Can We Say "Duped"
Sen. Dianne Feinstein (California, D) clued me into this on CNN's Late Edition this afternoon.
Did anyone else know that ONLY 18%-20% of the US federal government annual budget goes to social spending? What are Republicans and Libertarians always complaining about? They've made social spending out to be the national bogeyman—the serial killer of America's hopes and dream.
Better than two-fifths is spent on Defense, but because the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are funded as supplemental spending, their totals ARE NEVER added into official congressional Defense spending totals (though spending on them equals/exceeds the amount spent on social programs). This means—though we have known for 5 years that we will need the appropriations—Congress has never actually budgeted for either war, so spending for both automatically goes on the credit card (it gets charged to the Chinese). What the—?
Did anyone else know that ONLY 18%-20% of the US federal government annual budget goes to social spending? What are Republicans and Libertarians always complaining about? They've made social spending out to be the national bogeyman—the serial killer of America's hopes and dream.
Better than two-fifths is spent on Defense, but because the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are funded as supplemental spending, their totals ARE NEVER added into official congressional Defense spending totals (though spending on them equals/exceeds the amount spent on social programs). This means—though we have known for 5 years that we will need the appropriations—Congress has never actually budgeted for either war, so spending for both automatically goes on the credit card (it gets charged to the Chinese). What the—?
Labels: politics
2 Comments:
this is an amazing depiction of this i just saw at "true majority" - ben from ben & jerry's made this video to illustrate this:
http://www.truemajority.org/oreos/
thanks so much for sharing that, heidi!
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