The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities has a fun chart detailing the basics of where your tax dollars end up:
Two things: first, if our politics were rational, we’d recognize that spending a fifth of our budget on the military and defense is A) unnecessary and B) unwise. And second, our defense expenditures are almost double that of our spending on every other aspect of the social safety net. Long story short: a modest decrease in defense spending would free up enough money to make significant inroads in expanding some parts of the social safety net to millions of Americans while also bringing our defense budget to a more reasonable size. Of couse, the time for that kind of action was nearly twenty years ago at the conclusion of the Cold War. These days, asking the Pentagon to reduce its budget to merely a third of global military spending, rather than its current 48 percent, is the political equivalent of declaring your alleigence to the Osama bin HitlerStalin.
