| Kasz216 said:
IF youa dded up Department of Defence, VA AND OTHER and coutned it all as that.... (Which it obviously isn't) You still aren't there. |
First of all, I feel I have to point out that he said income tax, not total spending. The US took in $2.3 trillion in revenue in 2011, against $3.6 trillion in expenses. So if you factor that in, it turns out that that 20% spent on the department of defense, alone, jumps up to 31.3%. Add in VA, and you get 39.1%. It's not hard to believe that another 6-7% of total expenses is spent on the various other military-related expenses.
Anyway, that wasn't the reason I wanted to post in response. I just thought I'd do a bit of a comparison with spending here in Australia (Jul 2010 - Jun 2011).
Just to quickly do the conversions, assuming that numbers listed are *all* of the numbers, starting at the top and working clockwise...
Community services and culture: 2.45%
Health: 16.08%
General government services: 26.26%
Industry and workforce: 4.16%
Education: 9.33%
Defence: 5.94%
Infrastructure, transport and energy: 3.55%
Social security and welfare: 32.51%
Definitely interesting. We spend more on social security and welfare, we spend FAR less on defence, and we actually care enough to notice how much we spend on education.
The really interesting one, though, is Health. We spend less on health as a proportion of spending than you, despite having a robust public health system. But just to make sure our comparison is fair, I decided to do some conversions. Total government expenses in 2011 in the US was $3.601 trillion, so health and human services got 24% of that, or $864 billion. Per capita, that's US$2754. In Australia, we spent $56.88 billion on health. Per capita, that's AU$2480. Anyway, just an interesting comparison. I'm sure there's some factors I haven't accounted for, like the "human services" part.
Anyway, notice how much (proportionally) we spend on social security, compared with you? Interesting, given that Australia now has a higher GDP, didn't go into recession due to the GFC, and has lower unemployment than America does. Oh, and we tax the rich more (top rate is 45%, and it kicks in earlier than America's top rate) and the poor pay 0% tax. We also have less public debt (30% of GDP vs 100% of GDP). Americans pay $7336 per capita in tax (includes all taxes, including corporate tax, for instance), vs Australians paying $15,258 per capita in tax. We have a lower gini coefficient (meaning less income inequality), a larger per capita labour force, a lower percentage living in poverty, a longer life expectancy - 81.2 vs America's 78.2 - which makes us 6th highest life expectancy in the world, and our country is rated as more democratic (we're 6th with 9.22, vs US in 19th with 8.11, on the democracy index).
As I think I said before in this thread (or maybe it was in the "rich getting richer" thread), maybe America should be looking at Australia as a model. We seem to have it worked out relatively well.
