We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon
Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.
Response to the The Rabbit on another thread. - Message 32670612
He posted that - "We could cut military pork and pay for everything she <AOC> wants."
No we couldn't. Not sure how much would be considered military pork, but lets go to the extreme and consider half the defense budget to be military pork. So you could the military budget in half.
Lets look at 2019 defense spending
"For Fiscal Year 2019 (FY2019), the Department of Defense' budget authority is approximately $693 billion ($693,058,000,000). [1] Approximately $684.9 billion ($684,985,000,000) is discretionary, approximately $8 billion ($8,081,000,000) is mandatory. The Department of Defense estimates that $652.2 billion ($652,225,000,000) will actually be spent (outlays)." en.wikipedia.org
So a bit over $650 bil actually spent. But lets take the full budget authority instead, then round that figure up to $700bil.
Then from the same source you have another $69bil for "overseas contingency operations" You can also add in about $150bil for Veterans affairs, and about $15bil for DoE spending on nuclear weapons. I'll even throw in the CIA's covert action budget which was apparently around $2.6 bil in 2013, lets says its almost doubled since and call it $5bil, then round up the collection of stuff in this paragraph from $239bil to $250bil.
Then I'll round up again from $950bil to a nice even trillion. Its not really that much because everything has been rounded up more than once, but no one can reasonably claim I'm pushing to small a figure.
Half of that is $500bil a year. And that figure is calling not half of things like medical care for soldiers and veterans and their families "military pork". Really the trillion should be more like eight or nine hundred billion and the pork percentage should probably be less than half, but I'm being generous here, so $500bil or military pork.
That isn't enough to balance the budget, or if accepting recent large budget deficits as the norm, its not enough to cover the projected increase in current entitlement programs. But lets ignore all those problems and just cover what AOC would want to spend.
Its hard to say what exactly AOC would spend but lets simplify things and just go with the "Green New Deal" idea she pushed, even though she probably wants to do more than just that.
-------
"A new analysis from the American Action Forum finds that the Green New Deal, as laid out by New York Rep. Ocasio-Cortez and Massachusetts Sen. Ed Markey, would cost up to $93 trillion in the first ten years.
So that's $930bil a year on the average. And that's before any other programs she might want. Also with defense we are talking about actual spending, for AOC were are talking about projections, and projections of the cost of new government programs are usually low, often very low.
Presidential candidates had more detailed spending proposals then AOC did. Lets look at the additional annual spending from the candidates. AOC endorsed Bernie Sanders so we can focus most on his additional spending.
Subtracting Trump's proposed spending increases from Sanders, gives you about $4.5 trillion dollars of extra spending. You can't cover that from reducing defense spending (including defense related non DoD spending) to $0.
