A Tiny Sliver of the Budget Pie?

 

One of my "Eternal Truths" is that Politics by Meme is only slight more evolved than Politics by Bumper Sticker. Political memes are, by and large, useless, except that they have a fascinating ability to polarize your readers and start click wars. They rarely contain any useful information. As an illustration of this, I have copied a meme that has been making the rounds of my liberal friends. Before we get too far into this, I should state that I'm neither a Democrat nor a Republican, but I do vote in every election.

This chart shows a pie chart of the money allegedly spent by the U.S. Government, including a sliver of a wedge for "Food Stamps." At first, I thought that the author simply used numbers from some previous, unspecified year, but the more I look at it, the more I think the person was just pulling the numbers out of some nether parts of the anatomy.

The chart below is from FY 2014, using as a source: "Fiscal Year 2014 Budget of the U.S. Government." (Table S-11) United States Office of Management and Budget. I made the chart with the spreadsheet in NeoOffice.

 As a point of information, the "Food Stamp" program, which is actually the "Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP)", is administered by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, under the Food and Nutrition Service. According to this table (http://www.fns.usda.gov/sit…/default/files/…/SNAPsummary.pdf) SNAP Benefits cost $74 billion in 2014. The Department of Defense cost $526 billion.

As a minor point of reference, I'd like to point out that the 2014 budget for NASA was $17.7 billion, or about a quarter of the SNAP costs.

It probably occurred to you that $74 billion would probably make a wedge somewhat bigger that a "tiny orange sliver."

I am not here to argue that $74 billion would or would not break the budget. That's not the topic of this blog, but you're welcome to post your opinions on the matter in the comments. And there are certainly just as many conservative memes in the universe of social networks which are just as vacuous of honest data.

One take-away point here might be to double-check the facts any time one of your social media friends posts a political meme, but then you'd spend all day doing nothing else. The alternate take-way point would be to assume that all political memes are devoid of usable facts, and you will probably be pretty close to the mark.