2013 report on consolidating anti-poverty programs WARNING PDF. Obama's White House in 2013 proposed a consolidation of Federal anti poverty programs and cut to redundant management without impacting the money going into the hands of the people who need it. Those cuts totaled $24 billion a year. That same year, NASA got $17.7 billion. We spend roughly $80 billion per year on corn and ethanol subsidies, $130 billion on fossil fuel subsidies, we spent $8 trillion on TARP, roughly $2 Trillion so far on Iraq, and I could go on from here. The problem as I see it is this. Most Americans don't have any clue what their tax dollars do. That is a flat out failure of the media as their role of watchdogs. Maybe we can say education as well, but more of a news issue IMO. As I said in a rant that got badged last week, the important stuff is boring. Regional zoning and transportation planning commission reports don't even make the news, but the derby hats of celebrities are all over the local media. The federal R&D budget was amazingly easy to find and is roughly $140 billion in 2016 out of a budget of $3.5 Trillion. That basic R&D is what builds the engineering of tomorrow. It's peanuts and we can fund a whole decade of it by killing the F-35. Which gets into a Guns vs Butter debate that I don't want to hijack a thread for. The point is the money is there for the stuff that matters if we pay attention, the costs are minuscule, and it is building foundations that will have benefits for more than a generation.
The underlying thinking here is why I became a delegate for Bernie Sanders. America has plenty of money to do everything it could ever want to do. We have trillions and trillions of dollars available to us that we get to choose how to spend. Sadly, more than 60% of that money goes overseas to fund stupid empire-building exercises... while our bridges here at home crumble underfoot. The question is not whether we fund malaria eradication programs, or NASA, or give every student a basic living wage until they are 25, or whatever. We can do any of that we want to, and we could do it tomorrow, if we decided to. All we need to do is re-evaluate our spending priorities. Shit, the US Army lost a steel shipping container full of cash in Iraq War I. That single shipping container has NASA's entire budget in it. And it just disappeared into the desert without a trace. "Sorry. Can't find it. Dunno what happened." All the US needs is to rethink our spending priorities. It ain't about raising or lowering taxes, it ain't about breaking or supporting international treaties, and it ain't about the debt ceiling or how much of our debt China owns. All of that is line noise, if we can take a hard look at where our money goes, and think closely about our priorities.