This site from the Treasury has great info, but some highlights:
22%: Social Security
14%: Medicaid and other Department of Health and Human Services spending (health research, the FDA, FEMA, the CDC, temporary welfare for needy families, foster care, other stuff
14%: Medicare
At this point, we've already hit half of the federal just on social security and health spending.
13%: National defense
13%: General welfare. This is things like SNAP, WIC, SSI, the earned income tax credit, some housing assistance programs, and other welfare programs.
11%: Interest payments on debt.
5%: Veterans Benefits
The remainder is divided a million different ways, but those are the largest categories. Social security and healthcare are by far the biggest expenses, and those costs are also expected to grow faster than the revenue that funds them, which is eventually going to cause a big problem that neither party has any interest in addressing. It should absolutely be noted that that healthcare spending is disgustingly inefficient due to the disaster that is our healthcare system, and it could be much much more efficient. But basically, a huge chunk of the money goes towards retirees. It's probably a total coincidence that those are the ones that vote the most too.
I've been slightly loose with the categorizations there in order to not get bogged down in some irrelevant classification details between spending functions and government departments, but the general picture is accurate.
Whether you like it or not, the fact of the matter is that most Americans support defending those allies. This is not slimy Washington elites pillaging the common man's money to fund war; this is you being a significant outlier compared to standard American opinion.
Which is fine, but don't go pretending anything else is happening.
There is a very real logistical problem with directly taxing net worth. It's extremely difficult to actually assess, especially when you're targeting people with extremely expensive lawyers. They also very directly encourage wealth flight, which has happened in other countries that have tried them. They can also be avoided by accounting trickery, shell companies, and all kinds of bullshit. It's not me that owns $1 billion in Amazon stock, it's a shell company in the Cayman Islands that happened to buy a yacht. Sure, you can unwind all that, but enforcement takes a lot of time and resources.
There are other much more efficient tax schemes out there focusing on consumption that can't be easily escaped.
There are other pre-existing tax structures that make a lot more sense. It'd be much simpler to simply tax the consumption of the kinds of goods that those loans buy. If you have a large tax on hyper-expensive yachts or whatever, that simply has to be paid when the sale is made, no matter how many layers of shell companies or whatever other trickery you try to bury the purchase in. Trying to tax the loan, beyond not really making much inherent sense since net worth hasn't actually changed, simply incentivizes a lot of loopholey nonsense that's hard to track.
For instance, if my direct loan is gonna be taxed to hell, then I'll just set up a shell company that takes out the loan instead. Sure, maybe there could be rules against it, but now the IRS has to spend a ton of time and money going down all these rabbit holes. Consumption taxes are essentially impossible to avoid, since you simply cannot buy your penthouse or yacht or diamonds or whatever without somebody paying the money.
I mean, sure. I'd support that, and I think most Democrats in Congress probably would, at least on some level. There are some assumptions in that model that are a little oversimplified (it's extrapolating based on in-state public school tuition and doesn't account for the huge explosion in demand that would come with it being free), but yeah, I don't think you'd find that much resistance amongst Congressional Democrats.
Good luck getting it by Republicans who are convinced that universities are just woke brainwashing factories though.
I'm not really sure what the relevance of this is though. My assertion was that non-military spending is a thing that exists. 87% of all spending, actually.
The point is that, if she lies where it counts, under oath, her prosecutors have more than enough evidence to slam her with enough counts of perjury to last the rest of her life.
The production actually is pretty cool really. They basically brew giant vats of coffee and then freeze dry it into a powder that can be easily rehydrated.
The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act passed in 2021 allocates $550 billion over the next five years. That's in addition to another $650 billion that was already allocated.
I know you and I have a habit of disagreeing on essentially all things, so feel free to not respond to this, but I did want to put an actual fact out for anyone else reading and thinking that we literally don't spend money on infrastructure while we throw tons of money at war, because that's simply not true, even if you think the proportions are off.
When you have a bunch of online edgelords constantly denying atrocities, this is what's necessary, and I definitely applaud the journalists for having the stomach to watch this kind of stuff so that I don't have to.
And before someone brings it up, I know it's frustrating that truth is hard to reliably determine in war, but if your position really hinges on whether the neck of a murdered baby is intact or not, the plot has been thoroughly and utterly lost. And there are photos of burnt and bloodied dead children out there if you really care to look.
There's a difference between noticing it and being angry and actually being able to functionally do anything about it, which is the real challenge. I'm sure there are a non-trivial amount of people extremely angry about this whole disaster, but actually organizing and trying to create some change would be extremely dangerous. I'm honestly not sure where a path forward comes from until Putin eventually dies.
Sure. My point is that, as far as I believe anyone is currently aware, there is no evidence that any law enforcement agency has ever accessed the content of encrypted WhatsApp messages. That does not mean that it has never happened either, but anyone positively claiming so is doing it without actual evidence, which is something we should probably avoid doing.
BraveSirZaphod @ BraveSirZaphod @kbin.social Posts 0Comments 1,142Joined 2 yr. ago
Are you suggesting they kidnapped the journalists and forced them to watch it? As far as I've understood, this was voluntary.
Also, there absolutely are corners of the internet that are denying that any atrocities occurred at all.