For everything that isn't social security, medicare, or the military, continued federal support requires explicitly convincing enough members of Congress that it is important so that they will campaign in their committees for even basic inflation-level funding increases to be included in the next budget. National Park Service has a backlog of billions of dollars in maintenance it knows it needs to do across the US, but Congress won't give them the money to do it. They'll toss $18 billion to Israel though even while Israeli politicians and the Israeli public and Israeli lobbying groups in the US criticizes the US for not being generous or supportive enough and gets involved in domestic US politics. We need a serious talk about the strings our very generous foreign aid needs to come attached to.
> We need a serious talk about the strings our very generous foreign aid needs to come attached to
You’re exemplifying the problem. NPS and foreign aid funding aren’t competing with each other. They’re both rounding errors in the grand scheme. But everyone has their hobby horse that they have or must cut so we get some oscillation.
Non-defense US federal spending dwarfs defense spending, for whatever it's worth. The US is essentially a benefits management firm with a standing army.
Social Security is not an expense of the government. Well, for the most part. It’s a pension plan that people pay into. Similarly for Medicare. People pay into it before retirement. Then at a certain age they get this insurance benefit. Private insurers will not insure the elderly. If anything you should characterize this as a private insurance industry subsidy. It allows insurers to offload their riskiest clients to another entity.
Your characterization is badly wrong.
EDIT: Until recently Social Security took in more money than it paid out. It’s run by the government so its expenditures are counted as a budget item. But it is a sound pension system whose defects can be easily fixed if a certain party would actually govern. It is not the largest expense by the government. It’s just that it is a government run pension system. It’s not an entitlement either.
This is incorrect per the US Supreme Court e.g. Flemming v Nestor in 1960. Social Security contributions are purely an income tax like any other, it is explicitly neither a pension nor insurance plan. Contributions create no obligation for the government to give you anything in return, same as the other income taxes you pay. The government largely treats it as tax revenue.
It is intentionally (mis)represented as a pension plan where contributions are connected to benefits but that fiction is solely to maintain popular political support, they can disqualify citizens from eligibility at any time regardless of contributions and, on occasion, have.
The main issue with Social Security is that most people in prior generations took far more out than they contributed, in part because it wasn’t really a requirement since it wasn’t actually a pension.
Notably, if the gov’t starts making pensioners subsist on cat food because they refuse to honor their obligations, hopefully a whole lot of senators will be out of jobs ASAP.
SS is explicitly sold as a pension. If it stops acting like one, there will be consequences - even if it means rewriting laws.
If the Supreme's deem it so then it must be. Are there any decisions they've gotten wrong?
Your benefit is based on what you pay in. It pays out less than what it takes in. If it were privatized you and the Supremes would call it a pension. It acts like a pension, quacks like a pension and is a pension.
If the government decided to make Social Security a private corporation it could. If it did this, keeping in place Social Security “taxes” that would then go to the new corporation, we would not consider Social Security a budget expense. Being government owned or private doesn’t matter in terms of how the expenditures should be considered. This is why Social Security and Medicare are not part of the normal budget negotiations at budget time. These are obligations that need to be paid to the people who paid for them.
> If the government decided to make Social Security a private corporation it could
No, it couldn’t. There were promises made with the full faith and credit of the United Stares.
> obligations that need to be paid to the people who paid for them
Everyone pays taxes. Social Security and Medicare obligations are treated differently because of politics. Otherwise, they’re like any other expense: the Congress can amend them at will. (As is currently expected, e.g. with Social Security benefits beginning to be curtailed from 2035.)
I agree on Medicare. But it's plausible that the Supreme Court could find government meddling on Social Security unconstitutional, because similar decisions have already been made in other countries.
In Finland, the mandatory pension system is similar to Social Security, except that it aims to replace ~60% of earned income without any limits. Pensions based on past contributions have been established as constitutionally protected private property. If the system seems to be out of balance, the basic tools are raising the contribution rates without increasing the benefits and increasing the retirement age for younger generations. Any changes that would substantially lower the pensions that have already been earned would have to go through the same process as constitutional amendments. (There is also a third tool: increasing the tax rates for all retirement income, regardless of the source. But that is understandably unpopular.)
> But it's plausible that the Supreme Court could find government meddling on Social Security unconstitutional, because similar decisions have already been made in other countries.
I sincerely hope SCOTUS doesn't care at all about similar decisions made in other countries. What is or is not constitutional in the US should be based solely on the US constitution.
> If the government decided to make Social Security a private corporation it could
No, it couldn’t. There were promises made with the full faith and credit of the United Stares.
