For reference, this is where your tax dollars go (at of year 2000 anyway, not much has changed since then since all parts have grown except interest on the debt which has shrunk and military which has grown slightly).
No Defence, you go tthat chart from WarResisters.com. If you're going to use a chart, please use one from an objectie source.
Past military is treating interest of the debt as if it primarily came from military spending, it did not. It also takes out Medicaid, Medicare, and Social security.
If you want to participate in meaningful debates, don't get your numbers or stats from Democratic Underground like sites. And don't assume that others posting aren't informed enough to know the propaganda.
For others wanting to know where Deference got his chart:
http://www.warresisters.org/piechart.htm
Feel free and look at the page and decide for yourself whether it's an objective source. (incidentally, "off budget" items do end up in the pie chart eventually, i.e. my 2000 chart took all the off budget items passed after the 1999 budget and incorporates them).
Exactly. SS isn't a trust fund. It's pay as you go. It is paid via current taxes. Therefore it belongs as part of the budget. Besides, it's incredibly disengenous of anyone who is trying to argue that interest on the debt should be treated as "past military" (which is nonsense to begin with, even by their crazy numbers, only 30% of the debt is from military spending) to not count SS. If you don't want to count social security you can't count interest on the debt and I would argue both must be counted.
You are incorrect Deference. I'm sorry but you can play semantics all day but SS has always been a pay as you go system. You can call it whatever you want but it is not, legally, a trust. The revenue you pay is not put into any account. It is immediately paid out. It has nothign to do with "robbing" (A % of it has been used in the budget but that has to do with the SS surplus).
It is a pay as you go system. Period.
If you want to participate on MY blog (i.e. draginol.joeuser.com that is) then you'll source your charts.
Moreover, if you're going to use a far left site as your "source" then I'm going to call you on it.
I don't expect observers of these discussions to have to keep an eye out for someone reposting propaganda.
Because of the content of the site. The site has a far left agenda of eliminating the US military in order to spend money on more social programs and essentially create a socialist Utopia.
So how do I know this? Because they say this:
http://www.warresisters.org/about_wrl.htm
I can't tell whether you're genuinely unable to tell why this site is a fringe left wing site or whether you're so far left that you don't see socialism as being far left. They are also dishonest with their statistics which is something I find particularly annoying (such as assigning 80% of the interest on the debt to paying for past wares, that's just flagrant). They take all social programs as being a given and take that right out of the budgets -- not just social security but medicare and medicaid.
The reason I'm all over you about your chart is that I had already posted a pie chart based on a non-partisan source that breaks down the categories. IF someone wants to lump things together or take things out they can out of mine. But in your chart, the warresistors.org people have already done all the pesky thinking for you.
That's one of the things about that site that aggravates me -- they tell you what to think and keep the actual data to work from to a minimum. It's a classic example of what I was talking about here. Liberals are much more likely to rely on sites that tell them what to think whereas conservatives tend to want sites that present the data to form their own opinion.
