Request for our politically inclined members

[Aldaron]

Note, prior to making this thread, I've already done a decent (admittedly just decent, not exhaustive by any means) amount of research into this.

I am very very curious to know the US Government's spending. By this I mean what it actually spends money on (how much is payroll, how much is SS / medicare, how much is infrastructure, how much is military, for all of the previous, where and when is the money going specifically), where it gets that money (how much from taxes? from what demographics? how much from loans? from whom / what?), and how much of that information is able to be audited (to what level?).

I've already looked on sites like census.gov (for example, http://factfinder.census.gov/faces/tableservices/jsf/pages/productview.xhtml?src=bkmk for some payroll data) and others, but I can't find anything that actually, in depth, details exactly what money is coming when and from where and how that money is being spent and when and where and by whom.

I find lots of politically charged / obviously biased sites claiming "we spend too much on X, Y, and Z" but I'm finding few dependable resources and actually 0 comprehensive resources (or aggregations at least).

Any help here?

In forming my opinion on...well basically anything, I always like to follow the money (best way to truly understand intentions, particularly in politics I feel)...but it's really hard to actually do so?

I'm strongly hoping someone will just throw a link that I missed that will have a comprehensive, dependable collection of that data, but who knows.

I'm actually surprised at how little attention actual real facts about spending get. You always hear all the talking points from every side about this spending and that spending and what we should do and how we should go about it but...I never actually get any information to be able to follow the money.

Isn't that like...really kind of super important? How can you run any organization, or even have a vote in anything for that organization, if you don't know actual, real facts about its money?

Again, I'm strongly hoping I just somehow missed all this and everyone just assumes this is known information because otherwise all these debates are even more ridiculous to me than they were previously.

 

[Soul Fly]

Hey Aldaron, idk how much my post will help and might be even largely redundant to you if you've spent any amount of time in finance/corporate law, in which case feel free to ignore this but I generally want to put this out there anyways....
Here's the thing (this response is geared mainly towards the latter part of your post). Your need for a credible, consistent, and mostly neutral analysis of massive paper trails of money and resources is something everyone tries to achieve. But is incredibly hard in reality regardless of how perfectly lucid and basic it sounds in theory.

What you're probably not factoring in is the reality that even most *methods* of following expenditure and taxation that determine "facts" is ideology driven, beyond those basic hard numbers I'm sure you can already find (total debt ceiling, federal budget etc). I can't really go into technicality because it's surprisingly intricate but I had a massive conversation about this with my (now ex) girlfriend a year or so back, who was whiz at these things. Money is always hard to track in a fiat economy, and in fact even the government itself doesn't always know, but barely keeps up by keeping a tally as to where it is supposed to be, because too much of our is floating as debt, assets and whatnot. And whatever information that produce is pretty raw and all over the place and as far as I know not audited beyond the level of due-diligence purposes (which is partly why talented financial analysts make shittons of money - because they have a knack of converting raw data into meaningful projections for large hedge funds and shit)...
Imagine you own a godown so large that your really don't know how much you have so you basically keep track of the health of your stock by tracking how much people are taking out and depositing back. This is why the wealth of countries is mapped in GDP and economic trade/spending and whatnot.

Unfortunately in a world where half the presidential candidates have no idea what they are talking about when they talk about their tax plans, as far as I'm aware there isn't such centralized information of the kind you seek. That sure would make everyone's lives easier, and generally more sane. If any of you know that it's out there please step up and be the Messiah.

HOWEVER all is not lost, and if you're interested in "replicating" the effect you seek, there's the usual boring hard way. Sucks that your unicorn shortcut doesn't exist - sorry.
You'd have to cultivate your own sources by critically fact checking and copy-verifying claims and assertions made by financial columns and critical articles and documentaries. Every piece is a unique aggregation of disparate content already out there so you'll have to probably meticulously follow up on the sources, AND question the methodology used to manipulate the data into meaningful results (which is the harder part, because there's ALWAYS information asymmetry).
This is a process that I started a while back and is no where near complete.

