US Federal Budget 2008

Lately I’ve blown a lot of smoke and used a lot of fancy, emotive words to talk about why we should be hating the government and working together for a better future for all people. A lot of it has boiled down to radical philosophy and strong opinion with some awkward pairing of anarchy and humanism (a strangely popular article). I think it’s about time we took a look at something more tangible, more real. Being a scientific kind of fellow I like to be able to look at the evidence and crunch the numbers. I’ve decided to do exactly that and share with you what I found.

Since everyone pays such close attention to America and so many people on the Internet are American I like to talk about their country and government a lot. That’s why I chose to look at the US Federal Spending report and not my own country’s. Please note I am well aware of what my government is doing, though. Anyway, you’ll find the full report further down in the article. For now let’s look at what the government spent the most money on. Our two biggest winners are…

             $481.4 billion – Department of Defence

             $145.2 billion – Global War On Terror

I’d like you to first note that these are two different expenditures. That means the US government spent a total of 626.6 billion dollars in total on their military activities. Make sure that where it says “Department Of Defence” you read it as “Department of Invading Impoverish Countries Under The Pretext of A Lie To Force Their Government Out And Give Them A New Dictator Of Our Choosing” because that’s really what America’s army has been doing with the last sixty years or so with it’s “defence force”.

Further down the list at number 5 is…

             $39.4 billion – Department of Veteran Affairs

So while the US government doesn’t completely forget it’s retired soldiers it doesn’t think they’re quite as important as this generation of soldiers. Mind you soldiers aren’t the ones getting that six billion dollars spent on military. That money mostly goes to private arms manufacturing and into weapons research. The soldiers get the left-overs, if they’re lucky, and once they’re retired they slip down in importance. One rank below education and one above housing.