Federal Budget

With all of the posts it is becoming harder to find a political topic that someone has not already covered. In my opinion the focus on the presidential race and the vast sums of money their raising has overshadowed other issues. My issue of choice is the federal budget, which is so irreparably damaged with all the war spending that most have given up of fixing it in the next few years. Our current account deficit for fiscal year 2008 stands at 258 billion dollars. The total debt is a staggering $9,048,823,310,499.34. Crunching the numbers that is $29,837.91 per person, which is about $3,000 more then the median individual income or almost three times the budget for the fiscal year 2008. Its current pace is an increase of a paltry $1.4 billion dollars a day. The payments on the interest of this debt alone are more then the federal government spends on medicare/medicaid.

Where does all the money go?

Well after searching through countless federal spreadsheets on the government website that the breakdown goes something like this.

Fiscal Year 2008:

Total Budget = 2,941,121,000,000
Social Security = 655,564,000,000 or 22.3%
Medicare/Medicaid* = 404,511,000,000 or 13.8%
Military** = 624,638,000,000 or 21.2%
Interest on Debt = 469,919,000,000 or 16%

These four sections add up to 73.3% of the total budget.

Education = 58,603,000,000 only 2% :-(


I couldn't find a clean pie chart or break down for the current fiscal year so I had to obtain these numbers from individual spread sheets, if anyone wants to check my math feel free.


* Obviously doesn't include state contributions to the program
** military spending does not include any kind of retirement benefits or veterans administration cost, it also does not include costs for the FBI or CIA