Obama’s 2011 Budget Proposal, Department by Department (Infographic)

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2010/02/01/us/budget.html?hp

by bengebre • 16 years ago

54 56 16 years ago

nytimes.com

warfangle• 16 years ago

Mass transit is being cut, as is R&D, healthcare, and so forth. Joy of joys.

maukdaddy2• 16 years ago

Looks like mass transit is actually staying the same at 8.38 billion.

Edit: Looks like there are two different "mass transit" boxes with differing figures.

maukdaddy2• 16 years ago

$251 billion (+33%) in interest. That is a staggering figure.

dantheman2• 16 years ago

Some Observations, I always find it interesting how the break it up.

1. Normally the FBI & DOE are not considered national defense

2. Why is Medicare separate from health?

3. Why are veterans benefits & Military Retirement not considered national defense

This diagram is very misleading as criminal investigations is squirreled away under Administration. From this breakdown you can't actually tell how much is being spent on each top level category, which defeats the purpose of this type of graph.

las3rjock3• 16 years ago

1. The Department of Energy appears in at least three places in the chart: once under "National defense", once under "General science", and once under "Energy". I assume the amount under national defense consists of the allocations for nuclear weapons stockpile stewardship and nuclear reactor production for the U.S. military.

I will agree that it is strange that the Federal Bureau of Investigation has been categorized as "National defense"; the rest of the Department of Justice seems to have been catergorized as "Administration".

2. One could categorize Medicare with Health, but one can already do that with the chart as shown by considering those two rectangles together. It is interesting to see that Medicare, by itself, has a larger allocation than everything else in the Department of Health and Human Services (and there are pieces in the Health rectangle that probably belong in the Medicare rectangle, e.g. "Grants to states for Medicaid" and "DoD Medicare-eligible retiree health care fund").

3. The Department of Veterans Affairs is a Cabinet-level department independent from the Department of Defense.

4. It looks like the Department of Justice and the Department of Treasury have been lumped together under "Administration".

I will agree that some aspects of this breakdown are strange, but I don't think it defeats the purpose of this chart.

dantheman2• 16 years ago

Excellent feedback, I didn't know that VA wasn't DOD.

Is the chart only about the executive branch? Does it include congressional spending & the federal judiciary?

jbooth• 16 years ago

What, no giant red box marked "Socialism"? And they're underfunding the death panels!

jasondavies• 16 years ago

Unfortunately the colour spectrum is unfriendly to those of us with red-green colour blindness: it's hard to differentiate between positive and negative percentage changes without looking at the tooltips. Aside from that, nice treemap.

timr4• 16 years ago

One thing that should immediately pop out at even the casual observer: the traditional bugaboos of the right (social services for poor people, welfare, etc.) are a tiny, tiny minority of the budget. You can cut them down to an expenditure of 0, and you won't really change the bottom line.

If we're going to come to terms with the national deficit, we're going to have to accept the fact that military, social security and medicare expenditures are going to have to shrink. The problem is not poor people: it's old people and wars.

xenophanes9• 16 years ago

Isn't the 560 billion for "income security" a social services thing? Isn't it giving money to people who don't have jobs, or make very little money? So that's quite a lot of money in the welfare/social services category.

And personally I'd count social security and medicare in the same sort of category. It's the government spending a ton of money inefficiently providing services that should be provided by the free market, and saying this helps people.

It's good to help people, but it's not the right role for Government, which isn't very good at it.

On the other hand, the military spending may be a lot of money, but at least it's in one of the areas the free market has the hardest time with -- it's spending money in an area where the Government actually has some expertise and some business doing anything.

adamc• 16 years ago

Social security provides money, which is about as efficient as it gets. Are you positing that private pension benefits are somehow spent more efficiently?

As far as whether it helps people, it unquestionably does. Maybe it hurts other people (those who pay taxes), but that income transfer would not likely happen under private plans. So it is not an apples-to-apples comparison.

timr4• 16 years ago

You're missing the point. Go ahead and cut income security entirely. You'll slash some incredibly popular (and useful) programs, and you'll save less than one social security.

Again, we can't keep slashing at the smallest parts of the budget and hoping to shrink the deficit. It's nothing more than political theater, designed to appease a vocal minority who don't have a sufficient understanding of the problem.

jsz02• 16 years ago

How does the free market provide services to people who have no money? I agree it's good to help people but we have social security and other social programs exactly because there was no help when people needed it. I don't think anything has changed since. It's probably gotten worse.

Nwallins4• 16 years ago

Are you not including Social Security and Medicare in social services?

The complaint from the right is that the federal government confiscates the wealth of its citizens and redistributes it, presumably suboptimally. Leaving aside the objections to coerced wealth redistribution, there are questions of inefficiency, corruption, fraud, etc. i.e. One can easily imagine that a free market in social services would result in a more prosperous nation.

In any case, I think the right does not distinguish between Social Security, Medicare, and other entitlements in its objections to a spendy fed.

camccann• 16 years ago

The complaint from the right is that the federal government confiscates the wealth of its citizens and redistributes it, presumably suboptimally.