I'm not a lawyer so I'll rephrase. In an alternate universe the U.S. government created a corporation to run Social Security. It mandated that people participate in it. Everyone called it a pension system because that it what it is.
Congress can amend them at will.
All pension systems are subject to amendment. Many pension systems have been amended over the years.
> In an alternate universe the U.S. government created a corporation to run Social Security. It mandated that people participate in it. Everyone called it a pension system because that it what it is
If the U.S. then explicitly guaranteed that corporation's liabilities, sure.
> All pension systems are subject to amendment. Many pension systems have been amended over the years
No. Many state legislatures, for instance, are constitutionally prohibited from fucking with certain obligations, commonly pensions.
> entire idea of a truly guaranteed pension is not feasible and always leads to a pyramid scheme and then insolvency
Sure. But the point of full faith and credit is it's irreversible. (Actually, the point of credit, period. You can't declare your past debts pyramid schemes and unilaterally absolve yourself of them.)
Irreversibly, like all political concepts, is a fiction that humans choose to believe in rather than a law of physics. If social security became insolvent while the US was distracted by some other future national crisis, I'm certain that the people of the future would find a way to cut the pension while staying within the letter of the law (probably via inflation or https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TRgRz3nSG7o).
They're not part of negotiations because there was such a backlash during the Reagan era. Part of his campaign platform was to reel in the entitlements. Then he discovered that people like their entitlements. George Bush tried to privatize Social Security, and the idea went nowhere in a hurry.
The value of Social Security is the expectation that it will be bailed out by the government if it goes bust, for instance if the trust fund is depleted.
You do not understand how this all works. Social Security "spending" does not add to the deficit. It is not the source of any budgetary imbalances or of any structural budgetary issues in the United States. It is a pension system that is funded by workers that happens to be run by the government.
Social Security is not a pension plan, it's pay-as-you-go and barring massive tax increases and/or benefit cuts, its collapse is more-or-less inevitable in the next couple decades because of locked-in demographic changes.
The Social Security Retirement benefit is a monthly check that replaces part of your income when you reduce your hours or stop working altogether.
Most people would refer to this as a “pension”. Call it whatever you want to. The fact is that its issues are easily fixable and your benefit is based on how much you put into it.
This is not a very useful semantic argument. Pension programs routinely pay out to workers more than what was paid in; that's practically the definition of a defined-benefit pension plan. Either way: it's money the government pays out.
I've been hearing that since the eighties. Congress can change contribution rates and/or benefit rates at any time to keep it solvent, just like they have in the past.
Beyond a certain point, the working population will not be able to afford to pay for the retired population. It's a mathematical inevitability unless birth rates increase or people stop living as long any more (both probably impossible). Maybe the benefits could be eliminated/reduced, but this is politically untenable because older people generally vote while younger people don't.
immigration solves the birth rate problem, and is one of the big reasons why illegal immigrants is a hilariously terrible wag-the-dog wedge issue. make them legal, tax them, and have them contribute to the system as well.
Can was kicked too far, it is not easy to fix. It's easy to make the mathematical problem go away by reducing benefits AND raising taxes. Nonstarter. We will need a tragedy to illicit change.
That 13% is still more than the next 9 highest military budgets in the world combined. We're not financing our military, we're lining the pockets of the military industrial complex, on the taxpayer's dime.
Many/most countries have national tax and not (any or as much) state taxes. To compare across nations you’d need to divide the expenditure by the national sum of the taxes of the various government levels.
The military industrial complex is a socialist jobs program, both for those directly on the DOD's payroll and for the employees of the firms that contract with the government under the auspices of the military.
To put a finer point on it, VA care for Irag+Afghanistan is expected to drive the cost of these two wars to something in the ballpark of $2 Trillion USD.
Like I went to Iraq twice and I'm only 40. They're gonna be covering me for probably another ~40 years, and the US is owned lock and stock by healthcare companies that sure as hell aren't going to lower the costs of medicines.
It is a moral imperative to include the cost of looking after the people you feed through a meat grinder once you have ground them up and spat them out in the calculation of how much the machine costs.
A big chunk of that healthcare would just be under Medicare/Medicaid anyways though, so it doesn't seem reasonable to ascribe all veteran health spending as military.
It does when a huge portion of the injuries military personnel sustain are quite different from the genteel public, and wouldn't have happened if that person decided to be a teacher instead.
Seems kinda like we're talking about my $1,300/mo budget for candles and you're pointing out "yeah, but your mortgage is $5,000/mo, for whatever it's worth; you're basically just a homeowner with a candle budget".
