for those who understand this stuff better than I do, please explain?

[mickeym]

This whole deficit/tax mess that the people we've elected to take care of, *can't*...

We send billions of dollars every year overseas to different countries. Is that money that the government could use against the deficit? I understand that we should help those less fortunate...but there are a lot of people in our country who are going to be way less fortunate than they are now, since the deficit problem can't seem to be solved.

Anyway. If someone wants to try to explain this to me in small words, I'd be ever so grateful.

Comments

[theditor.livejournal.com]

My understanding is that money could be used against the deficit, but it's such a small percentage of our budget it wouldn't make much difference in reducing our debt. http://foreignassistance.gov/AboutTheData.aspx

[theditor.livejournal.com]

A little bit more here: http://andrewsullivan.thedailybeast.com/2011/10/slashing-foreign-aid-to-no-budgetary-effect.html

[mickeym.livejournal.com]

Cool, thank you :) (I'll pursue it tomorrow, probably. Right now my brain is fried from programming and database homework. o_O)

[laurificus.livejournal.com]

Yeah, that's what I was gonna say. If you're talking about cutting it by a trillion dollars, foreign aid isn't really going to help that much. And also, there's probably a calculus of other benefits--you're not just helping other people; you're improving the perception of the US, and a few billion now to build sustainable infrastructure/democracies/good governance maybe prevents a few hundred billion down the line. I'm not saying it always works like that, but I think that's the hope. (Of course, I also think they're cutting the amount of money available anyway, so...)

[mickeym.livejournal.com]

I was just wondering, really. It's been years since I had any sort of class that covered any of this stuff, so I feel all confused about what goes where, and why, and how much, etc.

And don't get me wrong, I don't want to not send aid to those who need it. I just worry about those HERE who need it, too, y'know?

[jamesinboots.livejournal.com]

I concur with theditor - aid money is such a small portion (about 1%?) of the overall budget that it doesn't make much of a dent in the deficit.

And as for who's less fortunate... it's kind of relative. I found this a bit illuminating: http://www.globalrichlist.com/ It's kind of telling that an American who makes even just $1,000 USD/year is in the Top 44% in the world wealth-wise. There are people in other parts of the world who make/have less than even the poorest Americans, which is kind of scary to think about.

[mickeym.livejournal.com]

Okay, see, this is why I asked :) Because I didn't have any idea how much of whatever budget goes to whatever cause/expense/so on. Billions of dollars seems like a lot to me -- but I have no way of knowing how much of our budget is made up of that. 1% *isn't* a lot, and no, wouldn't make much of a dent.

I agree that fortune is relative -- and it's a constantly shifting relativity, to boot. Three years ago, my annual income was (including Matthew's SSI, my salary and child support) about $34K. Right now it's... about $500/mo. But I have a roof over my head, the bills are (mostly) paid, and there's food in the kitchen, so I'm more fortunate than a lot of people, here OR elsewhere, particularly since I know I have spring semester student aid coming, as well as an income tax refund -- and lots don't have those.

I'll have to go check out that link, though I think I'm going to wait for my brain to unscramble. I do NOT like programming. At all. :-/

[vickita.livejournal.com]

Yup, yup, foreign aid, like money for the arts, and a bunch of other stuff, is only a tiny bit of government spending. You could cut every bit of the discretionary spending budget, every single penny -- roads, bridges, cancer research, etc. -- and still not balance the budget. The big bucks (in terms of spending) are in defense, Medicare and Social Security. And any real solution is going to have to include revenue increases, also.

There's a very nice graphic in today's XKCD (http://xkcd.com/980/) that talks about money, from the cost of a cup of coffee at Starbuck's to the biggest big ticket items in the federal budget.

[quiet000001.livejournal.com]

And, you know, tax breaks for the wealthy are SO much more important than things like making sure some tiny percentage of our population who we've already determined really need health care, get health care...

(Granted, I would be perfectly happy if someone wanted to make sure that programs like Medicare weren't paying out inappropriately - it's my understanding that there's some indication that there's a fair amount of fraud and people who aren't really qualified and that sort of thing with Medicare/Medicaid, and I'm sure reducing that would help with the cost, but in terms of simple categories of 'things we can do with less of' medical care is NEVER going to be in my top 10.)

[mickeym.livejournal.com]

I'm constantly amazed by the sheer number of people who seem to think it's okay to lie, steal, cheat, defraud, etc. How do they sleep at night, knowing what they're doing? (Of course, the same can be asked of people like Jerry Sandusky, or Michael Vick, Bernie Madoff, etc.)

I just don't get it. At all.

[quiet000001.livejournal.com]

Oh, I know someone who used to work processing Medi-something claims, and some of them are just, like '... seriously? SERIOUSLY? We paid for that with tax dollars?' (Stuff like totally elective plastic surgery with a really obviously trivial argument for it being medically necessary. I mean, I recognize that there are legit medical reasons for things that people ALSO get done on an elective basis - but reportedly some of these you could see the procedure being submitted multiple times under different reasons until it got approved, and that's just ridiculous.)

[auroramama]

Undoubtedly some people commit fraud. Of course, some completely legitimate claims get challenged by Medicaid, and not every patient is able to fight those challenges.

When my Girl was getting chemo, every couple of months she'd get some mind-boggling phone call denying her a benefit that was just fine last month. She would be told that the chemo drug itself was covered but the cost of getting it into her body was not, or that the prior approval on her morphine had somehow disappeared and must be regenerated from scratch. The ambulance ride that took her to the hospital after she collapsed at a Friendly's restaurant -- the bill for that chased us for about a year after she was gone.

