It's election time and this is a common refrain from not only politicians but the electorate. The problem of course is nobody ever states which major budget items they are willing to cut. Sure, they'll talk about tiny slivers (NASA, EPA, NEA, Amtrak) as talking points since the general public has no idea where tax money goes.
Here's a NPR article (
Thanks for Pay Taxes. Here's a receipt.) that shows the breakdown. While this blog entry focused on a different budget angle, the numbers are still there.
* Foreign Aid 0.85%
* NASA 0.52%
* EPA 0.22%
* NEA 0.0044%
As you can see, the usual suspects for cuts are rather small. To balance the budget, we'd need to chop off about 33% or $1778 if we went by the blog entry's numbers. (The
September 9 Planet Money Podcast went into this topic about misconceptions on the scale of budget items.)
An interactive budget balancing tool is at:
Stablize the debt
Instead of purely trying to balance the budget, the goal here is to reduce deficits where the national debt is at 60% of GDP. Give it a try -- I found myself pausing at almost every question trying to make a decision.
(Filed in economics)
Just last month, I posted a few links to federal government spending. Now it's California's turn. (Although I live overseas, I cannot get out of California income taxes at the moment -- you must truly retire and sever all ties.)Unfortunatel... Read More
Government just needs to stop spending!
Posted by Mossy
October 3, 2010 11:16 AM
Here's a NPR article (Thanks for Pay Taxes. Here's a receipt.) that shows the breakdown. While this blog entry focused on a different budget angle, the numbers are still there.
* Foreign Aid 0.85%
* NASA 0.52%
* EPA 0.22%
* NEA 0.0044%
As you can see, the usual suspects for cuts are rather small. To balance the budget, we'd need to chop off about 33% or $1778 if we went by the blog entry's numbers. (The September 9 Planet Money Podcast went into this topic about misconceptions on the scale of budget items.)
An interactive budget balancing tool is at:
Stablize the debt
Instead of purely trying to balance the budget, the goal here is to reduce deficits where the national debt is at 60% of GDP. Give it a try -- I found myself pausing at almost every question trying to make a decision.
(Filed in economics)
1 TrackBack
Just last month, I posted a few links to federal government spending. Now it's California's turn. (Although I live overseas, I cannot get out of California income taxes at the moment -- you must truly retire and sever all ties.)Unfortunatel... Read More
Leave a comment