Ignorance is strength, 2012 edition

by Hyphenated American 2:22 PM 0 COMMENTS

It seems that ignorance is a necessary condition to become a liberal activist. It’s simply astounding how little some folks know about the government spending. A few days ago, I left a comment on a liberal site yahoo – and got a reply which left me speechless. In original my post I pointed out two obvious things:
1. That the government (and American government is no exception) is very inefficient.
2. That our debt and deficit are mostly caused by an exponential growth of spending on the liberal holy trinity – Welfare, Medicare/Medicaid and Social Security.

The response from one of the liberals (code name WilliamM) was rather instructive. I will ignore the part where he claimed that the government run medical care would guarantee that every American gets the exact same treatment (an argument laughable on its face), and that the medical decisions would be strictly between the doctor and the patient (as if the government has unlimited resources). It’s rather apparent that the liberal activist had no idea how the economy works. But what made me laugh out loud was his apparent ignorance of the federal budget (which was coupled with a profound arrogance and certainty that he was right). Here is what he wrote:

Social security, welfare and medicare/medicaid are not the biggest portion of the federal budget. The biggest expenditure is the Pentagon. About 150 billion dollars is spent supporting welfare programs like the ones listed above. Annually, the Pentagon receives 700 billion dollars, with 300 billion set aside specifically for war.

In reality, the numbers that the activist quoted are not even close. Here is the truth. I am referring to the 2011 budget. In order to put things in perspective, I included also the numbers for the entire US government, federal, state and local – and I did it so that people had some feeling of how much money is spent by the government.

Total Military spending: $878.5 billion.
Federal spending on health care: $858 billion.
Federal, state and local spending on health care: $1,073 billion
Federal spending on pensions: $776 billion. The Social Security portion of this is: $730 billion.
Federal, state and local spending on pensions: $978 billion.
Federal spending on welfare: 473 billion
Federal, state and local spending on welfare: $745 billion.
Last but not least – Federal, state and local spending on education: $876 billion.

The total federal spending on Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and welfare is: $2,022 billion dollars.
Total federal, state and local spending on pensions, health care, welfare and education is: $2,600 billion dollars.

In case you are wondering if I covered the entire government spending, I must ad there are still other items which I left unmentioned:
Protection (federal, state and local): $320 billion dollars,

Transportation (federal, state and local): $277 billion dollars
General government (federal, state and local): $110 billion dollars
“Other spending” (federal, state and local): $460 billion dollars
I believe the number of Americans who believe in the liberal orthodoxy would decrease significantly if two things happen:
1. People stop guessing how the government spends its money and actually found out the truth.
2. People learn and understand the Law of Supply and Demand.