Since I'm not American, nor do I have active interest in domestic American fiscal and monetary affairs, I really don't have too many sources to share with you. One American media house I do love to regularly peruse however is Vox.com primarily because the stories are internally well researched with properly documented sources and (more importantly) they actively engage with everything that they are presenting, even some basic premise/assumption that might seem foregone to some traditional liberal/conservative media outlet. They also keep their reports jargon free, which I see as a move in really good faith, as I have usually experienced deliberate obfuscation to sound smart/push an agenda. This is a representative example of their financial reporting (It's medicaid). Another one here analyzing their take an Jeb Bush's tax plan (they run similar fiscal articles for all the candidates). You can take a look around and crosscheck their sources and methodology. I generally find them to be excellent, however your may or may not agree with me. But even if you do not and have well formulated problems with this reporting, at least now you have a critical insight into the system regardless.

If you want to "follow the money" this is probably the best way imho. Aggregate yourself and do the math.


Happy Politics. Hope I was marginally helpful at the very least.

 

[Soul Fly]

Fuck I typed all of that on my phone, my goddamn thumbs hurt. Pardon me of you find some stray weird vocabulary/typo. My autocorrect is a little bitch...

 

[DM]

Well, in all honesty, our government does not make enough money to pay for everything it buys; Bush's wars and tax cuts saw to that. (No, this isn't political, this is economic fact. Clinton left a surplus.)

Our economy is currently a mess of mortgaging our international lands to other countries (yes, China being a main "investor") and simply printing more money. It's a gigantic charlie foxtrot, and as Soul Fly said, no politician running for President (outside of MAYBE Bernie Sanders and *ugh* Rand Paul [that was a little political]) really presents a realistic, logical plan to save our futures.

 

[nyttyn]

Frankly speaking I don't think even congress, the OMB, the IRS, etc combined has more than an extremely vague, loose idea of where all the money's going.

The united states has so many incompetent workers due to sheer size, combined with how our government's massive size (and this isn't even getting into the headache that is the federal/state/local split) makes logistics incredibly difficult, on top of us having a government that's loaded with both people who use paint huffing ideals to gather votes, and actual paint huffers...

Soul Fry is mostly on point here but frankly speaking all is kind of lost. No one citizen, and probably not even small or medium sized groups of citizens will ever be able to figure out even a tenth of the budget. Even the OMB, an office dedicated to the sole purpose of keeping track of the budget, likely does not comprehend the entire scope of the federal budget. Simply because between the local, state, and federal levels, with all the various budgets and appropriations and riders and intentional opaqueness and human error and clerical error etc etc SO MANY issues it's just this hopelessly endless labryinth, and the minotaur's a decaying pile of bones in some dark corner.

You can probably figure out, with much time and effort, the vague numbers of a singular part of the budget, or an individual bill, but that's about it.



I guess maybe at some point in the past back when federal and state governments were separate this might have been possible to keep track of, but given the two are more or less married now that kind of ruins any hope of it being remotely comprehensible by your average citizen in even small part.

 

[Bughouse]

Very generally speaking, money goes to 1) various forms of social services (i.e. social security, medicare, medicaid, unemployment, and welfare) and 2) the armed services. And 3) debt service...

Anything beyond those three categories is pennies. I'm even being generous grouping debt service in with the top 2. It's all military and social services. At the same time, the federal government spends more servicing the national debt than it does on scientific research, the salaries of the staff of several entire cabinet departments, and all energy and environmental programs combined.

iirc those three top categories add up to nearly 80% of the budget. This is largely because of most other responsibilities (big ones being infrastructure, education, law enforcement) are overwhelmingly devolved to the states.

Basically, what I'm saying is that you really don't need any sort of specific detail on everything the federal government spends money on. You should only be specifically looking at those top two categories.

To illustrate further, the EPA's budget request for 2016, for example, is 8.6 billion. That is about 0.2% of the US federal budget. Let's say you're a reasonable conservative who recognizes the purpose the agency has, but you still think it's overreaching. You want to slash its budget by 30%... congrats. That's 2.5 billion. Not bad right? But in reality, you've now saved only 0.06% of the federal budget. And the government, even in good years before the 2008 crash, ran deficits of over 2%. You'd have to slash at least 33 agencies the size of the EPA by 30% to meet that deficit in a good year with low deficits. Problem is... well there aren't 33 agencies that size. Not even close.

