OH? I think you're looking at the wrong budget.
United States federal budget - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
According to this military spending is 23% while social security and medicaid/medicaid alone are 39%
Social security and M/M are not d
iscretionary social programs. They are programs funded by their own taxes. They're run a surplus every year. They are fully funded until 2039 and that's without taking into account the IOUs they hold.
Since we pay directly into the fund and expect to receive benefits in the future from the fund they are not classified as discretionary.
Most honest people would classify the 'social programs' as those such as welfare, foodstamps, school meals, section 8 housing, EIC...
In other words social programs where low income people receive handouts that the rest of us pay for.
Those are discretionary social programs.... funds for them are determined in each budget and they are paid out of the general fund.
In the 2010 budget there is $1.4 trillion in discretionary spending.
The department of defense is 663.7 Billion of that... almost half. Add in another 100 Billion for Veterans admin and Homeland security
HHS, Education, and HUD are only around 160 Billion combined and that's everything... not just the welfare type social programs.
As I said. The welfare type social programs are a drop in the bucket compared to defense.
If we had a payroll tax just to fund Defense it would be over 10%. Maybe that's what we should do... force defense spending to be funded with a specific tax.
Then we'd see how many Cons want to keep spending 700 Billion plus a year on it.
Andy