Monday, June 11, 2007

When Liberals Make Charts II

A reader sent this to me.

Cripes. Again, and I mean this in the truest sense of the word, it is a bold face LIE.

They are lying, as in not telling the truth, as in posing information that is incorrect. I don't see Social Security anywhere and they've been able to massage the figures to (how convenient) get the military budget up to 51%. It really begets the question whether they even bothered looking at the Federal government's budget. And it further points out that there are people in the world that would rather live in a false world that unfairly benefits them at the cost of the rest of society and will gladly let their ideology form their "truths" instead of the truth form their ideology.

And good lord, I've never seen such a budgetary allowance to the HR department! Catbert would become dictator supreme if that percent of the US budget was given to an HR department.

12 comments:

Anonymous said...

The liberals at large are making random charts? What? How about a source there, cappy? Seriously, you can't say all liberals are lying off of one annon chart. The reader could have easily made it up, just like Ann Coulter makes up all her so-called facts.

-Bellicoze

Anonymous said...

They don't include Social Security because it is financed by a payroll tax, not by the income tax. Of course it still doesn't make sense to exclude Social Security for it is all money from the taxpayer.

Human Resources sounds funny in this context. What did they meant? Health Care/Welfare expenditures?

Johnny Roosh said...

Everybody knows if the pie chart were an accurate graph there would be at least 10% of federal expenditures attributed to "We don't know/we'll get back to you."

Paul E. Zimmerman said...

Let's just require that all social security and various other welfare recipients enlist in the military. That way, these bogus charts these morons keep coming up with might be a tad more accurate.

Anonymous said...

WOW, if only it was that much!

Our military funding is only 3% of the federal budget from my understanding, which is around $200-some billion. Since the U.S. GDP is somewhere around $10 to $12 trillion, this means according to the chart, the military would be getting about $5 to $6 trillion each year.

Considering the entire military consists of about one million, and five trillion divided by $200 billion would be twenty-five, then our military should have somwhere around twenty-five of everything it has now, so twenty-five million Soldiers/Sailors/Airmen/Marines, some three-hundred aircraft carriers (twelve currently times twenty-five), thousands of Abrams battle tanks, thousands of Apache attack helicopters, thousands of other armored vehicles, holy crap, who knows how many F-16s, F-15s, and other aircraft, etc...if our current budget was this, then 1) why can't they put more troops into Iraq right now, I mean sheesh, with twenty-five million, we could conquer the whole Middle East, 2) if the military had this budget but simply couldn't get enough volunteers, then why are they still receiving this budget since all that extra equipment is wasting away since there are not enough people to maintain it, and 3) if they are receiving this budget with so few troops constantly, then why not offer much higher salaries for soldiers to attract more troops? (Join the Infantry! $100,000/yr starting salary!).

And also, why is the Air Force unable to buy as many F-22's as it would like, and the Navy as many of those super-expensive subs they'd like?

If the U.S. military budget was half of the federal budget, we could probably simultaneously: conquer the Middle East and claim all the oil, kick Kim Jong II to the curb with ease, and conquer a lot of Africa, or free it up anyhow (nation-building or something).

We could also go conquer France, and the British would probably help us do it. We could also conquer Canada to, and claim all of North America for ourselves :)

I wonder how they make such charts?

Brandon Berg said...

It's cute the way they attribute all debt payments to past military spending.

Anonymous said...

I saw this chart while verifying the missing part of the last liberal pie chart (War Resisters League). I think the 51% comes from some dubious accounting choices; I know one is that most of our debt is military related (assuming that if we dropped our military we'd have no debt), so all debt-service payments go in the military slice. Also, health care for veterans got put under military costs. There's probably other similar chicanery, but I wasn't interested in reading further.

Anonymous said...

This chart only includes federal income tax. So the majority of the federal budget isn't on there.

It's misleading as all hell and anyone who would use it to try to prove a point about government spending in general is absolute scum, but that's why social security isn't on there.

It takes a real bastard to design a chart to show how much the other side is spending once all your own little programs are conveniently removed.

"Our military funding is only 3% of the federal budget from my understanding, which is around $200-some billion. Since the U.S. GDP is somewhere around $10 to $12 trillion, this means according to the chart, the military would be getting about $5 to $6 trillion each year."

I think you might have goofed there Captain: percentage of the federal budget is not the same as percentage of GDP. This chart doesn't even include the entire federal budged, just the bits financed by federal income taxes. The chart may be technically accurate in its depiction of how a small fraction of the federal budget is spent, but is extremely misleading strictly because it covers such a small percentage of the total budget and your average lefty moron sure as hell can't tell the difference. Hence they send you this chart without being crushed by the shame of their own ignorance.

Anonymous said...

"Let's just require that all social security and various other welfare recipients enlist in the military."

Gaius Marius for President in 2008. :)

Arcane said...

Our military funding is only 3% of the federal budget from my understanding, which is around $200-some billion. Since the U.S. GDP is somewhere around $10 to $12 trillion, this means according to the chart, the military would be getting about $5 to $6 trillion each year.

You're confusing GDP with the federal budget. American GDP is somewhere between $11-13 trillion, depending on the source. The military consumes 3-4% of GDP on average, or around $450 billion. Add in the supplemental war budgets and it comes to be somewhere around $550 billion. Total federal government expenditures average between 20-24% of GDP (total government expenditures from federal, state, and local government total around 35% of GDP), again depending on the source, and of that about 15-20% of the federal budget goes directly to defense, with perhaps an additional 5-10% going to defense functions within the DHS, DOE, DOJ, and other government agencies. Again, I emphasize these are averages based on readings and research that I've done over the past half dozen years or so.

As for the chart, I find it incredibly misleading, not only because it has nebulous categories that are undefinable, but because it only focuses on one tax category and at no point in time are taxes focused towards specific categories of government expenditures.

This reminds me of the silly charts produced by the War Resisters League, except probably being championed now by liberals since they have been pulled so far to the left by these "progressives" that they would not be recognizable to self-defined liberals fifty years ago.

Arcane said...

I knew it! It is from the War Resisters League! I didn't even think those guys existed anymore...

http://www.warresisters.org/piechart.htm

Captain Capitalism said...

HA! Lieutenant, the chart IS from the Was Resisters league!