RSSNon-Defense Discretionary Spending in 2007
This chart illustrates the broad categories of spending for the Non-Defense portion of the Discretionary Spending category. [Discretionary Spending consists of two major components: Defense ($549 billion for 2007) and Non-Defense ($493 billion for 2007)]. Said another way, these are the amounts that the federal government spends on items other than entitlement programs, interest on the national debt and defense. Many of these categories are discussed separately in the Challenges section of this web site.
6 Responses to “Non-Defense Discretionary Spending in 2007”
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June 17th, 2008 at 1:30 pm
Is this chart a “Budget” chart or monies actually spent? I ask because one of the dirty deeds of Congress is their propensity to “hide money” from the budget by way of “emergency” spending bills and “misnomered” appropriations; such as hiding their continually massive farm subsidy spending under categories other than “agriculture” (like “education”, for instance).
Joe Scarborough does an excellent job of exposing this ruse and deceit (fraud) in his book “Rome Wasn’t Burnt In a Day”. He should know, he spent over seven years in Congress.
When will be able to “look inside” each “category” at acatual monies spent and discern for ourselves if the monies are rightly labeled (or hiding the pork)?
J. Noga
June 17th, 2008 at 1:57 pm
Also, why does this chart, titled “discretionary” contain items that are part of the “non-discretionary” spending (Medicare. Social Security, Justice Admin)? With “mandatory spending” at +/-45% of the total budget, why the “dual registry”? I included the “Justice Admin” spending because the Federal Justices and the related costs is mandatory, no?
J. Noga
August 5th, 2008 at 3:56 pm
This chart shows one of the major reasons why we have a crippling energy problem in the US. Energy R&D (the non-nuclear weapons portion of the DOE budget) is the smallest labeled section on this chart.
As an example, we are spending much more on NASA and space exploration than we are on doing something about the $700B we are paying each year for imported oil. What good is a space program going to do for us if we will be bankrupted by our oil payments long before we get to Mars?
We should take a good part of this discretionary spending and use it more productively to address our single biggest problem - we are using much more energy than we have and much more than we can afford.
Energy R&D funding should be a top national priority, as high as defense R&D. If we could solve our national energy problem, we would not need to spend nearly as much on defense. And we currently spend more on defense than all NATO countries, plus Russia and China, combined.
August 7th, 2008 at 7:19 am
This chart points out one of America’s major problems - we are not prioritizing energy research. Energy is the smallest labeled bar on this chart.
At the same time that we are spending over $700B annually for oil imports, we are spending more than twice as much on NASA and space exploration as we are on energy R&D. The space program has provided important advancements in knowledge and technology, but it is not going to do us any good to spend a lot of money to go to Mars if we will be bankrupt when we get there because we have spent $10 trillion on oil (ten years at $700B yearly and growing).
2008 marked the first year when we began spending more for oil imports than we spend on defense, and the US defense budget is bigger than the combined defense budgets of all NATO countries, the G8 countries, Russia and China.
Defense and energy are both in the discretionary spending category, but the Department of Defense budget is 40,000 times larger than the Department of Energy Budget (when nuclear weapons are excluded). America’s biggest problem is that it is using more energy than it has and more than it can afford. If we redirected some spending from defense to energy, we could still have the biggest defense budget in the world, but we might also make progress solving our energy problem. If we could do that, we might be able to spend even less on defense and more on our failing infrastructure.
October 29th, 2008 at 1:37 pm
“VeRterans”?
Sugestion: can we do without the huge masthead image* on the top of each page? Makes it so annoying paging through the charts…
*http://perotcharts.com/wp-content/themes/perotcharts/images/masthead1.jpg
October 29th, 2008 at 1:37 pm
err… SugGestion.