Visual Representation of the US Federal Budget

Now that is something that is really cool. In about 20 years, that big blue emblem will be replaced with Social Security as all you baby boomers retire.
Jon

Just think how enlightening this kind of “Map” could be for a business? In a flash you would see your cost centers. If you did one for a B-2-B you could show your major and minor customers, distributors, and partners. Size their logo by their contribution. Keep your eyes on the big ones.
Just like to bring it back to business. Thanks for the heads-up on this awesome map. Jess Bachman is fantastic.

But…this graph is missing some key elements of government expenditures…
“Mandatory Spending, at $1.412 trillion in FY 2006, is over half of the U.S. Federal Budget. The largest mandatory spending programs are Social Security and Medicare, as follows:
Social Security – $544 billion
Medicare – $325 billion
Medicaid – $186 billion
All other mandatory programs – $357 billion. These programs include Food Stamps, Unemployment Compensation, Child Nutrition, Child Tax Credits, Supplemental Security for the blind and disabled, Student Loans, and Retirement / Disability programs for Civil Servants, the Coast Guard and the Military”
If one is to use a graph like this, then a complete picture needs to be presented…even though there is something of a caveat in the middle of the circle, the image over all was built to provide the skewed view that military spending is huge…while in reality, mandatory social programs take up a larger portion of the budget. When you further pull down that ~60% of the military budget is payroll, and then further work down to the industries (large and small) paid for through DoD you end up instead with a different view of where money is going.

I agree that this poster is deceptive. It makes it appear as if the military is the largest expense when in truth it is social spending. Social spending is three times the size of the military and it is conveniently left out of the main diagram. Fixing social spending is the key to balancing the budget unless you prefer to totally eliminate our military.

It is always amusing when people talk about spending or the deficit, but never mention our outstanding debt.
http://zfacts.com/p/461.html
An Argentina-style sudden currency devaluation is the only option left.

Another thing that the graph does not show is “off balance sheet liabilities”. Remember those little things that brought down Enron and Worldcom. For the government that would include things like the future payments from Medicare and Social Security versus future incomes as well as things like the pension benefit guaranty corporation. A paper from an economist in the 90’s estimated this at around 60 trillion dollars.
I do agree that this graph is deceptive but it is still a cool visual aid. I may have to steal it to use.
Steve
As for currency devaluation Wall Street will take care of that for us. When the government has trouble servicing its debt there will be an attack waged on the dollar. For what this attack might look like check out “The Vandals Crown” which details George Soros’s attack on the Sterling pound and the Italian Lira.

Privileging Defense

I see dots scattered all around all the time. Most of the time I don’t have the time or energy to connect them. I had some free time this morning, I saw a few dots, and I played around with them a lil’ bit.
Dot 1:
This morning, while scanning my RS…

Death

I am not political. Really. This is about as political as I get (keeping in mind that this is more “cool” than political). This is a graphical representation flow-chart format of where our Federal Tax Dollars go. How cool is