HOW THE USA SPENDS $7,000,000,000,000 | PERCEPTION MATTERS
Should the USA match it's Social Services spending Military funding?
Numbers should be written out in full in certain cases. Discussing so called public sector spending is one of them.
I’m writing this from Kenya, as an adult have lived in Italy & the USA. Most of my formative years were in the States including when I began to take an above average interest in politics. This intercontinental background informed my perception of certain things those born & raised in a culture they expected to never leave, seemed to take for granted. As early as my teens I wondered why people would lynch someone for stealing a chicken or a sac of potatoes but then call the politicians that embezzled billions of shillings away form them “honorable.”
Thought maybe it was because the average Kenyan could relate to the chicken or potatoes as figuratively taking food out of someones mouth but as they still did not have things like bank accounts, or deal with more than a at most few hundred shillings in currency on a day to day basis. So how could they really visualize what billions or trillions of shillings meant enough to be outraged at its theft?
Thought this was different in the USA at the time, Most people after all had bank accounts. They were sending credit card applications out to teens after all. I was hearing of the tens of thousands in loans people were taking on for college. Witnessing how homes were in the hundreds of thousands with millions nto being unheard of in the places I lived. They also had access to news about what sort of deals were made by the powers that may have been.
Information was ‘free’ in the land of the free so of course they knew. Those in charge of governing the greater economics of the society they lived in were relatively open with letting folk freely access the spending they…
Not so sure anymore.
I continue to have a specific interest in the USA. not only am I still in the process of returning to join the vast majority of my friends there, it is a nation in possession of the most powerful State in the world. As an institution defined by a legal monopoly of force over a given area it is inherently predatory & thus a threat. More pernicious for a globalized world, it’s practices influence the aspirations politicians in other countries. The spending has grown exponentially compared to the actual population, supported in part by being relatively politically stable, having very productive per capita population & possessing the world reserve fiat currency.
I realize that bureaucracy can be intentionally convoluted & folk have more important things on their minds than spend even a single digit percent of time that I have chosen to spend looking not certain things but the sort of ignorance I see around how much the USA spends while demanding it is not enough is appalling.
the utter state of the state
As I listened to President Biden of the USA giving his State of The Union address on March 1st 2022, I scrolled the socials & saw “Fund the Police” was trending. I imagined Biden would continue the narrative shift of Democrats being for funding police if it wasn’t for the Republicans not allowing things like the like this isn’t the internet where a 7 minute supercut of Democrats saying defund the police exists.
Election was fortified enough to get Biden in along with the help of BLM & others giving up support for supposed black issues. He gave them a VPOTUS. Is announcing a SCOTUS nominee. May not be exactly back to Biden of the 1994 crime bill but the polls matter & “Defund the Police” the police is now too toxic, to utter unless it is to discredit it. Here is the quote from the State of the Union address.
“We should all agree: The answer is not to Defund the police. The answer is to FUND the police with the resources and training they need to protect our communities.”
This did not go without notice. Advocates for defunding or those against it, this stuck out for some. It happens. Pick & choose what few words out of the thousands spoken will define how you perceive the entire thing.
It was passable as a political piece. He is an old man with some struggles so the delivery was Bidenesque. It’s totes a stutter bro! Ukraine as expected featured heavily at the start. I wonder what was bumped out in favor of that or would he have gone with a 45 minute speech instead?
As for the truth content of it that was politics as usual which is one of the few things that Joe Biden has actually delivered on from his campaign. There was a suspiciously fortuitous dropping of Washington D.C.’s mask mandates a few days before the SOTU. This is the sort of political production you can expect thats been going on since the Democratic National Convention when that kid with a stutter said he was just like Joe that has now been used to diffuse many questions about his speech patterns.
Those who watched got to see almost all those in attendance unmasked & Biden played on that calling for the continued attempt to learn to live WITH the reality of the virus rather than curtailing life FROM the potential threat of it.
I’ve been there for over a year as have billions of others across the world. Welcome to those ready to join us. What some of you said about “The Science™” before the political science changed though will be remembered. Millions of Biden’s constituents will probably never get there. The theater was too convincing for some. Which is just one of the things included in the effect of the trillions of dollars spent & lost around the world during the last 2 years.
Regardless, this is a good message even though I bet some of those effects will now be able to be shifted onto whatever is going to result from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine & the economic, political & social responses to it.
Get back to the point here Silas!
These good people have decided to spend their time reading about the trillions the USA spends, so don’t spend too much time on your frustration with the state of States! The perception of how federal government spending effects the job market & socieconomics in general, matters more to the practical political agent than the truth of the matter.
Shall touch on a few of those things here.
