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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: tejek who wrote (217602)	2/6/2005 5:29:34 PM
From: TimF	Respond to of 1573849

$401.7bil was for the Department of defense. Perhaps the $429 billion figure includes defense related spending in other departments, or perhaps the extra $27.3 bil is money for Iraq that isn't accounted for in the Defense department's budget, and isn't aid to Iraq, or money for rebuilding. In any case the differnce is less than $28 bil., while your figure was off by more then $2tril. Without Iraq, defense is nearly half of all discretionary spending and is larger than Medicare. In the last three years, it has been growing faster than SS which pays for itself in any case. The last 3 years growth is mostly about Iraq. There is not going to be any similar level of rapid growth in the future. Medicare and social security will continue to grow for decades at a pace faster then the increase in GDP, and over the long run at a rare much faster then the increase in defense. If we cut back on our defense spending, I'm sure we could cover future SS shortfalls. Maybe if you cut by over half perhaps over 3/4ths over the next few decades, and even then it still wouldn't cover medicare's projected shortfalls. Tim