I’m fairly irritated at myself to report that I just wasted half an hour of my life looking through Rand Paul’s report in detail, because I was curious how he managed to arrive at $900 billion dollars. I spent some time with Google Sheets and trying to de-obfuscate his numbers. I’ll cut to the punch line. It’s:
$659 billion in interest on the national debt
$236 billion in “improper federal payments” – basically, money that the federal government erroneously paid out to people it realized it shouldn’t have ever given it to in the first place. This number is, apparently, actually real, and I sort of agree with Paul that it sounds big enough to be a problem. I will note that the number went monotonically up all through the Trump years, up to a peak of over $300 billion, and monotonically down through all through the Biden years.
$851 million on all the rest of this culture-war bullshit aside from those two single line items
Or, to put it in visual form:
Everything in any news story, about Egypt or lobster tanks or transgender monkeys or whatever, is part of the orange slice of the chart.
I’m fairly irritated at myself to report that I just wasted half an hour of my life looking through Rand Paul’s report in detail, because I was curious how he managed to arrive at $900 billion dollars. I spent some time with Google Sheets and trying to de-obfuscate his numbers. I’ll cut to the punch line. It’s:
Or, to put it in visual form:
Everything in any news story, about Egypt or lobster tanks or transgender monkeys or whatever, is part of the orange slice of the chart.
Good post. Thanks for doing that.