Town Hall Meeting

When it comes to who wins the massive federal spending competition, it’s not even close. Most of your money goes to one thing: the very loosely named “Defense.” In 2012, under a “socialist, anti business, pacifist” (yeah, right) President, “Defense” was given $707 billion. Remember, that is for 1 year! For a little context, spending on housing was $67 billion, and education was $73 billion.

Some people like to confuse the issue of federal spending by bringing up Medicare and Social Security. Those are paid for separately, and should never be part of this conversation. That’s why in your paycheck, you have one line for “Federal Tax” and one for “Medicare” and “FICA” (aka Social Security). The pie chart shows how the “Federal Tax” is divided. And this is the tax that everyone gets so upset about, such as when people say lets raise the top federal tax rate from 35% to 38% on income above $250k (another annoying thing is people don’t realize that income up to $249k isn’t effected at all).

And even worse, if you count other reasonable things as “Defense,” such as veterans affairs, homeland security, and veterans health and pensions, the total number becomes over $1 trillion, again for just 1 year! Isn’t this how countries fail? While people are homeless, unemployed, underemployed and sick, the elites are polishing their fancy new toys.