The only way to cut budget shortfalls on the spending side is to touch either military spending (unthinkable for a presidential candidate to advocate... not like anyone actually supports Rand Paul) or social services, particularly social security and medicare.

On the opposite side, federal revenue comes from 1) HALF income tax paid by workers, 2) ONE THIRD payroll taxes paid (equally I think) by both employers and workers, and 3) TEN PERCENT corporate income taxes. The remaining 7-8 percent come from miscellaneous other places like import duties and excise taxes on things, especially gas. So, again, that top 3 add up to about 93% and really are the only things worth talking about.



So with all that said (and that you probably already knew...) Do you have more specific questions? I really can't help you in any more detail than I already did on a general "follow the money" question. That's too broad and not remotely answerable in a post on Smogon.

 

[Adamant Zoroark]

Bughouse is pretty much right on point here. There's a few more things I'd like to add on specifically about the big spending & income taxes.

So, of course, first of all, the United States military budget is pretty insane. If I recall correctly, we spend more on our military than the next 26 countries combined. I think we could cut our military budget by like 80% and still have the largest military budget in the world? Of course, as stated, considering how big our budget is, we probably don't have a scope on the exact numbers, but it's still pretty crazy. However, coming from a military family, I know pretty damn well that even suggesting cutting a dime from the military budget is political suicide. I mean, you could talk about cutting things like social security and medicaid, but that's even more suicidal so I won't talk about that.

People like to talk about cutting small programs like farm subsidies, but the truth is, those things are pennies in comparison to the military budget & social services spending - you could cut those things and barely even put a dent in the deficit. So, I'll focus on military spending since that's 1) Something you can cut and actually do something, and 2) Probably the most reasonable thing to suggest. So what happens now? People don't want military spending to go down, and anyone who suggests cutting it isn't getting elected.

Okay, so how about we look at income taxes (biggest source of revenue?) Bughouse didn't really talk about this but I'll try to go into greater detail. I used to be kind of a "fuck taxes" kind of guy in my teen years, but looking back I know now that this is incompatible with my fiscally conservative / deficit hawk views - you can't get a balanced budget only by cutting spending. However, there's some truth to the "fuck taxes" sentiment - nobody wants their taxes to go up, so suggesting raising taxes on anyone but the top earners (who constitute a very small percentage of the voter base so you can afford to lose them) is also political suicide.

Basically, people say they want to balance the budget, but they're looking at the wrong things (talking about cutting small programs and shit) and they're not willing to do what you would really need to do in order to balance it. People don't want the military budget to decrease (even though I find it kind of hard to argue that we're not overspending on our military) AND they don't want their income taxes to go up in order to help balance the budget - and no politician in Congress is ever going to do something their constituents would hate, so basically they're stuck with just raising taxes on the rich. I mean, sure, it'll help bring in more money, but you can't balance the budget JUST by doing that.

tl;dr: People want to balance the budget but they're not willing to do what you'd need to do in order to do that. We're fucked, basically.

 

[Joim]

The fed prints more money. China buys debt. Rinse, repeat.
I guess that's all I can add to the posts above.

 

[JermemGoffdoff]

Federal Budget allocates money to departments as a percentage of GDP and is made public yearly, which is why reporters tend to focus on the percentage of the federal budget spent on programs as opposed to the exact amount of dollars - that's the info they're given.

A huge reason why there is basically no information on specific allocations is this: Because most reporters get information of Government expenditures through FOIA (Freedom of Information Act) requests, which then oblige departments to report requested information, the information that is available is mainly determined by what is and isn't covered by FOIA. Persuant to FOIA, Departments aren't obligated to disclose any related to Human Resources, such as payroll or contract information, making it difficult to track administrative costs.

You can submit any request you want, though. It can take a long time for them to be processed. Here's how:

http://www.foia.gov/how-to.html

You might be able to find something neat.

