The way we spend our money

I was talking to my brother last night about how the united states spends its money and he mentioned how it was difficult for him to conceptualize how the budget is spent. It reminded me of an old graphic created by deviant art called Death and Taxes.


To see the full sized image, click here.





It's funny because this is from 2004 and the budget has increased substantially to well over a trillion since then.

Another thing we were talking about was the ridiculous stance our government has taken on energy. From a financial perspective alone it seems crazy to take the short term benefits of patroleum over the long terms savings of energy independence. And this is not even taking into account the financial repercussions we will face once climate change becomes a bit more pronounced. The conclusion we came to is the same old thing with every "crisis situation" in the world. We seem to be a reactionary culture that is incapable of proactively solving problems.

Amory Lovins of the Rocky Mountain Institute gave a really interesting interview on the Charlie Rose show where he talks about some of the technologies and strategies we should probably be adopting sooner than later.

On an unrelated aside, I posted some of the pictures from my recent african safari on the web via Google's free program Picasa and it was both easy and quick. For PC users looking for a great free program to do basic things with digital photographs I give my highest reccomendation.