Posted by
Noam D. Gear on Wednesday, February 18, 2009 9:44:00 PM
After a long period digging up these numbers from government spending data and census data, I am pleased to present the graphic below.
The meat of the graph points out this. In 2005, the government paid $22 Billion to employ 300,000 people to move $1.4 Trillion from people who had that money to people who "needed" it. The average salary for such a job was $70,000, and this transfer of social entitlement (money and services) was 11% of the entire economy in 2005.
In contrast, 2005 also saw the government employ 670,000 people in the military, and the average salary there was $47,000. The non-salary budget for National Defense was $0.57 Trillion, of which the war in Iraq was about $0.15 Trillion, or roughly 11% of social entitlement spending in that year. On top of that, we pay much less money to soldiers than we do to the 300,000 paper pushers who manage the Federal dole.