 

[Chou Toshio]

Hey Aldaron, idk how much my post will help and might be even largely redundant to you if you've spent any amount of time in finance/corporate law, in which case feel free to ignore this but I generally want to put this out there anyways....
Here's the thing (this response is geared mainly towards the latter part of your post). Your need for a credible, consistent, and mostly neutral analysis of massive paper trails of money and resources is something everyone tries to achieve. But is incredibly hard in reality regardless of how perfectly lucid and basic it sounds in theory.

What you're probably not factoring in is the reality that even most *methods* of following expenditure and taxation that determine "facts" is ideology driven, beyond those basic hard numbers I'm sure you can already find (total debt ceiling, federal budget etc). I can't really go into technicality because it's surprisingly intricate but I had a massive conversation about this with my (now ex) girlfriend a year or so back, who was whiz at these things. Money is always hard to track in a fiat economy, and in fact even the government itself doesn't always know, but barely keeps up by keeping a tally as to where it is supposed to be, because too much of our is floating as debt, assets and whatnot. And whatever information that produce is pretty raw and all over the place and as far as I know not audited beyond the level of due-diligence purposes (which is partly why talented financial analysts make shittons of money - because they have a knack of converting raw data into meaningful projections for large hedge funds and shit)...
Imagine you own a godown so large that your really don't know how much you have so you basically keep track of the health of your stock by tracking how much people are taking out and depositing back. This is why the wealth of countries is mapped in GDP and economic trade/spending and whatnot.

Unfortunately in a world where half the presidential candidates have no idea what they are talking about when they talk about their tax plans, as far as I'm aware there isn't such centralized information of the kind you seek. That sure would make everyone's lives easier, and generally more sane. If any of you know that it's out there please step up and be the Messiah.

HOWEVER all is not lost, and if you're interested in "replicating" the effect you seek, there's the usual boring hard way. Sucks that your unicorn shortcut doesn't exist - sorry.
You'd have to cultivate your own sources by critically fact checking and copy-verifying claims and assertions made by financial columns and critical articles and documentaries. Every piece is a unique aggregation of disparate content already out there so you'll have to probably meticulously follow up on the sources, AND question the methodology used to manipulate the data into meaningful results (which is the harder part, because there's ALWAYS information asymmetry).
This is a process that I started a while back and is no where near complete.

Since I'm not American, nor do I have active interest in domestic American fiscal and monetary affairs, I really don't have too many sources to share with you. One American media house I do love to regularly peruse however is Vox.com primarily because the stories are internally well researched with properly documented sources and (more importantly) they actively engage with everything that they are presenting, even some basic premise/assumption that might seem foregone to some traditional liberal/conservative media outlet. They also keep their reports jargon free, which I see as a move in really good faith, as I have usually experienced deliberate obfuscation to sound smart/push an agenda. This is a representative example of their financial reporting (It's medicaid). Another one here analyzing their take an Jeb Bush's tax plan (they run similar fiscal articles for all the candidates). You can take a look around and crosscheck their sources and methodology. I generally find them to be excellent, however your may or may not agree with me. But even if you do not and have well formulated problems with this reporting, at least now you have a critical insight into the system regardless.

If you want to "follow the money" this is probably the best way imho. Aggregate yourself and do the math.


Happy Politics. Hope I was marginally helpful at the very least.

So what you're saying is that real federal expenditure is like the economics equilibrium price-- you know it exists, but if you could actually discover it you'd have a Nobel prize on your hands~~

 

[billymills]

I'm not quite sure I understand the question. My guess is that the federal government gives money to departments in some sort of internal transfer, and those departments have budgets for their own programs.

I'm not a finance major so I don't really understand a lot of the terms in the documents (whether they're projections, actually calculated from ledgers, or otherwise), but maybe these would be helpful?

https://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/omb/budget/fy2013/assets/hist.pdf

http://energy.gov/sites/prod/files/FY2012UBR.pdf (record keeping?)
http://energy.gov/sites/prod/files/2015/02/f19/FY2016BudgetinBrief.pdf (submitted to congress)

I know just from discussions at college that a lot of government departments are involved in the same areas, which means funding towards a specific area (like research) could be via 4-5 departments simultaneously, even if it were on the same project. I'd expect it wouldn't be easy to calculate exactly how much the government spends on a given project if there are a number of different threads.