Social security is, even if not legally then practically, a debt repayment. Defense spending is largely discretionary.
Social security is not a debt repayment and the point I'm making would stand if you took it out of the budget, even though you shouldn't. Defense spending isn't even the majority of discretionary spending.
> Social security is, even if not legally then practically, a debt repayment.
How is it not practically a debt repayment?
The common understanding is "you pay money in, you get money back when you retire". Do you think you could cut it without widespread backlash? Do you think you could cancel it without borderline revolt?
"It's not a debt. It's just that if you don't pay me I'll kill you."
The US Supreme Court asserted in 1960 that no one is entitled to Social Security. There is no connection between contributions and future benefits. Many people are under the misapprehension that this is not the case.
Without a doubt it would not be popular if the government eliminated some or all of Social Security. But it would be strictly legal and Constitutional, popular backlash notwithstanding. This is an important distinction. There are no Constitutional protections that ensure Social Security benefits. Ignorance of this fact doesn’t change its reality.
The constitutional protection is that if Congress tried to do that, they would be replaced in the next election. As stupid as they sometimes appear to be, they are not that stupid.
You pay a tax. You receive a benefit. The benefit's connection to your tax payment is nominal at best. It's one of many direct benefits the government awards, none of which are debts.
It would be more accurate to call it insurance than a debt, because the tax is called "Federal Insurance Contribution Act." The insurance product that Social Security is most similar to is an annuity, a contract that specifies that you pay in and then the insurance pays out when you reach a certain age.
I would be pretty upset if I paid into an annuity plan my whole adult working life and then the insurer reneged on their obligation. Social security not paying out would be even more upsetting, because you're legally obligated to pay for it, whereas buying an annuity is a choice.
I dont know how we can know this. My understanding is that the pentagon has an unknown total budget. Once you wrap up all the CIA, NSA type stuff too I'm not sure how we can know this?
The DoD has a "black budget", but that's money you don't get a breakdown of, not money you don't know about: it's voted in by Congress as a blind total. Total spending is profoundly tilted towards non-defense spending (even more so if you include state and local government spending, but that's not germane to the Forest Service) --- the amount of "secret" money going to defense, if it existed, would have to be economy-breaking to alter the balance.
Not really. When counting not just DoD spending but DoE nuclear weapons spending, NASA (now Space Force) and satellite spending, VA and veteran's benefits, interest on past military spending and so forth, military spending takes up a large chunk of the pie. It is only small if defined very, very narrowly (which is what they, and you, do).
They call it mandatory spending but this is a misnomer. When you pay into a pension system and pre-pay for insurance it’s expected that you receive the benefits you paid for. That it is government run is irrelevant to how it should be viewed. Social Security is not an expense of the government. It’s a government run pension system.
This is not at all how the accounting for Social Security, Medicare, and other mandatory spending programs work. Generally, Social Security beneficiaries receive more than they paid in (invariably they do with Medicare). And, obviously, everyone receiving Medicaid and SSDI do. I don't think this technical point about Social Security is going to salvage the argument that the US pays more in defense than anything else.
Apparently you don't understand how pensions work. Take a 401(k). Under normal circumstances what you take out of the 401(k) far exceeds what you put into it. This is what happens with investments generally speaking.
Saying, "Social Security beneficiaries receive more than they paid in..." indicates you don't know what you are talking about. And, believe it or not, Social Security does invest money.
And yes, it does salvage the argument. Defense spending (all of it not just DOD) is the largest expense of the government. This is expected when you are the hegemon.
Defense spending isn't even the majority of discretionary spending.
It's simply an enormous, vast economy, and 13% of a vast economy is a huge number, large enough to outspend the next several countries combined. That's all.
Regardless, social security is funded totally separately from the rest of the budget, with a dedicated tax, and does not contribute to the deficit. It’s typically excluded from budget discussions, for that reason.
You could change the law to axe social security, keep its highly-regressive tax, and instead use that to pay for other stuff—but lots of things are possible with a change in the law, and that’s not possible now without such a change. That’s not something that can happen as an ordinary part of the budgeting process.
I'm not saying I like everything about federal spending (or even defense spending), just that the argument that we spend most of our money on defense (or even a plurality of it) is false.
For this reason it’s pretty unusual to see an analysis of the US budget aimed at policy nerds that includes Social Security. Almost all serious discussion about it excludes that.
