Building the budget from the bottom up

Ok, in my last post I suggested we build the Federal budget from the bottom up until we reached the “magic number” of $2.217 trillion – the amount of money the Federal government brought in last year from all sources.

So let’s just look at this current year, ignoring for the moment some of the looming($100 trillion +) unfunded liabilities in future years.

First, of course, we would have to pay money the government is legally obligated to pay, which includes:

• Interest on the national debt: $188 billion

• Military veteran’s pensions: $59 billion

• Civil servant pensions: $70 billion

• Social Security: $730 billion

• Medicare: $492 billion

• Medicaid: $271 billion

Those obligations already total $1.81 trillion. We only have about $400 billion left to run all the rest of the Federal government, including paying people’s salaries and running their office buildings. What shall we fund next?

Military spending? Let’s cut its current budget of $685 billion in half to only $342 billion. That would leave us only $58 billion for everything else.

Running the legislative branch (Congress) would cost us another $2.8 billion even if we cut their current budget in half. Now we have $55.2 billion left.

Running the judiciary branch (courts) would cost us another $3.1 billion even if we cut their current budget in half. Now we have $52.1 billion left.

Running the executive branch will bust our budget. The Department of Homeland Security alone would cost $56 billion. The Department of Agriculture spends $95 billion a year. The Department of Education spends $68 billion a year. The Department of Health and Human Services spends $700 billion a year. The Department of Housing and Urban Development spends $40 billion a year. The Department of Justice spends $25 billion a year. The Department of Labor spends $40 billion a year.

There are another several dozen executive branch agencies, but I think you get the point. Even if we cut in half the budgets of the departments just listed above it would still add over $500 billion to the budget, and we only had $58 billion more to play with in the first place, once we had spent the money we were legally obligated to spend.

This exercise kind of concentrates the mind, doesn’t it? It makes it clear that the sort of baby steps being argued about so passionately in Congress now are in fact largely meaningless in the face of our budget problems. Cut the budget of every government department and agency in half and we still don’t bring in enough revenue to pay the bills.