If you're looking for itemized receipts (your link was broken for me, so I'm not really sure of your example), you'd probably have to find budgets for each of the programs, for each of the departments.

 

[Alfalfa]

I mean, http://www.usdebtclock.org will tell you where the largest amount of federal money is being spent (Medicare/ Medicaid, military, etc.), but they do not give you an actual demographic of where all of the money is going.

 

[QuickBH]

Here is our income tax rates. It's quite large in my honest opinion, and a decrease for a flat tax (around 15%) would be best for the vast majority. As getting more than $9225 happens if you work for minimum wage at a 7 hour job for 210 days. (Around $10290)

Here is our tax rates for all businesses. Not going to go to far into this, but as you probably already know, many big companies are simply stashing overseas and going overseas because of these tax rates. Small businesses cannot really afford to do this, and with other government mandates, they are left out of the dust and doomed to fail. The best way I can see to fix this is by reducing tax rates and letting more companies, and therefore jobs, return/be able to start here.

That seemed to be a prominent topic, so I just decided to make a brief synopsis of my own.

 

[Ohmachi]

Here is our income tax rates. It's quite large in my honest opinion, and a decrease for a flat tax (around 15%) would be best for the vast majority. As getting more than $9225 happens if you work for minimum wage at a 7 hour job for 210 days. (Around $10290)

Here is our tax rates for all businesses. Not going to go to far into this, but as you probably already know, many big companies are simply stashing overseas and going overseas because of these tax rates. Small businesses cannot really afford to do this, and with other government mandates, they are left out of the dust and doomed to fail. The best way I can see to fix this is by reducing tax rates and letting more companies, and therefore jobs, return/be able to start here.

That seemed to be a prominent topic, so I just decided to make a brief synopsis of my own.

No it wouldn't. A flat tax while it appears to be a stable tax rate for everyone is in actuality regressive. The reason why is because of cost of living. Ill give you an example. Lets say we have two wage earners "A" and "B". A makes 20,000 and B makes 100,000. Now lets assume a there is a flat tax rate of 10% and a cost of living of 15,000. After taxes A has $3,000 to play around with and B has $75,000. You can see how most of A's income goes to keeping himself alive where most of B's income goes to what ever he wants. B can afford to pay more taxes.

The next thing about the proposed flat tax rate of 14.5% is that its way to low. The tax bracket for the highest wage earners is 39%. Most of our countries income tax comes from the highest tax bracket. Decreasing the tax rate will destroy the governments revenue, and shift the tax burden to the middle class. It will decrease the tax rate of most Americans by .5%, it will increase the tax rate for the lowest bracket by 4.5% and it will decrease the tax rate for the richest bracket by 24.5%.

Next is that only C corporations have an income tax. Most small bushiness are either "S" Corps and partnerships which do not get tax on income. They are flow through entities. C corps tend to be giant companies. Corporations are taxed because they are treated as its own entity and have something called the corporate veil which protects its owners from getting sued for something the company did. Companies can't simply move there money to a tax shelter. They have to merge or buyout a company in another country. This would make since if the majority of the companies activity happened in the new country that the two companies merged in.

as for bringing jobs back...

 

[QuickBH]

No it wouldn't. A flat tax while it appears to be a stable tax rate for everyone is in actuality regressive. The reason why is because of cost of living. Ill give you an example. Lets say we have two wage earners "A" and "B". A makes 20,000 and B makes 100,000. Now lets assume a there is a flat tax rate of 10% and a cost of living of 15,000. After taxes A has $3,000 to play around with and B has $75,000. You can see how most of A's income goes to keeping himself alive where most of B's income goes to what ever he wants. B can afford to pay more taxes.

The next thing about the proposed flat tax rate of 14.5% is that its way to low. The tax bracket for the highest wage earners is 39%. Most of our countries income tax comes from the highest tax bracket. Decreasing the tax rate will destroy the governments revenue, and shift the tax burden to the middle class. It will decrease the tax rate of most Americans by .5%, it will increase the tax rate for the lowest bracket by 4.5% and it will decrease the tax rate for the richest bracket by 24.5%.

