Discretionary spending? Entitlement Spending? What’s the difference?
In today’s heated rhetoric, much of the conversation seems to center on what we are “entitled to.” The differences highlighting this assumed division are apparent in the current budget and national debt discussions. The numbers being used today split our current spending into - $ 1.3 Trillion discretionary spending and $2.1 Trillion entitlement spending. About $200 Billion go to pay the interest on our debt. The press and much of the public are convinced one side wants to leave the country defenseless and the other side will push our less fortunate over a cliff. While I don’t believe that either argument is accurate, I feel that both sides are trying to paint the others position as completely unreasonable, but not show why their own position is the right one. That’s for another discussion.
The bottom line is: It’s our money! While it is interesting to me and other tax payers that the expenditures go into different programs; at the end of the day, it is money that we earn and the Federal Government takes from our earnings. When you look at your pay check the government takes out what it considers its share. They split it up between Income Tax, Social Security, Medicare and a myriad of other categories. These divisions have become transparent from the governments point of view ever since they began to use the “Trust Funds” to borrow against. For us, the tax payer, it basically means the federal government gets a significant portion of our hard earned dollars.
On top of this business’s are forced to match several of the taxes you pay. This means that the company you work for has to pay the government earnings from what you earned the company. In other words they have less profit to pay the investors, who put their hard earned money into the business, or pay the workers full value for their work. While the government collects taxes using these different line items, it is still means we get smaller pay checks. I have several issues with this, but for this posting, I would rather the government was up front with us and gave us one bill to be paid.
I do have a problem with the identification of Discretionary vs. Entitlement. By splitting the expenditures this way, the government is facilitating the argument between the defense of the country against the internal support structure it has established. This is not helpful and only serves the politicians and press. The politicians use the division to play to the fears of their constituencies and the press report on the “conflict” to raise their ratings.
For those of us tax payers, it’s still our blood sweat and tears that pay for everything.
