So, now that I’m kinda grown up and got a mortgage and such, I’ve been spending time putting together a budget to make sure everything works out, especially now that I have some concrete numbers for the mortgage. When doing the budget in Microsoft Money, it helpfully gives a pie graph of where our expenses are going. I noticed that a very large chunk of it was going toward our mortgage interest. It was about 20% of our monthly expenses. (Especially near the beginning of the loan, the vast majority of the payment is just paying off interest.)
And then, I noticed that over 28% of our expenses were taxes. Wow.
A mortgage just feels so big, it really puts the taxes in perspective.
What do we cut first? Education, NASA, or national defense? ;-)
And how much would you be paying for your mortgage if you didn’t get the land gratis (or almost gratis; I don’t know what kinds of loopholes you, guys, used this time).
And that of course was really moi. Because I’m mean like that. :)
Social Security. I’d really much rather take the $80 a week going to that and invest it myself. I think that I can do a better job with my money than the government can.
I think that there are a lot of savings that can be made with education. I don’t think that the federal government needs to be involved much at all, and I’m not really a big fan of public schools in general.
There are more places for savings as well… I think that our government does a lot more than it needs to.
It depends what you think the role of social security is. If you look at the nation’s history, or the history of economics in general, there’s a certain demonstrable lack of stability. I tend to think of social security as the “old people don’t starve when the nation goes to hell” fund. Of course, the way social security dollars are managed, the government isn’t even achieving that goal, so there’s a lot of complaining to be done on all sides of the issue.
Education is tricky. I don’t mind children in rich families having an advantage, but the opportunities of all children must be “good enough” to make it decently well in society, and all things being equal the upper echelons of society shouldn’t be too, too far from an even demographic distribution. There’s already a serious disparity in educational opportunities between cities. Increased localization stands to widen that gap. There’s a subjective worldview in that paragraph, but few and far between are the Libertarians who are willing to punt the notion of equal opportunity.