Next is that only C corporations have an income tax. Most small bushiness are either "S" Corps and partnerships which do not get tax on income. They are flow through entities. C corps tend to be giant companies. Corporations are taxed because they are treated as its own entity and have something called the corporate veil which protects its owners from getting sued for something the company did. Companies can't simply move there money to a tax shelter. They have to merge or buyout a company in another country. This would make since if the majority of the companies activity happened in the new country that the two companies merged in.

as for bringing jobs back...

Small businesses have to pay income tax, I know this because my parents run a small business and they are taxed on income.

I just stated with evidence that job companies are simply stashing and moving overseas due to the amount of taxes. It's big corporations, they don't give a crap about where they produce, so they can buy out a company or whatever they must to avoid these tax rates, it's not a big deal and it's a one time buy over a bunch of tax rate deductions for them.

Also, the less taxes someone has to pay, the more they can afford. The more money they earn, the more they will work because it gives everybody more money while keeping the standard of living the same. Sure, it might put a tax deduction on the rich....who will hire less due to the fact that hiring you with the tax rates is simply going to be of detriment. 15% on the rich is still more than 15% of the poor, taxing them more is not equality, it never was and it never will. I already explained how easy it is for a worker to make over 10k, and with a living income, of course if one person does an easier/worse job they will be able to afford less, that's how life works. A reduction on all is nice though, whether it's 0% 10% 25%, just enough to make sure the government pays enough taxes with decreased government spending so more people have more money for what they do work and incentivize for them to work as hard because they're actually seeing success. A whole lot better than going on welfare, I say.

 

[Ohmachi]

Small businesses have to pay income tax, I know this because my parents run a small business and they are taxed on income.

I just stated with evidence that job companies are simply stashing and moving overseas due to the amount of taxes. It's big corporations, they don't give a crap about where they produce, so they can buy out a company or whatever they must to avoid these tax rates, it's not a big deal and it's a one time buy over a bunch of tax rate deductions for them.

Also, the less taxes someone has to pay, the more they can afford. The more money they earn, the more they will work because it gives everybody more money while keeping the standard of living the same. Sure, it might put a tax deduction on the rich....who will hire less due to the fact that hiring you with the tax rates is simply going to be of detriment. 15% on the rich is still more than 15% of the poor, taxing them more is not equality, it never was and it never will. I already explained how easy it is for a worker to make over 10k, and with a living income, of course if one person does an easier/worse job they will be able to afford less, that's how life works. A reduction on all is nice though, whether it's 0% 10% 25%, just enough to make sure the government pays enough taxes with decreased government spending so more people have more money for what they do work and incentivize for them to work as hard because they're actually seeing success. A whole lot better than going on welfare, I say.

they are not "simply moving" there money to offshore bank accounts. The US taxes foreign earned income. They have to merge or buyout a foreign company. This is why you only hear about large companies doing this.

I highly doubt your parents company is a C-Corp. Outside special circumstances a flow through entity will not pay taxes.

Your parents are either paying self employment taxes, quarterly taxes, or are a c corp. All of which I know how to reduce ;)

In the U.S we have a progressive tax structure. That means the more you make the more you pay. In order to make things easy to understand I will be using made up numbers. Lets take our two wage earners again "A" and "B". They are still making $20,000 and $100,000 respectively. Now lets say there is two tax brackets of 10% for the first 20,000 and 20% for the anything over 20,000. A will pay $2,000 in tax and B will pay $18,000. This is because you only pay the rate for the income you earned per tax bracket.

here it is broken out for A. 20,000 * 10% = 2000. For B it would be 20,000 * 10% then 80,000 * 20% for a total of 18,000 (2000+16,000). This system is fair because rich people can afford to pay more.

Low income wage earners typically don't pay taxes because the government give out the individual tax credit and the standard deduction. This is usually enough to reduce their taxable income to 0.

I may be taking this thread of topic with my explanations on how taxes work. If enough people show interest I will make a thread to discuss those questions.

