As for Social Security, no, it's no longer a trust fund, as the government had borrowed from it now to the point where it is a part of the Federal Budget and is accounted for as part of the general revenue. Look it up.
Following again the path dictated to you, I'm sure you are referring to Junior's statement: “There is no trust ‘fund’ — just IOUs that
I saw firsthand”. As usual in his infinite ignorance he thought that the pieces of paper in that ivory filing cabinet in the offices of the Bureau of the Public Debt were the “actual” IOUs. This IOUs as Junior called them are “just” Treasury Bonds arguably the safest investment instrument in the planet. Where would you rather invest the surplus of the Social Security, in the stock market?.
The surplus is the trust fund and it's lent to the government because of the safety it represents and it perfectly could have been invested somewhere else. This money that the social security trust fund lends to the government was supposed to be used to repay part the national debt so when the time came to redeem the bonds Uncle Sam would be in better shape to pay back the money borrowed from the trust fund. Of course nothing like that happened, the debt increased, including during the Clinton years where by virtue of again some “creative accounting” it looked like we had a balanced budget, and now we have this leeches trying to convince the public that social security has to be privatized using the argument that “there is no fund” and is “going bankrupt”, I would like to hear what Bill Gates and other wealthy individuals have to say about their treasury bonds being called just IOUs.
Please don't be a pawn in their game!.
Also, including Social Security as part of the social programs in no way obfuscates defense spending, both rational and irrational. The point of lumping them together in that manner was to point out how much is spent in the defense and pure social programs that make up the largest chunk of the budget. We know how large the defense budget is, so other than the remaining 18%, the rest of spent on pure social programs.
As explained before, social security
is not part of the budget so “lumping it together” has no merit in any kind of comparison.
You see any and all defense spending from a Utopian perspective, which is to say the money spent on defense can always be better spent elsewhere. You see it as nothing more than channeling money upwards to people who don't deserve it.
I don't know what a Utopian perspective would call for in regards military spending, the one I know is the rational perspective. The rational one calls to adapt depending on the
real threat aggression and not an imaginary one designed to maintain a military force almost equal to the rest of the world combined (45%)!, in order to run an empire from which we the people see very little benefit, if there is any to being an empire.
To get a perspective on this here are the ones that follow in their expenditure as a percentage of the total around the world: UK 5%,
China 5%, France 4%, Japan 4%, Germany 3%,
Russia 3%. No wonder why we need an
Axis of Evil and a
War on Terror to justify the insanity of our military spending.
You asked me how much, well; cutting our military spending in half would be a start!
Yes I do!.
By the way is Gautama, as in Siddhartha Gautama. You may know who I'm talking about, is that fat dude sitting cross legged that so many statuettes depict.
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