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by mym1990 44 days ago
Funny, because while science and research funding is being cut…the debt is still rising faster than ever, because I still see taxpayer money flying towards useless things more than ever.
1 comments

social security and medicare?
That, interest payments, UFC fight night flyovers, ballrooms, wars, tax cuts.

I would go as far as to say that the only things getting reduced funding are education and science research, but that’s just a hunch.

The massive increases to military spending would be a big part of it. Have to feed the war machine at all costs apparently.
all military is ~1/6 of ss and medicare. new military expenditures is a rounding error
[citation needed]

Defense (DoD) budget is $900 billion now. When you also account for veterans' health, expenditures on nukes (goes to the DoEnergy), military stuff in space (goes to NASA), border protection, etc., the total national security spending tops $1.5 trillion. That's not counting the interest on past wars.

Medicare + SS is about $2.6 trillion. With Medicaid, it's up to $3.3 trillion, but this still gets you nowhere close to "all military is 1/6 of ss and medicare".

Even if we are more conservative about how we count "all military" - for instance, include veteran's health and nukes, but not CBP - it still doesn't get us close to the 1/6 number.

Would you explain your reasoning and numbers a bit more?

medicare, medicaid, ss is > 4 billion and dod is 1 billion, so its more like ~< 1/4. sorry i forgot to mention medicaid, also my bad. i was eyeballing a pie chart.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. You’re going to need to justify both of those claims.

https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-guide/feder...

you listed some rounding errors
Interest payments, wars, tax cuts are rounding errors?
guess you also listed some non-rounding-errors
reparations to Iran
tbf, it's unclear to me at this point how much of that is going to represent $$ out of the American pocket. A lot of it is "guarantees of financing and investment" by other gulf states. Probably we're subsidizing Iran re-investment, and the costs of that are intentionally ambiguous.
If its USD dollars that are going to be spent, its not different than Fed literally printing money out of thin air and sending to Iran. The mere consumption of these dollars will have some effect on global inflation and will strenghten Iran long term