One thing that should immediately pop out at even the casual observer: the traditional bugaboos of the right (social services for poor people, welfare, etc.) are a tiny, tiny minority of the budget. You can cut them down to an expenditure of 0, and you won't really change the bottom line.<p>If we're going to come to terms with the national deficit, we're going to have to accept the fact that military, social security and medicare expenditures are going to have to shrink. The problem is not poor people: it's old people and wars.
Unfortunately the colour spectrum is unfriendly to those of us with red-green colour blindness: it's hard to differentiate between positive and negative percentage changes without looking at the tooltips. Aside from that, nice treemap.
Some Observations, I always find it interesting how the break it up.<p>1. Normally the FBI & DOE are not considered national defense<p>2. Why is Medicare separate from health?<p>3. Why are veterans benefits & Military Retirement not considered national defense<p>This diagram is very misleading as criminal investigations is squirreled away under Administration. From this breakdown you can't actually tell how much is being spent on each top level category, which defeats the purpose of this type of graph.
Next book on my reading list is The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, so that I can finally understand all of this Economic mess the world is in. Of course it won't give me a full understand, but I have been told it will send me in the right direction.<p>Recently, I have been trying to understand what exactly a dollar is. From what I can tell, its pretty useless.<p>I've determined that money != wealth.
Related: <a href="http://www.wallstats.com/deathandtaxes/" rel="nofollow">http://www.wallstats.com/deathandtaxes/</a><p>I always thought this was a pretty good visual representation of budget distribution. Note this reflects the 2010 budget, not the proposed 2011 budget.
They should cut military spending and focus more on nuclear type weapons, sure they will no longer have the same power in tactical ground warfare but it would be basically saying, sure you may be able to out maneuver us now but we can defiantly blow you off the face of the earth if you try.