

By the way, the word in title of this post should be taxes, not tax's. That is, unless there is something that belongs to some tax about which I am supposed to be reading here.

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The time for calm and rational discussion has passed. Now is the time for senseless bickering.

CingularDuality

It was bugging me, but your post was the straw. Consider it fixed.

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El_Gringo_Grande

Have you ever lived way out in the backwoods with none of the modern conveniences? I mean no running water, no gas, no electricity no paved roads. Hell, no roads to speak of if it rains for more than an hour. And nobody to help if something goes wrong?

If you call that freedom then put down the keyboard and go have at it. In fact my hillbilly uncle would probably sell some of his mountain* to you. And believe me, up there you can do just about anything you want. You can hang out with the skin heads/KKK/pick your ignorant angry white group. He might even let you do some moonshine runs if you gain his trust. But be careful, cross the wrong person and you might take a really long hike to the hills.

When I was a kid going without a bath for days at a time and taking a dump behind a boulder was kinda fun. But even at 12 it got old.

And Kerostasis, it can be argued that 90% of the taxes are wealth redistribution programs. Do we really need a 400 billion military? How much of that is people collecting a pay check that can't really do anything else? How much of it is graft that looks good and patriotic?

So one persons "wealth redistribution program" is another's vital program necessary for basic existence.


*I doubt it was ever really his mountain. But people in those parts (SE Oklahoma) called it by the families last name and in them parts that is good enough.

__________________
Sen. John McCain (AZ) For President '08
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I’m not racists, I have republican friends. Radio show host.
- "The essence of tyranny is the denial of complexity". -Jacob Burkhardt
- "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds" - Emerson
- "People should not be afraid of it's government, government should be afraid of it's People." - Line from V for Vendetta
- If software were as unreliable as economic theory, there wouldn't be a plane made of anything other than paper that could get off the ground. Jim Fawcette

xTYBALTx

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Current Tybalt theme song: Mason v. Princess - Perfect

El_Gringo_Grande

Here is a nifty little link to the 2003 budget summary. It is interesting to drill down into the varios classifications on spending.

For example the IRS and Social Security administrations are in the "Social Services" category. And the Nation Science Foundation is under Military.

Does anybody know of this kind of simple breakdown for current spending?

__________________
Sen. John McCain (AZ) For President '08
---
I’m not racists, I have republican friends. Radio show host.
- "The essence of tyranny is the denial of complexity". -Jacob Burkhardt
- "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds" - Emerson
- "People should not be afraid of it's government, government should be afraid of it's People." - Line from V for Vendetta
- If software were as unreliable as economic theory, there wouldn't be a plane made of anything other than paper that could get off the ground. Jim Fawcette

E0_

Gringo, you can get the numbers here

http://www.gpoaccess.gov/usbudget/fy...s/hist03z2.xls

but you have to make your own pie charts.

By the way, I'm not arguing for or against the current level of spending on the military or social services. I'm just in favor of accurate information and good grammar.

E0

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The time for calm and rational discussion has passed. Now is the time for senseless bickering.

mentholated

Yes, I have.

TheSkudDestroyer

9.13 Trillion. National debt, right?

That's the number I know, as of now.

Get rid of Fraud in government programs. For example, Medicare and Welfare are nessacery, but abused. My mother does Medicare billing for her non-for profit company. She can tell me how easily the system is taken advantage of.

I'm not saying this would help solve our national debt. But it sure as hell would help slow it down.

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mentholated

Medicare and welfare are not neccessary at all.

You could eliminate them simply by charging only for materials used in their practice, and paying doctors and nurses set wages each whatever period of time, along with regular employees. Welfare could be solved by providing free housing and food. There are so many vacant buildings and lots in the US that could be put to better use, we could have a small emergency room every 10 blocks if we wanted.

leejo

Thank's!

ScratchMonkey

There's no question that these things are nice to have. The question is whether taxation is the best way to pay for them. Taxes are controlled by politicians who are only (re)elected once every several years, and are rarely subject to the recall a corporate CEO must risk. Small business owners are even more subject to changing consumer demand. So the feedback path between bad government service (corruption, mismanagement) is very long and noisy. If you had an audio system that was designed like that, it would hiss and whine and blow out your speakers. It would not at all sound like the music information going in the front end. Imagine if you had to decide what to play in your CD player once every 4 years and you didn't get to actually listen to it until months or years later. And then it came out sounding like crap.

Steeler

Private firms are just as susceptible to waste and corruption as public institutions, particularly if they develop revenue streams that make their profitability independent of the quality of their product or service.

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xTYBALTx

Perhaps they are. But the point is that private corruption and waste is punished much more quickly and severely than is public corruption and waste.

When GM's cars start sucking, people may switch to alternatives immediately. When the DMV's service starts sucking, there is little recourse.

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Current Tybalt theme song: Mason v. Princess - Perfect

leejo

This seems unlikely to me, and it has certainly not been my experience.

mentholated

I'd have to agree with him. I've only witnessed the federal/corporate greed in my lifetime. Small(er) public organizations seem to be self sufficient enough not to rape civilization and reshape human lives into images of their own chosing.