How can you say military spending has gone up and in the same breath say it's not going into Iraq or Afghhanistan?
Imagine the government spends X before Bush. Now it spends X plus Y1 (increased defense and security spending outside of Iraq and Afghanistan), plus Y2 (spending on Iraq and Afghanistan), plus Z (spending on things other than security and military spending).
Z is bigger then Y (Y1 and Y2 combined).
Thus - We spend more on Y, in some ways a lot more on Y, but Y isn't the majority of new spending.
Or translating back from variables to words. We spend more on defense, a big chunk of that increase goes to Iraq and Afghanistan, but the majority of new spending doesn't go to Iraq and Afghanistan, or even to any sort of defense/security/homeland defense/anti-terrorist area.
education spending,-if education spending is going up, how come about 10 states are suing the feds for unfunded education mandates? Speak into the microphone, please.
Federal education spending has increase at a rapid rate, but so have federal education mandates. So you have both a massive increase in education spending and "new unfunded mandates".
agriculture spending-what in the world are you talking about? ...Sure, there's increased spending on agricultural subsidies
You answered your own question.
Or should we come right out and call it corporate welfare.
For the most part that would be an accurate description.
Social Security- this is money that has already been "saved" and is technically separate from the federal budget. Bush does not "spend" money on social security.
The money is spent according to pre-existing law, so it isn't a Bush program or an expansion caused by Bush, but its still money being spent. The "saved" money has already been spent years ago, but even if it was sitting in a bank account or in a big pile of cash it would still be spending.
Re: Foreign aid
as a percentage of the total federal budget, the US is about 10nth in the world in spending for foreign aid.
It has gone up adjusted for inflation. It has gone up simply means we spend more. You might argue that we should increase spending here to an even greater extent, but even if that is true it hardly means there hasn't been a pretty decent sized increase already.
Tim
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