2013 report on consolidating anti-poverty programs WARNING PDF.

Obama's White House in 2013 proposed a consolidation of Federal anti poverty programs and cut to redundant management without impacting the money going into the hands of the people who need it. Those cuts totaled $24 billion a year. That same year, NASA got $17.7 billion. We spend roughly $80 billion per year on corn and ethanol subsidies, $130 billion on fossil fuel subsidies, we spent $8 trillion on TARP, roughly $2 Trillion so far on Iraq, and I could go on from here.

The problem as I see it is this. Most Americans don't have any clue what their tax dollars do. That is a flat out failure of the media as their role of watchdogs. Maybe we can say education as well, but more of a news issue IMO. As I said in a rant that got badged last week, the important stuff is boring. Regional zoning and transportation planning commission reports don't even make the news, but the derby hats of celebrities are all over the local media. The federal R&D budget was amazingly easy to find and is roughly $140 billion in 2016 out of a budget of $3.5 Trillion. That basic R&D is what builds the engineering of tomorrow. It's peanuts and we can fund a whole decade of it by killing the F-35. Which gets into a Guns vs Butter debate that I don't want to hijack a thread for. The point is the money is there for the stuff that matters if we pay attention, the costs are minuscule, and it is building foundations that will have benefits for more than a generation.