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We’ve All Been Thrown Under the Omnibus
This latest omnibus spending package is just one more nail in the coffin of the American way of life. Forget about the details. The good news is six months from now, this will all fade, like trying to remember a nightmare a half hour after you wake up. Has anyone been talking about the Deficit Reduction Act lately?
I’m a simple man. I need to wrap my head around these figures with some simple math. Any small business owner has one thing in common. You need to control the money flow. The first thing I noticed when trying to crunch these federal dollars is online mortgage calculators can’t handle all those zeros. So, all my numbers will only be in billions because any dollar on the federal level, less than a billion, is insignificant.
The feds and all the talking heads love to muddy the waters, not only with such large numbers, but also confusing funding vs. revenue, borrowing, smoke and mirrors, etc. What it comes down to is every dollar spent needs to be paid by an American citizen at some point. The straight up taxes are obvious. Our unseen contributions come from every corporation that must pass the cost down to the consumer, otherwise, why be in business if you can’t make money? For instance, I program drinking water systems. My costs and fees have gone up. Your water bill will go up proportionally to match.
Because some of these bills are spread over years, don’t forget we are still paying for previous years and the future will pay for this year.
Congress loves to separate mandatory spending vs. discretionary spending. I don’t know anyone that contributes very much to discretionary taxes. Well, outside of my wife’s occasional scratch ticket. It’s okay because whenever she buys one and tells me, she wins. There is only one balance that counts. How much money went out.
One overlooked fact is that there is no debt ceiling and there is no budget. Instead of a debt ceiling, it should be called a 
debt elevator. A budget that has a deficit every year is an insane, unrealistic, fictitious, so-called budget! It reminds me of the bald kid in the Matrix, “Do not try and bend the spoon, that’s impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth … There is no spoon.”
The population of the United States is 0.333 billion people. According to CNBC, 61% of Americans pay no federal taxes bringing the contributing population down to 0.13 billion people. The 2022 spending is $6,600B. Just for 2022, we all need to contribute $50,769.23 without interest ($0.000051B).
There is definitely interest owed on this money. $6,600B minus $3,400B revenue equals $3,200B borrowed or printed. Let’s just use conservative estimates of 3% over 30 years would equal $1,657B in interest giving us taxpayers a total debt for this year alone of $63,515.38 each.
If you add your 2022 federal taxes along with all your inflated costs contributing to federal revenue, how much of that pays off your $63,000 tax burden? I’m sure most of us have not reached that threshold.
Compared to previous years this $63k per person is high. It is my guess, in future years, it will be low. There will come a time when we can no longer service the interest on these loans. A further watering down of our currency is inevitable. Our 401k’s have already lost half their buying power with inflation and lost returns. We are on a straight path to becoming Venezuela. It’s only a matter of time.
Published in General
Rand Paul was saying that we spent more than the next 8 countries combined. Are we any more secure?
I suspect we have passed the point of diminishing returns.
Congress doesn’t bother to examine, debate, and vote on the 12 appropriations bills any more. The defense bill should have been considered on its own merits, just like all the others should. There’s more than enough in there to consider cutting, as I’m sure individual Congresscritters loaded it up with pork for their districts.
I’m sure every member of Congress who has a base in their district can tell you why their base is the most important in the whole nation. Or maybe they don’t even claim that, but tell you how vital it is to the local economy, as if the military’s function is to be a jobs program.
There is always wasteful spending in the military. But, there is a whole lot more other areas that should be cut first even if we had the money to spend.
Edit – sorry, was adding a link but had the wrong year. You can find this year. Got to run.
Cuts to the military alone won’t balance the budget, but you can’t get there without cutting the DoD. Defense, Social Security, and Medicare make up an enormous part of the budget and if we’re unwilling to make changes there, we cannot balance the budget.
Not Defense. I think it’s down to something like 10% of the federal budget, and one of the few things the federal government is supposed to do, unlike Social Security and Medicare.
The wife and I regularly tell ourselves how lucky we are that we decided not to have children. To leave this future to them. With luck I will not live to see it. If I do I doubt I will live through it.
It takes more than the Omnibus not passing. It takes a government that has a fiscal responsibility. Some how the political class has convinced itself it is beyond the law of finance and economics. Maybe because the cause or effect is not direct or maybe because it really does not matter how thing fall apart as long as they steal enough to be the rulers of hell. Still eventually this country will self destruct like all the others before it. I just hate seeing it in my life time.
If Defense is getting $800 Billion just from this bill, wouldn’t that mean the whole federal budget is $8 TRILLION?
What does Defense get mean? I have seen stuff that is considered defence spending and it does not seem very defense like.
It’s about half of the “discretionary” budget; i.e., what Congress votes on each year. If you include “mandatory” items like social security, medicare, etc., it’s only about 10%.
Fine, but 10 times 800 Billion is 8 TRILLION. Is the whole Federal Budget up to 8 TRILLION? I guess maybe it could be next year, but that would be a very big jump over just a few years.