No, that's the complaint from the Libertarians. The complaint from most of the right wing is that it redistributes to the wrong people (e.g., ones who vote Democrat).

In particular, old people tend to vote more right-wing, so you're raving mad if you think they'd ever oppose Medicare.

rw• 16 years ago

Want to convince others? Then don't assume that they'll "easily imagine" that you're right. Save that stuff for the choir.

ja30278• 16 years ago

The 'usual bugaboo' is 'entitlements', which includes Medicare and Social Security, and is roughly $1.6 trillion.

I don't agree with the money we're pissing away in the Middle East either, but you can't honestly call social services a 'tiny minority' of that budget.

timr4• 16 years ago

Do I already need to remind you that a Republican president just enacted one of the largest expansions of Medicaid in the history of the program?

The Republican party is no more eager to cut senior entitlements than is the Democratic Party -- they both use Medicaid and Social Security as political bludgeons, and neither side has made a serious proposal to cut costs.

You can try to turn this into a partisan political debate, but the bottom line is that both sides have a strong incentive to leave these programs alone (they benefit active voters). On the issue of entitlements, the primary practical difference between Republicans and Democrats is that the Republicans have a long history of attacking entitlements for poor people, in order to maintain the illusion that they care about costs.

robryan2• 16 years ago

They should cut military spending and focus more on nuclear type weapons, sure they will no longer have the same power in tactical ground warfare but it would be basically saying, sure you may be able to out maneuver us now but we can defiantly blow you off the face of the earth if you try.

Perceval2• 16 years ago

Biden recently wrote an op-ed in the WSJ explaining the administration's goals for the U.S. nuclear arsenal: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405274870487890457503...

robryan2• 16 years ago

Guess my message was taken the wrong way? I'm not advocating nuclear weapons but rather scaling back military spending and using them as a deterrent to other countries so that the current US defense force size doesn't need to be maintained.

mquander• 16 years ago

Your message is insane. I don't even know where to start. Why would we prefer to have nuclear weapons as a deterrent instead of having a conventional military as a deterrent? Which is more favorable, defending one of our allies by deploying nuclear weapons, or defending them by deploying a few ten thousand soldiers, planes, and warships? Why would we want to put money into weapons we can never use without tremendous backlash and moral misgivings, instead of ones we deploy regularly to serve our interests?

The current U.S. defense force size doesn't need to be maintained; we haven't used a significant portion of it to defend us or our direct allies from a military attack since World War II. We use our military proactively, as a tool for enacting our will. We cannot hammer a nail if our only tool is a bulldozer.

pkaler• 16 years ago

This is the expenses side. It'd be nice to see an infographic on the revenue side. (Taxes, etc.)

evanjacobs• 16 years ago

I'm going to start a business to sell services to the US government. Even if I only capture 1% of the market that's $36 billion per year!

las3rjock3• 16 years ago

You're hardly the first person with this idea. There are many corporations already working in this sector--they're called government contractors.

InclinedPlane• 16 years ago

I think he was making a dot-com (v1) boom joke. Wherein the overly simplistic business model math involving capturing just X tiny percent of a huge market was obvious justification for the profitability of a web venture. Turns out, there's no reason to assume that anyone can capture 1%, 0.1% or even 0.0001% of any market, merely because it's a small value doesn't mean it's easy to achieve.

matty• 16 years ago

I always thought this was a pretty good visual representation of budget distribution. Note this reflects the 2010 budget, not the proposed 2011 budget.

Perceval2• 16 years ago

It's not that good really. The site you linked to only displays the discretionary budget. The NYTimes infographic is much better, because it also includes all mandatory spending. Mandatory spending is over 50% of the entire federal budget, and includes pretty much all of the 'welfare state': social security, medicare, medicaid, unemployment and other income supplements, veterans' benefits, student loans, and on down the list.

Displaying only discretionary spending is a rather tendentious way of representing the federal budget, because it makes defense spending look like the largest expenditure. Such graphs are usually linked to by people decrying U.S. militarism or imperialism or the military industrial complex. This is not to say that the U.S. does or does not spend too much on the military, but simply to point out that the visual effect of cutting out over 50% of the budget biases people's perceptions and provides undue support for politicized arguments.

mattwdelong• 16 years ago

Next book on my reading list is The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, so that I can finally understand all of this Economic mess the world is in. Of course it won't give me a full understand, but I have been told it will send me in the right direction.

Recently, I have been trying to understand what exactly a dollar is. From what I can tell, its pretty useless.

I've determined that money != wealth.

jeffcoat• 16 years ago

Have you discovered that if you have something that someone else wants, and they have something you want, and you swap, then you can both end up happier?

Have you discovered that it's tricky to carry with you for exchange purposes every conceivable desire of the guy that owns the grocery store, and thought that it might be handy to introduce an abstraction layer?

dpatru• 16 years ago

For understanding money, you might try reading Murray Rothbard's "What has government done to our money?", available for free in both written and audio at mises.org.

rms• 16 years ago

http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Politics_is_the_Mind-Killer

olalonde• 16 years ago

If only we could change "National Defense" by "Startup Fund".

Obama’s 2011 Budget Proposal, Department by Department (Infographic)

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