Some typical things like State governments claiming they create jobs. It’s a regular nuisance to me. In a practical rather than political sense the State has the ability to regulate who can create jobs & subsidize others that have little to no market demand. When you look at public sector or civil service ‘jobs’ most if not all are funded by redistributing funds from others to pay people to do things politicians argue are desired by most if not all people but yet they would somehow not go about actually providing enough demand for these sectors & industries to be created on their own.
Without the State to plan & organize who will bid on building roads people would just be driving on the grass through swamps & hills & using smoke signals instead of stop lights. That’s if cars would exist without the State regulating the industry & deciding the standards of vehicles private companies are subjected to & how the private supply lines get the needed parts to the factories to begin with.
“Muh Roads” aside back to the SOTU address. For some the perspective is X number of jobs existed a year ago, no 6 million more jobs are listed than X so that means Biden admin created 6 million jobs. This jobs number is still lower than the number was pre pandemic when the state began mandates & processes the loss of hundreds of thousands of businesses & the millions of jobs that existed then. However it’s politics as usual.
I don’t put much stock in quantity of jobs versus quality of jobs but if you, like the politicians, M$M & others seem to, then overall employment in the USA is still down 3.6 million jobs from the April 2020 peak.
Simple example is is as follows. Imagine back in 2019 X was working 1 fulfilling job that earning $100k a year, for 50 hours a week (counting commutes). With this X is able to provide for & support a stay at home partner(Y) doing the work of parenting their child(Z), in a decent sized home located where X was born & raised. International passenger from Wuhan, China come to visit place becomes a Pandemic hotspot. The business X earned their living from shuts down for good due to measures that are ostensibly to flatten curves. After a year unemployed X chooses to move to a new place. X now works 2 jobs that earn roughly the same 100k but on 65 hours a week due to increased commuting. Their partner Y now works part time to barely cover the increased costs that include daycare for Z.
This would count to the State as 2-3 jobs created since since 2019. There would also be glowing talking points about how the higher household income & enrollment in social service of daycare says positive things about the growing economy.
Economics are not inherently confusing & for sure are not common sense. They can get complicated at time. But it takes the state to make them as convoluted as they are.
what does funding x look like?
Military Spending ≠ Police spending. Police spending.
Police are law enFORCEment agents. They are not peacekeepers. They are the agents of the State that carry out the mandates of the state through the judicious * selective application of force. They don’t do this all the time. They don’t all actively pursue every single thing that may be considered illegal at any given time & then use as much force that they are legally allowed to apply to get you to submit.
Understand that use of force based on often arbitrary & unclear laws is inherently what the police under State governments are about. The average officer is not a good person FROM the selection process of being granted a police badge, they just happen to be good human WITH a badge.
A regular budget talking point is how out of control US Military spending is. I’ll get to that more later but if this comes up due what Biden said then ask the person saying it if the executive branch even has the capacity of funding the police. Answer may save you some time you may have wasted in engaging them like an adult.
Empire of Lies posted that the US spends more on police funding than all but US & China do on their militaries. State & local spending on police is not included in federal budgets. The president does have influence & their agenda can then inform what officials at state & local governments do. Can also withhold federal funding for certain unrelated fields as a quid pro quo.
$118,808,031,000 is not a small number. It is still roughly 3-4% of the total state & local government’s annual spending. When you add corrections(jails, juvenile detention etc) it averages to 5.2% in 2018. That was trending down from a decade ago. Politics as usual though. Finger to the wind then once you position yourself in the right direction claim it was your idea all along, until it’s time to sya you never thought of it.
Some more from SafeHome.org “HOW MUCH DOES AMERICA SPEND ON LAW ENFORCEMENT”:
“One thing to note is that spending on law enforcement varies significantly across the country, no matter how you slice the data. For example, as a percentage of all state and local spending, Nevada spends twice the amount on law enforcement as Iowa, Massachusetts or North Dakota does. Arkansas has more than double the number of law enforcement employees per 100,000 residents than Mississippi. Tennessee has more than double the number than Ohio.
Washington, D.C. has triple the law enforcement spending per capita as Iowa.”
As you can see, even at a state level there is nuance to the topic of just police spending in quantity, let alone all the things that go into quality.
Why is Nevada the highest? Is it due to having one of the most visited city’s attracting people with a penchant for gambling with large sums of money & other forms of debauchery that earned Vegas the moniker of Sin City? Seems like a credible reason. It selects for X people while providing Y incentives that may get the same Z crimes regardless of where X & Y may meet.
If so then why would tiny Washington D.C. have 3 times the budget as Iowa? Is it also one of the most visited city’s attracting people with a penchant for gambling with even larger sums of money & other forms of debauchery that earned the D.C. the moniker of *REDACTED*?
For any spooks listening to this i totes agree that the recently settled case, the second person’s self deletion that was missed by a glitching camera & the female one that has been sentenced means there is need to see any list of any supposed clients, from Vegas, Windsor, D.C. or anything ...