You tend to only see it included when the full total of money disbursed by the government from any pot and for any purpose is expressly relevant (it’s usually not) or in writing that is not aimed at policy nerds, but at everyday voters (to convince them whatever batshit crazy spending we’re doing in the author’s preferred non-social-spending item isn’t bad after all, usually)
Agreed, although seeing as the economic plans laid out by both current presidential candidates would result in an increase in deficit the political will to do so does not seem to be there. In reality it feels like the spending is just being shifted elsewhere.
They literally use tanks to keep avalanches off roads. Here is a video near Seattle of the Dept of Transportation using a couple M-60 Sherman tanks to launch artillery into the snowpack in an effort to control avalanches along the Highway 2 corridor.
Nitpick: the M-60 is a Patton tank, not a Sherman. The M-4 Sherman was the primary medium tank used by the US during WW2. The M-60 is much more modern, used by the US military until 1997, and several countries still use them today. I only bring that up because an M-60 tank still running today is perfectly normal, while a Sherman that’s still running would be much more unusual!
Interesting fact, but is it really necessary to go to those lengths? Surely something like a handgun or detonated explosive would be cheaper and just as effective (though less fun). I don't think this use case needs the vehicle to be armored.
A pistol would be hilariously inadequate. As for "detonating explosives", what do you think they are doing? They are shooting high-explosive artillery rounds from a tank that detonate on impact.
As for "why artillery", how do you plan on getting explosives into the snowpack, especially under conditions of severe avalanche risk? Those areas of the mountains are inaccessible by vehicle even in the summertime. A tank can drive on a road and deliver the explosives where needed. They often target 20+ separate snowfields so being able to do it in a timely and efficient manner matters.
While the armor doesn't contribute much, it happens to be what the artillery gun is attached to. It would cost far more to rig some special-purpose vehicle. Sherman tanks are free, the government has loads of them lying around waiting to be scrapped, you just pay for fuel and upkeep.
Handguns don't have the range or power. Explosives are used, but you have to get them up there, which means either schleping up the mountain or using a helicopter, which is wildly more expensive.
The US normally gives Israel around $3 billion dollars a year to buy our weapons -- they are in fact required to spend it on buying weapons from US defense industry. It's kind of an, um, gift certificate.
This year they gave Israel $18 billion, so much more than usual.
In one sense, all of this is actually a jobs program for the US defense industry, since all that money is required to turn around as weapons purchases from US companies.
Even $18 billion is less than 1% of the US non-military budget, this isn't the reason we "can't afford" the USFS, or the reason to stop giving weapons to Israel -- the US certainly can afford both. (The reason to stop supplying Israel is that those weapons are actually destabilizing the region and encouraging violence and gross human rights violations).
But, no, Israel "buys" US weapons with US money, they are indeed a gift.
I think two different accounting methods are being conflated here which leads to the huge $3B vs $18B difference. Congress periodically authorizes spending for military aid to Israel and other countries. Later, the executive branch actually disburses that aid. In recent years, the US has on average given Israel $3B. This year, congress authorized an additional $18B to be disbursed through 2026 - which is what recent news stories about US giving Israel $18B are referring to, as far as I know. You would end up double-counting every dollar, if you did the math that way on an ongoing basis.
But if you know of a clean source of data on the actual amount of aid provided each year, that would be useful. I’d guess the number this year would be a lot more than $3B given the physical reality of tons of expensive offensive and defense missiles fired.
OK good point that the $18 billion is not all to be spent this year, thanks for correction, I didn't realize that, it is good to be clear! The best source i have for understanding this stuff is the study from professors at Brown University I linked above, but I haven't read/assimilated the whole thing yet.
But my main point is we DO give Israel money to buy our weapons, they are indeed a gift. I don't know if Israel spends any of their own budget on US weapons -- my guess would be very little, because they would _rather_ be funding their own Israeli domestic defense industry (which is of course quite developed), they spend our military aid $$ on US defense industry because it is required as a condition of the gift.
(There was a time in the past, when Israel, alone of all military aid recipients, was allowed to spend a portion of military aid on their own domestic defense industry, I guess becuase the US wanted to support the develpment of that specially among all other recipients of US military aid. It worked, Israel now sells $billions of weapons to autocratic Arab regimes in the middle-east and north africa: Notably Bahrain, the UAE, and Morocco. Saudi Arabia would love in on that too. But those provisions expired a few years ago, now all US military aid to Israel has to be spent on weapons from the US, just like other US military aid recipients.)
It prob got initially downvoted and then later up-voted just cause it's so political, and i mentioned my personal support for ending US weapons supply to Israel, and people vote based on their political agreement or disagreement with sentiments, explicit or implied, but here I was explicit.
