Money for Nothing

Coyote's version of the 2010 budget

Coyote reformats a spending chart (on left) in a way which is quite thoughtful, and Tufte-compliant in terms of not lying via pictures.

It’s a pretty telling and jarring image – the Federal Government spending far enough over what we’re earned that we’d have to zero out defense and discretionary spending to be at break-even. Yikes.

And then of course, there’s this: the GAO says that there are multiple billion dollars of duplicative and wasteful spending. Of course, it’s all in that “discretionary” section above, and we should absolutely do something about it (for instance, why precisely do we even have a Federal, cabinet-level Department of Education, given that public education is uniformly a state or local issue?)

However, eliminating all of the waste in the world won’t solve the structural problem: we have a lot of government spending that does nice and noble things, that we cannot afford. Until we actually admit that we need to make major, significant cuts in the so-called “entitlement” categories, we will continue to have this problem, and we will dig ourselves further and further into debt.