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Title

The US Budget Explained

Description

This Flash video, <a href="http://www.truemajority.org/oreos/" source="TrueMajority" author="Ben Cohen">Oreos</a>, uses dessert to focus your attention on the ridiculous numbers in the US federal budget. The first illustration (below) shows the size of the military budget as compared to the sizes of other portions of the federal budget. On the one hand, he's conveniently left off Social Security and Medicare (the two biggest non-military programs in the federal budget), but on the other, he's only included the <i>official</i> Pentagon budget, which does not include Homeland Security's budget, the CIA/NSA/etc. budgets, and, of course, money for wars, which are paid for with "special appropriations". So, though including social programs would have used up quite a few cookies, including all military expenditures would balloon that budget by at least 100% (80 cookies). <img src="{att_link}/budget-numbers.png" href="{att_link}/budget-numbers.png" scale="50%" align="center" class="frame"> The video continues by showing how taking just 5 cookies from the Pentagon ($50 Billion) could end world hunger, pay for children's healthcare and fix the US educational system, leaving a measly $350 Billion to pay for conquering the world. The next segment assuages the worry warts who think that the Islamic hordes would wash away our way of life in a tide of fanatic blood if we were to neglect our military in this way. <img src="{att_link}/military-numbers.png" href="{att_link}/military-numbers.png" scale="50%" align="center" class="frame"> The graphic above shows Ben illustrating how absolutely ridiculously out-of-proportion our military budget is compared to any other country's. Several years ago, we officially started spending more annually than all other countries in the world combined. Officially. Ben's hand is covering the label for the last column, but that's the one representing all the countries in the <i>Axis of Evil</i>---including Iran and North Korea. It's a good, short, hard look at the way our national wealth is wasted year after year---building a larger and larger military that makes our nation more and more insecure, all the while worsening the situation in almost every way on the domestic front. Since it's clearly such an important issue and easily fixed, look for this devastating discrepancy to be a "hot button" issue in the upcoming midterm elections. Yeah, right.