That $118,808,031,000 is for the policing that the average American would come into contact with the most. Most Americans don’t interact with the institutions funded by the $731,751,400,000 in that chart. There are some federal police such as Amtrak Police, National Park Service Rangers, Bureau of Indian Affairs, U.S. Customs and Border Protection, the Federal Bureau of Prisons, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement. When most think of federal law enforcement officers, high chance it would be federal agencies like the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), & other intelligence agencies.
These are all funded by single digit percentages of the total military spending.
Most spending of the $731,751,400,000 is allocated to obtaining or maintaining materiel or human resources. Some of the individuals are enlisted in the actual armed services capacity that are expected to fight directly, but the majority are & involved in administrative branches.
Despite the typical public sector waste, objectionable use of military force on principle, and the recent abject failures of the US military decision makers, when it comes to military spending there are some good arguments that this is something that is actually a valid expectation to be handled by a national government & is directly provisioned for in the US constitution. A significant amount of this is spent in foreign countries keeping around 750 American bases staffed, provisioned & in good repair & running live drills that simulate combat conditions for themselves & with allies.
Military spending has practical & objective results. This can be good for making a case for it but folk can also look at things and say you spent X amount for how many jets that don’t even do what you said they’d do? You were in Y for 20 years then you pulled out leaving how much in materiel & after 2 weeks it turned to what now? You tried to put missiles where & that led to Z reacting how now? One could make the case that it is easier to see the direct effect on certain things that military spending & action has than policing does. But as it is mostly foreigners that deal with the application of the US military I can understand why police funding is more pertinent to the average American.
Military is more of and they spend X on the Military so they should spend at least X on thing the person sees as more of a benefit to them or their chosen group. Reverence for the military has been more common. Defund the troops would not get the sort of traction that defund the police got even in Brandon’s America.
Maybe defund the feds could with the plummeting trust. Though they are inherently a not to be trusted bunch of spooks. There is also the black budget stuff, but I’m still trying to be granted a visa back into the USA so for now shall not say much more about that.
Black budget matters.
Police funding had been dropping for some time. May have been some good sloganeering for campaigning but the actual popularity was not ever that high. That low rate of support was higher than the actual low level of followthrough by politicians & bureaucrats. In practical sense it’s more about transforming the police than abolishing it.
Check their actual use of police & other security forces in their lives. They just want the police to be enforcing their laws on their terms. They support funding their policies regardless of how unpopular they may be for the general populace. Hard to find a war on X, Y, Z that State administrators & bureaucrats could not see as profitable & the average citizen speaking about it with terms like systemic racism or racial reckoning are uninformed on the particulars of what they are complaining about.
this is what the pie chart looks like
Shortly after deciding to draft this piece, I wanted to include a visualization of the federal spending in the USA. I collected some charts from National Priorities Budget to make this following image. The 3 pie charts cover mandatory federal spending added to federal discretionary spending which combine together to make up for the total federal spending.
When the annual interest payments on the national debt is included the total is $7,000,000,000,000.
$7,000,000,000,000.
Thats seven trillion dollars.
I’ve been listing billions before so the number may seem similar so here they are together for 2021
$7,000,000,000,000 total federal spending
$705,390,000,000 total military spending
$110,000,000,000 total police spending (estimate)
Remember how much was added in a few bills ostensibly addressing the effects of the PANdemIC & how much was lost in productivity due to those very same processes addressing the PANdemIC.
Military spending is around 10% of the total federal spending. How many people know without looking it up that the largest percent of federal spending is Social Security, Unemployment & Labor? When you add Medicare & health would they expect it to be close to two thirds? Adding education it’s about 75%.
Why do so many fixate on a little over 10% of the budget?
The USA is the 4th largest country in the world. It should be no surprise to you that it spends more on most categories of State ran federal spending than any other country in the world when it comes to quantity in dollars. As for quality of spending, maybe looking at percent spent on X can show how much it may be valued. In that case the United States of America at (30%)is second only to France (31.7%)in total net social spending.
Now to take a closer look to Medicare & Health spending. Do you hear people griping that the US spends a world leading $1,370,000,000 in healthcare?
Nah, when it comes to other sectors you’ll often about how it’s per capita spending to avoid mentioning what is close to double the Military spending. USA still leads with $11,945 for roughly 331,449,281 people followed by Switzerland at $7,138 with its population of 8,761,428. That’s New York City proper without the greater metro area. The Swiss are also more homogenous in genetics & culture so may face similar potential health problems. Fewer obese people who end up needing more healthcare services than a fitter version of themselves would.
Here is an excerpt from “How does health spending in the U.S. compare to other countries?” :
“The COVID-19 pandemic led to both an increase in health spending and an economic downturn resulting in a shrinking GDP in every comparable country with available data between 2019 to 2020. In 2020, the U.S. spent 19% of its GDP on health consumption (up from 17% in 2019), whereas the next-highest comparable country (the United Kingdom) devoted 13% of its GDP to health spending (up from 10% in 2019).”