 

[Adamant Zoroark]

they are not "simply moving" there money to offshore bank accounts. The US taxes foreign earned income. They have to merge or buyout a foreign company. This is why you only hear about large companies doing this.

I highly doubt your parents company is a C-Corp. Outside special circumstances a flow through entity will not pay taxes.

Your parents are either paying self employment taxes, quarterly taxes, or are a c corp. All of which I know how to reduce ;)

In the U.S we have a progressive tax structure. That means the more you make the more you pay. In order to make things easy to understand I will be using made up numbers. Lets take our two wage earners again "A" and "B". They are still making $20,000 and $100,000 respectively. Now lets say there is two tax brackets of 10% for the first 20,000 and 20% for the anything over 20,000. A will pay $2,000 in tax and B will pay $18,000. This is because you only pay the rate for the income you earned per tax bracket.

here it is broken out for A. 20,000 * 10% = 2000. For B it would be 20,000 * 10% then 80,000 * 20% for a total of 18,000 (2000+16,000). This system is fair because rich people can afford to pay more.

Low income wage earners typically don't pay taxes because the government give out the individual tax credit and the standard deduction. This is usually enough to reduce their taxable income to 0.

I may be taking this thread of topic with my explanations on how taxes work. If enough people show interest I will make a thread to discuss those questions.

Off topic, but the US taxing foreign-earned income is one of the biggest reasons so many expats renounce their citizenship every year. Hell, our government even tries to get extra money from these people by requiring a fee to renounce your citizenship (and I think there's even a law on the books that says anyone who renounces their US citizenship for purposes of avoiding expat taxes can't step foot on US soil, but I don't think it's ever been enforced.) The US has basically given expats no reason to keep their citizenship and every reason to renounce it.

On-topic, we can talk about the laffer curve but please, trickle-down economics is disastrous. Maybe the principle applied back when we were still developing (and I think a lot of countries formerly under Soviet control are using flat tax rates to spur economic growth) but don't try to argue it applies in the modern-day United States. Assuming people will actually reinvest that income is a very naive assumption about human nature because people are greedy shits (which I realize may be the most misanthropic thing I've said yet, but whatever, come at me.) Both of my parents are Republicans but Reagan was the reason my mom registered to vote Democrat when she first registered to vote. I like free markets but let's be realistic here.

Now, that being said, according to the theory of the laffer curve (i.e. you won't bring in any revenue at tax rates of 0% and 100% so the ideal rate must be somewhere in between the two) you could have argued for cutting the marginal top rates when they were as high as 90% (hell, possibly even when they were as high as 70%) because it's logical to assume that a 90% rate is on the right-hand side of the laffer curve (i.e. where raising the rate would actually bring in less money.) Now though.... Yeah, good luck pushing that argument.

Now, of course, our tax code is also full of technicalities (and unlike the poor & middle class, the rich have the legal resources to exploit these technicalities to legally pay less taxes) so I feel like for a while we should be talking about closing those loopholes and see where that brings us.

 

[mfhoundoom]

In forming my opinion on...well basically anything, I always like to follow the money

Just... follow the money.

I don't think you can say trickle down economics has ever been relevant, from the beginning it's been a reason for the poor to vote against their economic interest, a larger facade than the right-wing social agenda. While addressing tax loopholes are important to look to, they won't finance healthcare and all the shitty wars we're in. There just needs to be a simply larger income tax like it was before corporations gained say in the matter, c'mon no one needs that much money unless they're funding some bond villain type scheme

 

[Aldaron]

Just as a brief update; I actually read through a lot of what was posted here and it helped a lot.

So thanks a lot guys.

I'm not looking for an excessively granular tabulation / audit of everything, but I was looking for more.

It's still not enough but it's a start.

Thanks!

 

[UncleSam]

The table on this front page appears to break up spending pretty well, though there's a nebulous 'remainder' category. Also includes State/Local spending data.

Other resources available on that website include comprehensive spending for a range of issues (Social Security, Medicare, etc.) as well as Budget plans and the raw data upon which their reported analyses are based. I admittedly haven't double-checked their calculations or assumptions but at a glance this appears to be a reasonably comprehensive site detailing government spending.

