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

To: Tenchusatsu who wrote (219851)	2/20/2005 5:03:38 AM
From: tejek	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1574727

Ted, Not 3/4.....roughly half. I'm doing the math here. According to my source, defense and homeland security made up 17% of the total expenses. If that 17% represents half of discretionary spending, then that means 66% of total expenses is mandatory. I believe either your math or your base numbers are faulty. Discretionary spending made up 40% of the 2004 budget while mandatory was 59% of the budget...interest paid made up the remaining 1%. Initially, defense at $454 billion was 51% of discretionary spending and 20% of the total budget. However, by the time the $80 billion for the Iraqi war was added into the mix at the end of the 2004 fiscal year, its share of discretionary spending increased to 55% and its share of the total budget increased to 23%. In addition, the gap between discretionary and mandatory spending narrowed by roughly 1-3%. cbo.gov Then I said "Up to 3/4 of the federal revenues are tied up in "mandatory" spending." Since revenues are lower than expenses, "mandatory spending" will obviously represent a larger percentage of revenues compared to its percentage of expenses. Here are my figures: Total Revenues: $2,350B Total Expenses: $2,763B Military: $358B Homeland Security: $117B I don't know where you are getting your numbers but my numbers which I believe come directly from the Office of the Budget don't agree with your's. According to their numbers, defense in 2004 was $454 billion. That means when you add in the $80 billion for Iraq that for whatever reason, was kept outside of the Defense budget that defense figure increases to a grand total of $534 billion. Whatever the exact number, however, its too much. In fact, its a sin how much we spend on defense. ted