The USA & a few other countries shouldered the vast majority of money in research & development for ways to combat Corona-chan. You are thinking that s they may have paid her way into the world in the first place it’s only fitting they pay to see her the way out? Cheeky you! We may be allowed to speak of the lab-leak possibility but dont know if we are approved of that sort of anti The Science™ think yet. This R&D spending is a trend across many fields.
The world is globalized. Certain spending on X by the USA in reduces the need for other countries to spend in that X sector. Some countries for example have have little to no active national militaries due to treaties, concessions or just agreements to have the USA handle any potential need for national defense for or with them.
Some countries lack the facilities or personal to do certain medical research so they benefit from the R&D done in the USA, sometimes they are guinea pigs as part of the R&D funded by the US government.
Some countries lack the regulations & the USA shps in the human researchers & funds the development of *REDACTED*
The entire funding system in public sector is wasteful.
It is common to find frivolous ways to spend allocated funds each period lest the holders or the purse strings permanently tighten the stream of funds. Instead of risking a reduction in what may seem to be misallocated funds, If you can report that it’s been spent, may nto matter how it was spent. It’s not the money of the people budgeting after all. They are allocating funds taxed from other people to give other people for doing things for other people.
Only time their job may be at risk is if something bad happened and it was claimed to have been done because not enough money was spent due to lack allocation. This provides an incentive to keep things funded even if to maintain the bare minimum level of functionality.
This perception of the masses that X is taken care of added to the states ability to monopolize X or set Y barriers so high that it retards the incentives for any one to try and provide X in any better way & you have this monstrosity of a State that spends $52,400,000,000 just on interest payments and is in debt (tO iTsElF) for $30,239,954,776,917 at time of drafitng this which is roughly $91,091 per capita.
But don’t fret Americans, ya’ll are just number 13 on national debt to Gross Domestic Product ratio, at 132.9%. Venezuela with 304.125%, Japan with 256.49% and Sudan with 211.656% are the top 3. Representing different continents there. Let me check other continents. In the Middle East it’s Lebanon with 154.364% and in Europe, Greece with 210.093%.
How helpful is it to compare these countries? What similarities do they have? What is the quality of life that can be derived by their debt vs spending?
Why do so many fixate on a little over 10% of the budget?
Because for manyMilitary spending is easier to critique & debate than attempt a honest conversation at the sheer waste & mismanagement of the other public services the State provides.
I would be remiss to add that I trust about 0.0003004050006070070833% of financial information coming out about China if the CCP has anything to do with reporting it. Not that the other countries are paragons of honesty or CCP is as bad as let’s say, North Korea but still.
What things do you think a country’s government should rightfully spend money on?
Decades ago I was introduced tot eh phrase “mkate na chai” which is Swahili for “bread and tea.” It was used colloquially to describe how Kenyan politicians bribe people for a few shillings spent per person while campaigning can secure you their ballot. 100 shillings fluctuates around $1. A packet of milk is about 30 cents and loaf of bread 45. So for about a dollar you can simply nourish about 5 potential voters.
This is unlike the no giving food & beverages to people as they wait in lines to vote barbaric law the Republicans in Georgia are subjecting people to. In Kenya you can eat & drink like some proper english royal with soem earl grey & cucumber sandwiches(?)while you partake in political theatre. Who really is the developed country here!
As I hope to have shown from this look at how the USA’s State spends $7,000,000,000,000 a year, the citizenry of developed western nations need a grander sort of bread and circuses than the lowly folk of developing nations. More bells & whistles. Got to at least give a reach around & tickle their body politic’s figurative balls while they State shafts them with the baton of everyone needing to pay their fair share for the greater good.
Part of this refunding the police rhetoric by Democrats will end after the mid terms. Any practical refunding will mostly returning it to prior declining levels. The attempt to continue adding regressive District Attorneys shall continue as the changes in policy are effected.
The sort of fundings matters more than the amount as it dictate what sort of charges can be brought for whomever the police may catch post committing whatever is considered a crime. If police officers catch a perpetrator & no charges are actually pressed then it’s like a catch & release pond where you can just repeat the same procedure and count them as an increase in apprehending criminals.
It shall also include stipulations on how the money is spent. What sort of criteria new hires should fit. Other sorts of sub sectors need to be established to account for a reimagining of policing. Imagine thinking if the people that spend $7,000,000,000,000 they acquired by threats & carrying out of force could only increase spending for your flavor of threats & carrying out of force is the solution…
Oh wait. That is kinda, sorta consistent. Stupid me.
I see why they think that.
What was your favorite thing these smort people chose to ignore that Brandon said in his SOTU address?
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