>>http://news.investors.com/031014-692704-us-government-payments-to-individuals-70-of-budget.htm
>
>Implicit in the article is the notion that a high percentage of payments to individuals is somehow a bad thing.
>Actually, I think that the reverse is true.
>When it makes payments to individuals, the government does the least harm.
>Government is most harmful when it kills and maims people or otherwise disrupts their lives.
>
>Bush spent over a trillion while slaughtering hundreds of thousands of civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan and rendering millions homeless.
>He also created a massive "terror" bureaucracy that endures today.
>That lowered all the other percentages in a hurry- but it also helped turn the federal surplus that he inherited into a huge deficit.
>Personally, I'd have preferred to see US citizens get the trillion that we borrowed from the Chinese to finance the slaughter and mayhem.
>The author doesn't seem to agree with me.
>Obviously, he wasn't one of the people slaughtered, or he might have a different view.
>
>By ending those wars and shrinking the military, as he promised to do, Obama has driven up the percentages for the good payments while reducing the deficit.
>Had Obama been a better president, the good payments would represent a much larger percentage and a larger piece of the non-personal payouts would have gone to repairing our decaying roads and bridges.
>Obamacare would have been rolled into Medicare - increasing payouts there- we'd have de-commissioned more nukes, more military bases would have been closed, Homeland Security and DNI would have been scuttled and groups like the CIA, NSA, etc. would be working on much lower budgets.

I hadn't thought about it before, but that number struck me as high.

Good or bad, it is income redistribution - hence the wry thread title. The bureaucracy to do that redistribution is not cost-free.