Your tax dollars go to all kinds of things far worse than helping people survive. The Protestant work ethic cannot die soon enough. Never once have I cared if someone is "lazy". A rich person may work very hard exploiting others, that's far worse than not working at all.
I feel like even a lot of atheists get trapped in this Protestant mindset because we've been raised in this environment (like a fish trying to detect water), but if you think it through you'll see it doesn't actually make sense. Especially under capitalism.
But the Protestant work ethic is good! There are hard-working people who are still poor, but there are very few situations where you, or anyone else, will be better off being lazy instead of working. (Hard manual labor that harms you permanently in some way, like old coal miners, is probably the biggest exception.)
In the counterfactual, where these hard-working poor people are lazy instead, they aren't suddenly rich or even the same as they are now. They're almost certainly worse off.
I was raised with a strong work ethic. Do I believe that working hard is the only reason I am where I am now? No, of course not. But if I didn't work hard my life would be worse in every way imaginable! Regardless of how lucky or unlucky your life is, having a solid work ethic will always always always make you happier. Work is not inherently 'bad' in some way, and neither is having to work to live and to learn and to have a good life.
I don't agree, it's a one way ticket to exploitation. All of the richest people I know (and I mean really rich, like over $100M in net worth) are from rich families and have inherited their wealth. Most are lazy but the ones that "work hard" produce exploitation at scale to further enrich themselves at the expense of their workers.
> I was raised with a strong work ethic
Most Americans are raised like this, which is why they are so easy to exploit and why they are against basic social safety nets and other things that are generally good for society.
The fact is other than inheritance, the easiest way (and really only way) to make a lot of money is to talk well. Talk well and get as close to rich people as you can, then talk some more. Is that "hard work"? It's wasting your life for sure, but it doesn't compare to pouring concrete.
I recommend everyone read this and try not to end up "clueless" as it really is the worst option of the bunch:
A significant chunk of the "defense" spending is VA. Interest kind of shouldn't count? It's the cost of borrowing for our past spending on, you guessed it, mostly social programs.
Defense spending used to be a higher percentage of our budget than now, so if anything you should assign more of that to the debt.
About 16% of the spending is straight up defense spending and about 5% is the VA. I personally think it’s crazy to severe them and wish the va was part of the DoD. But people can disagree.
You only get to a majority by doing two misleading things… blaming the national debt on entitlements instead of general fund deficits, and counting Social Security (which is funded by its own payroll taxes) as a welfare program.
The actual means-tested safety net (Medicaid, food assistance, SSI, housing) is only around 15% to 20% of federal spending.
Social security is a welfare program. As is Medicare. They are odd regressive forms of them but they are tax funded welfare programs full stop.
As for fund deficits there are basically 4 things the federal government pays for, social security, Medicare, Medicaid and the military. Everything else is noise or interest. So when accounting for the debt load of that interest it only makes sense to assign some part of it to those 4 things.
Stop repeatedly changing definitions and accounting rules until the desired conclusion becomes true. It's tiresome.
In U.S. policy terminology, Social Security and Medicare are social insurance programs. Medicaid, SNAP, SSI, and housing assistance are means tested safety net programs.
Yes, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and defense make up a majority of federal spending. But your conclusion only works by relabeling Social Security and Medicare as welfare, dismissing the rest of government as noise, and then assigning an arbitrary share of decades of accumulated interest expense to those programs.
Your last move is especially egregious. Federal debt reflects the cumulative gap between all federal spending and all federal revenue over time. You can't figure out what caused it by looking at today's largest spending categories.
Social Security's current shortfall is primarily the result of a demographic imbalance Congress has known about for decades and repeatedly declined to fully address. That makes it particularly silly to retroactively assign some arbitrary share of the rest of the federal government's accumulated debt to Social Security.
The accurate way to talk about this is that Social Security and the major health programs are a very large share of federal spending. "The social safety net is most of the budget" is a conclusion manufactured by your definitions.
Social safety net isn’t rigorously defined in the first place so acting like the definitions are being twisted isn’t a reasonable counter argument.
Pick what labels you want to throw social security, Medicare and Medicaid into. That bucket is about 46% of federal spending and increasing fast. It’s quite easy to get to 50% without including debt payments on things that look like social safety nets (snap, aca subsidies etc).
More importantly as you point out social security, Medicare and Medicaid are growing as a percentage of the budget (and a percentage of gdp) and are not discretionary spending. Those (and defense) are the only places we have any lever to change US debt other than increasing collection. And it’s not politically viable to change them.
Social Security is kind of a "zero-sum gain," if you believe people, because we are supposedly being paid back what we spent a lifetime, having withdrawn from our wages.
I feel like even a lot of atheists get trapped in this Protestant mindset because we've been raised in this environment (like a fish trying to detect water), but if you think it through you'll see it doesn't actually make sense. Especially under capitalism.