Note To Our Elected Officials: Follow MLK's Advice

[Igel]

2. 2011 budget outlays

About $700 billion for defense. Some of this is salaries.

About $835 billion for Medicare/Medicaid. This doesn't count state spending.

About $725 billion for Social Security.

Unemployment, stimulus, student loans, education funding, environmental funding, food stamps and tax credits, NIH funding, and lots of other programs are wedged in the $470 other mandatory programs and in the $650 discretionary programs.

Then there was the nearly $227 billion in interest on the national debt.

Don't know if MLK would have considered Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, NIH/NSF funding, foodstamps and tax credits, unemployment or the environment to be "social uplift" or not. However it sort of makes you wonder what falls in that category if they don't.