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The newly elected President of the United States, Donald Trump has said that he plans to expand the military budget of the United States by $54 billion in order to boost the United States’ depleted military after more than a decade-long war in the Middle East, Asia, and North Africa. The question, everyone (both Trump critics and non-critics) asking is, where the money might come from as Mr. Trump has so far poured cold waters on traditional Republican plans to cut on social security and Medicare. In this article and next, we look at the US budgets in greater details to help our readers to see, where the money goes in the US. Our data is based on numbers from 2015 budget.
- The size of the US budget is enormous at $3.8 trillion.
- The spending can be broken down in three discrete categories; mandatory spending ($2.45 trillion or 64.63 percent of the budget), discretionary spending ($1.1 trillion or 29.34 percent), and interests on federal debt ($229.15 billion or 6.03 percent).
We would now look at the discretionary spending (DS) at greater details,
- The biggest portion of the discretionary spending goes to military ($598.49 billion or 53.71 percent of DS)
- The rest can be broken down in 10 major categories; government ($72.89 billion or 6.54 percent of DS), education ($69.98 billion or 6.28 percent of DS), Medicare and health ($66.03 billion or 5.93 percent of DS), Veteran’s benefits ($65.32 billion or 5.86 percent of DS), housing and community ($63.24 billion or 5.68 percent of DS), International affairs ($40.94 billion or 3.67 percent of DS), energy and environment ($39.14 billion or 3.51 percent of DS), science ($29.7 billion or 2.67 percent of DS), social security, unemployment, and labor ($29.13 billion or 2.61 percent of DS), transportation ( $26.28 billion or 2.36 percent of DS), and food & agriculture ($13.13 billion or 1.18 percent of DS)
These discretionary spending levels are set each year by the congress and would be much easier to add or subtract money in these categories.
It would interesting to see, from where the new government finds the money to increase military spending and to keep other promises if the budget size is not increased.