Hope this is what you were looking for.

 

[RaikouLover]

Spending is irrelevant.

The United States government is monetarily sovereign. It can make the U.S. dollar equal to a partridge and a pear tree if it so desires. No bill will ever be too large for the United States government. Social Security, Medicare, the Military, The Highway Trust Fund.... None of them can ever go bankrupt unless the U.S. politicians wish them too, by intentionally defaulting on the debt (not raising the debt limit) for political gain. We actually have idiots (like Ted Cruz) dumb enough to do this. Those politicians are paid for by their mega-rich donors.

The whole debate on U.S. government spending is caused by the media conglomerates being owned by psychotic mega-millionaires. It is in their best interest to have the government cut funding to social programs because that is how they preserve their wealth. If I have $1 million and everyone on Smogon only has $100 ($25 of which is subsidized), I can make myself richer by cutting off their $25 subsidy so that they have $75. In the end, total dollars are irrelevant. Wealth is a function of your piece of the pie. The only thing that matters is the gap.

Contrary to popular belief, printing money is not the cause of inflation. The U.S. also sets the interest rates, which is how the demand for money is regulated. Inflation is caused by oil prices.

 

[tehy]

Are you really saying we can just print money infinitely and there won't be any problem...?

Or that we can take loans infinitely and there won't be any problem...?

 

[danilo]

we dont actually spend that much on military. i mean we do but the extent to which we spend is vastly overrated by liberals. yeah, the figure we spend is more than the next like 15 countries down the list combined, but we also just spend more money than them generally.

if u want to look @ the big picture you'll look @ how much we spend compared to our GDP, which ends up being around the mean of the other 15-20 nations.

not to say that we shouldn't cut military spending, but the next time someone says we spend way too much on the military, tell them "not really u cunning misinformed f*ck"

 

[Bughouse]

we dont actually spend that much on military. i mean we do but the extent to which we spend is vastly overrated by liberals. yeah, the figure we spend is more than the next like 15 countries down the list combined, but we also just spend more money than them generally.

if u want to look @ the big picture you'll look @ how much we spend compared to our GDP, which ends up being around the mean of the other 15-20 nations.

not to say that we shouldn't cut military spending, but the next time someone says we spend way too much on the military, tell them "not really u cunning misinformed f*ck"

inaccurate: http://data.worldbank.org/indicator...pi_data_value+wbapi_data_value-last&sort=desc

We're bigger, sure. But that is hardly the sole reason. We spend at least 1.5x proportional to our GDP of other western nations, except for Lithuania (lol Lithuania).

The USA is at 3.5, comparable to some countries I don't think we want to be compared to like Jordan, Morocco, and Pakistan.

The closest "western countries" for which I'll use our NATO allies are:
Lithuania - 2.7
Greece - 2.3
France - 2.2
Turkey - 2.2
U.K. - 2.0
Poland - 1.9
Estonia - 1.9
Portugal - 1.8

And the remaining 19 NATO countries, 7 spend less than half of the USA proportionally to GDP. And another 12 spend a third or less.

Here's some other non-NATO countries that we'd like to be compared against:
India - 2.4
China - 2.1
Australia - 1.8
Finland - 1.3
Brazil - 1.3
Sweden - 1.2
Japan - 1.0

(And since I'm sure you'll bring up Israel, Singapore, and South Korea as "western countries" to compare to - all have compulsory military service which drastically drives up how much money goes through the military... all men, or in Israel's case all people, are involved somehow for a while.)



Ooooooor put another way, you could look at it per capita, in which case the US spends the 3rd most in the world (roughly 8x above the world average), behind only Saudi Arabia and Israel... and nearly double the country in 4th, the UK.

Yeah. We spend too much on our military. Don't let anyone tell you otherwise.

 

[danilo]

yeh but like, spending 1.5x times as much as other nations isn't that statistically significant when we're talking about such low figures.

also given the role the US has given itself, as the world's policeperson, as the defender of good, destroyer of evil, and protector of holy christian values, 3.5% of gdp isn't really that much. of course the western nato nations u cited wouldn't spend that much. compare their foreign policy to ours.