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You can't be serious? Even if we reduced it by like 20% we would still spend more on military spending than any other country on the planet.
It isn't making us strong, it is killing us. Our infrastructure is falling apart, literally..our education system is sinking, we have families one sickness away from bankruptcy, and you really believe we should spend more on the military. Really?? Who are we protecting ourselves from exactly? The only people benefiting off of a huge military budget are shareholders of Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman. Why do you think the DC area has the highest income in the country, while the rest of the country suffers. I'll give you a hint...it isn't because of government workers.
Conservatives in this country literally live in a fantasy world. How about you get out sometime and visit other first world countries and just see how they live and deal with things and get out of the bubble.
We could actually reduce it by 70% and still have a budget 50% larger than China's, and nearly 3.5 times the size of Russia's.
Even if we shaved $100 billion a year from this, and rooted out another $50 billion in Medicare fraud a year -- in ten years you would be looking at 1.5 TRILLION dollars saved.
Eisenhower WAS right -- "beware the rise of the military-industrial complex.
I'm all for protecting ourselves, but our budget is as large as the next 17 countries combined!!!
You're free to disagree with Maddow, but it doesn't seem quite right to call her an "idiot" or to suggest she has no authority -- after all, she has a doctorate in politics from Oxford (look it up -- I just did).
That's meaningless. The Unibomber graduated from Harvard and got a Phd from Michigan. Education is a meaningless event when it comes to being an idiot.
The problem with focusing on "discretionary spending" is that can be defined any way you choose. Everything is discretionary since laws can be passed to stop, increase or decrease all government spending.
She's absoutly correct that the military is by far the biggest pork barreled spending the nation has. It's the perfect example of how the GOP really doesn't care about the budget as they want to gut the crap out of medicare and education, while expanding spending on something that needs it the least.
This graph is true but is also misleading becuase it only accounts for Discretionary Spending. Discretionary Spending is 30% of the budget, of which 57% is military. That means about 17% of the overall budget is military.
Once we look at Mandatory Spending, which is 64% of the budget, we see that spending for entitlement programs is much greater than for military. Entitlements account for 87% of the Mandatory Spending and 56% of the overall budget.
She's absoutly correct that the military is by far the biggest pork barreled spending the nation has. It's the perfect example of how the GOP really doesn't care about the budget as they want to gut the crap out of medicare and education, while expanding spending on something that needs it the least.
The GOP? Remind me how many Democrats oppose the bill?
You're free to disagree with Maddow, but it doesn't seem quite right to call her an "idiot" or to suggest she has no authority -- after all, she has a doctorate in politics from Oxford (look it up -- I just did).
The silly twit did her thesis on AIDS.
She is walking proof that education doesn't equal smarts.
This graph is true but is also misleading becuase it only accounts for Discretionary Spending. Discretionary Spending is 30% of the budget, of which 57% is military. That means about 17% of the overall budget is military.
Once we look at Mandatory Spending, which is 64% of the budget, we see that spending for entitlement programs is much greater than for military. Entitlements account for 87% of the Mandatory Spending and 56% of the overall budget.
And spending on Military is actually more "mandatory" than spending on social programs. If we had no military spending we would also have no social programs spending since our country would cease to exist.
The distinction between "mandatory" and "discretionary" is purely political and highly misleading.
Tempest, military spending is only 20-22% of the total budget. No way is it almost 57%. Where did you get that made-up chart from?
I will gaurentee you it is more than 20-22%.
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