A very nice chart from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities:
A European made the point to me a few weeks ago that even though the political constituency for the enormous defense budget is huge, the Pentagon (and defense-related programs in the Department of Energy) doesn’t really provide a service people use. If we did something crazy like resolved to limited defense spending to twice the combined budget of Russia and China and reallocated the money to other priorities people would probably feel, on an intuitive level, that they were getting more “bang” for their tax “buck.”
The other related point is that a ton of tax money is going to health care, and a very large proportion of health care spending is waste—either medically useless or counterproductive—and this would look even bigger if we could see implicit tax subsidies.
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