A Federal Budget Allocation Survey
Friday, September 24th, 2004At some point in listening to the endless debates over how much the government should spend and how that spending should be allocated – in other words, in the debate over the fundamental operations of government – it occurred to me that one of the problems we have in discussing such things is that very few people actually know what we spend already. ‘Conservatives’ decry “welfare spending” and want to beef up defense; ‘liberals’ demand “butter before guns”, convinced that we spend only a pittance on social needs and a fortune on the military. But when I looked at the actual numbers (for FY2004 at the CBO web-site) I was somewhat surprised at how the money is actually allocated, and I would bet that most people share my ignorance. I would further bet that if you asked ‘conservatives’ and ‘liberals’ to guess at the allocation of federal resources you would get vastly different estimates, with ‘conservatives’ grossly over-estimating and ‘liberals’ grossly under-estimating the relative weight assigned to “social programs” (and with them reversed on “defense”).