this post was submitted on 10 Apr 2024
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Political Memes

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[–] [email protected] 50 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 children)

What the shit is this

The total budget is $7.2 trillion, "defense" spending is $850 billion (the summary's on page 136). Unless I'm missing something both of the numbers in the meme appear to be just made up. Here's an infographic that's a couple years out of date but a lot easier to make sense of.

The US spends an absolutely insane amount on its military, but it also spends an insane amount on lots of other stuff. The really obscene thing that's making it hard to fund needed programs is (1) corrupt congresspeople simply deciding not to fund them and (2) simply not taxing people who are making millions or billions of dollars (see also #1).

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago

The US budget actually reserves the largest amount for social security and medicare, which actually makes sense, those are the two figures that you pay specific additional taxes for

[–] [email protected] 25 points 7 months ago

tl;dr: The numbers in this meme are way off.

The total proposed budget is around $7T. If we assume the numbers in the meme are just discretionary spending, and not mandatory spending on things like medicare and social security, then the total in the meme is off by less than a trillion, but the mix of discretionary spending between defense and non-defense spending is pretty close to a 50-50 split, unlike this meme depicts.

Here’s a link to the proposed budget so you can see for yourself if you’re interested.

[–] idk837384 7 points 7 months ago (2 children)

What the hell is happening in this photo How is there an eclipse of the moon and the sun happening..... if they're on the moon....

[–] [email protected] 4 points 7 months ago

earth actually has 2 moons but we cant see the other one from earth because its always hiding behind our first moon. and the guys on this picture are on the second moon

[–] [email protected] 6 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Faulty metaphor because the Moon isn't bigger, it's just closer... The meme just doesn't work.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Nah its actually accidentally correct. Defense spending was barely larger than just Medicaid by itself in 2022. What Wikipedia labels as just "health" had 150 billion more than defense spending. To put it in better perspective, defense spending was 767 billion out of a 6.3 trillion dollar budget. Still huge, but not literally 2/3ds the budget, though I'm sure this meme is just taking the piss because we really do spend a shitload more than anyone else.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 7 months ago

It's funny how the memes factual inaccuracy and the meme's wrong understanding of an eclipse even each other out and make it fit again

[–] [email protected] 4 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

but we have a sword missile