Given that Medicaid has healthy people working to prevent fraud, whereas patients have to cope with this sort of error when they're already feeling crummy, I'm willing to bet that losses due to patient fraud is more than made up for by care that's needed but isn't received.

[quiet000001.livejournal.com]

See, a better processing system would work to benefit people who actually do NEED the care at the same time as weeding out people who are frauds and taking away money from the people who need it (and also creating the social attitude that if you're getting benefits you must be a lazy so-and-so who just doesn't want to work.)

I say this after talking to various people who have actually worked within the system, who are medically competent and quite aware of the difficulties faced by people with legitimate care needs, so when they tell me 'there are things that need to be fixed that would save money while making things better for the people the system is intended to serve' I tend to believe them.

Part of such a system, quite likely, is also making available patient advocates (or making them MORE available) so that patients and their families have assistance in dealing with any issues.

Trust me, I have extensive experience with people who are severely or chronically ill and dealing with bureaucracy of all types, so I do understand quite personally how hard it can be. But I think that leaving open the loopholes that are used to defraud benefits systems actually make things WORSE, because of the way then everyone using the system becomes a suspect. If we were better at weeding out people using the system improperly in the first place, there'd be far less need for all the hassle and suspicion you face as a legitimate user asking for help, even if it's not the normal sort of help that they're used to handling.

(MickeyM can vouch for me here in terms of having experience on the trying-to-get-necessary-assistance end of things.)

Part of the specific issue with medicaid and medicare, as I understand it, is that within certain chunks of the country (I have no idea how it's divided up) much of the actual work in determining if a treatment or procedure or whatever is appropriate is contracted out to health insurance companies. Which is fine *if* it is a good health insurance company that actually has a system set up based on what's medically sensible (including a decent appeals process for unusual cases that doesn't unduly stress the patient) rather than what's economically best. Unfortunately, there do not seem to be a lot of good health insurance companies of that kind. :(

If it would actually end up saving the programs money, I don't know - but 'it's full of fraud!' is one of the lines people ALWAYS use to justify cutting funding, and frankly I'd rather whatever we do budget go to people who need it rather than people who just know how to fiddle the system, so putting some effort into sorting it out properly seems like a good plan if we want to make it harder for people to justify budget cuts to those services.

why can't the government do what we've asked it to do?

[auroramama]

Thanks for the awesome reply! I'm glad to learn from someone who knows both sides of the system.

If we spent the money to hire enough people to make the system run effectively, we might spend our way out of this unemployment hole. Enough patient advocates for everyone who needs one (especially everyone who is sick and alone), a non-profit system for determining medical necessity and a fair appeals system with enough staff to do timely reviews, better computer security for patient information...

Throw in a fully-staffed EPA that does frequent safety and pollutant inspections, an FDA that safety-tests imported foods and has permanent staff at the giant processing plants, and there are thousands of jobs carrying out tasks that are already supposed to be getting done. We voted for legislators who passed these laws, but there's no one to implement them.

While I'm dreaming, how about internalizing the invisible costs of factory farming, monoculture agribusiness, and centralized food processing? If the true costs and risks were being borne by the conglomerates, and subsidies were set up to benefit small farms with diverse land use, we could send a million people back to small-scale farming. People want to do it, but it's been made almost impossible.

Sorry for the rant, but it just kills me that government hiring in a recession is considered controversial. There are things that business won't do, and staffing up against low demand is one of them. Only government can do that.

[mickeym.livejournal.com]

Like I said to someone else upthread, this is why I asked. Because I don't know what percentage of the US budget is discretionary spending and so on.

Y'know, it's funny. I won't have an issue if (assuming I had a job *g*) my taxes were raised, if the money was going to increase the budget for things like defense, Medicare, and Social Security. Or for the aforementioned roads, bridges, education grants, etc. I won't care if taxes were raised if it meant that teachers were paid better.

What I can't understand is the people who have millions, and don't feel they should have to pay more taxes. If the 'little people', the middle-and-lower classes, can/would do it...what's their problem?

[pensnest]

There's an interesting post here which gives information in graphs and tables, and a quiz at the side.

According to the pie chart in the first part, Social Security is 21.3%, Defense 19.?% (it's a bit blurry) and Foreign Aid 0.9% of the Federal budget. So not a huge deal, particularly since (as I understand it) there's a lot of budget which isn't Federal, ie at state level.

Alternative sets of figures come in rather differently, anyway. I found a table at fullfact.org (of which I know nothing) which says that the US's aid as a percentage of its Gross National Income is just 0.21%. On the same table the UK gives 0.56%, Canada gives 0.33%, Germany 0.38% and Japan 0.2%. Apparently at the Gleneagles G8 summit the countries actually signed up to give 0.7% of GNI. Hah. Norway is the most generous in percentage terms, giving 1.1%—of course, the actual sum is dwarfed by what the USA gives.

Here's the link: http://fullfact.org/factchecks/Daily_Mail_Express_Daily_Telegraph_international_aid_UK_most_generous_G8_OECD-2738

I'm glad my country gives a decent amount of foreign aid. I see it as a macro version of giving to charity—if you only have enough to keep yourself going, you can't help other people, but if you're well-off (and certainly by comparison with much of the world, the UK and the US are very well off, despite current difficulties) you *ought* to give. Of course, there are newspapers here, like the Daily Mail which inspired this particular page into existence, which rant about how we are giving millions! Millions! to Johnny Foreigner, but they are crap newspapers with no sense or conscience. I bet there are media in the US doing exactly the same thing, raising a fuss about giving all this money away, instead of raising a fuss about rich people and corporations paying puny levels of tax and giving *jobs* away to other countries.