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"Both of those programs also got off to relatively slow starts but now are massive components of the federal budget. Persons served by Medicare mushroomed from 7 million in 1967 to 27 million in 2002.67 Collectively, the entitlement programs of Social Security ($488 billion), Medicaid ($300 billion), and Medicare ($176 billion) now make up almost half of the federal budget. Feeling entided to all this, we think we are also entided to happiness." - Charles Barber, Comfortably Numb: How Psychiatry Is Medicating a Nation (Get the book.)

"Krimsky writes that it could take more than a thousand years to complete a full testing program, "an effort that would involve a level of complexity that could easily overwhelm our most advanced testing systems and surely our federal budget." More than three thousand man-made chemicals get added to food products in the United States (for a variety of reasons: texture, taste, color, appearance, odor, flavor, or just to get you "addicted," as you'll see later on)." - Brenda Watson and Leonard Smith, The Detox Strategy: Vibrant Health in 5 Easy Steps (Get the book.)

"Just the bill for the prescription drugs used by the elderly covered by Medicare, a benefit that began in 2006, was expected to rise so fast that it would account for 5 percent of the federal budget in 2020. In all, federal, state, and local governments paid for more than 45 percent of the nation's health care in 2005. That meant that a working person without health insurance was paying taxes that covered the cost of medical care for the poor, the elderly, veterans, prison inmates, and public employees yet would be on his own if he got sick." - Melody Petersen, Our Daily Meds: How the Pharmaceutical Companies Transformed Themselves into Slick Marketing Machines and Hooked the Nation on Prescription Drugs (Get the book.)

"Collectively, the entitlement programs of Social Security ($488 billion), Medicaid ($300 billion), and Medicare ($176 billion) now make up almost half of the federal budget. Feeling entided to all this, we think we are also entided to happiness." - Charles Barber, Comfortably Numb: How Psychiatry Is Medicating a Nation (Get the book.)

"That kind of money probably isn't going to come out of the federal budget any time soon. But we may not need that much, considering that much of the research drug companies now underwrite goes toward "experimercials," clinical trials aimed at increasing market share rather than increasing medical knowledge. If federal and private health insurance programs set aside .ooc percent of the two trillion dollars we now spend on health care, the AHRQ would have a ten-billion-dollar endowment." - Shannon Brownlee, Overtreated: Why Too Much Medicine Is Making Us Sicker and Poorer (Get the book.)

"The growth of the state is best illustrated by its cost to the taxpayer, that is, the size of federal budget. The following figures are in nominal dollars. In fiscal 1941, before the United States entered World War II, the budget was $13.6 billion; in 2001, the cost of the war on drugs alone was $19 billion. In 1942, the federal budget more than doubled, to $35.1 billion; and in 1943, it was $78.5 billion. In the next thirty-six years, the budget increased about sixteen times, to $1.65 trillion in 1998. According to James M." - Thomas Szasz, The Medicalization of Everyday Life: Selected Essays (Get the book.)

"But even after the Cold War was over, the federal budget continued to rise, from $1.14 trillion in 1989 to $1.38 trillion in 1992. The Great Society was merely the domestic wing of America's new system of imperial finance. Johnson offered more bread and more circuses than any president before him. The five-year cost of administering the Great Society programs was estimated at $305.7 billion (in 2005 inflation-adjusted dollars). This does not include the $250 billion in college loans and grants to 29 million students since 1965 (see Figure 8.3)." - William Bonner, Addison Wiggin, Empire of Debt: The Rise of an Epic Financial Crisis (Get the book.) "When the Vietnam War ended, however, federal spending continued to go up. The federal budget had been $184 billion in 1969 at the height of the military spending. In 1972, it rose to $231 billion. In 1969, the federal government actually ran a surplus of $3 billion. By 1972, with the war winding down, we expected to see the surpluses continue; but instead the surplus turned into a deficit of $23 billion. The empire grew, and kept growing. Before launching the attack on the USSR, June 22, 1941, Hitler remarked that the Soviet Union was like a rickety old house." - William Bonner, Addison Wiggin, Empire of Debt: The Rise of an Epic Financial Crisis (Get the book.)

"That kind of money probably isn't going to come out of the federal budget any time soon. But we may not need that much, considering that much of the research drug companies now underwrite goes toward "experimercials," clinical trials aimed at increasing market share rather than increasing medical knowledge. If federal and private health insurance programs set aside .ooc percent of the two trillion dollars we now spend on health care, the AHRQ would have a ten-billion-dollar endowment." - Shannon Brownlee, Overtreated: Why Too Much Medicine Is Making Us Sicker and Poorer (Get the book.)

"By 2005, Social Security and Medicare took up 27 percent of the federal budget. While the program was relatively young, it was a novel idea and controversy surrounded the question of whether the program paid out enough based on the required payroll deductions people paid in. Little concern was given to whether it could remain solvent in the long term." - William Bonner, Addison Wiggin, Empire of Debt: The Rise of an Epic Financial Crisis (Get the book.)

"In 1942, the federal budget more than doubled, to $35.1 billion; and in 1943, it was $78.5 billion. In the next thirty-six years, the budget increased about sixteen times, to $1.65 trillion in 1998. According to James M. Buchanan, professor of economics at George Mason University and 1986 Nobel laureate in economics, "In the seven decades from 1900 to 1970, total government spending in real terms increased forty times over, attaining a share of one-third in national product." - Thomas Szasz, The Medicalization of Everyday Life: Selected Essays (Get the book.)

"However, as Pamela Bailey noted in her speech, "The new reality, unfortunately, when you look at the federal budget, is that there will be no federal funding available to FDA — either this year or in the foreseeable future — to focus on cosmetics." Pause. "That's because cosmetics and personal care products are the very safest products that FDA regulates. But we also know that industry needs FDA as the tough cop on the beat to protect us, and to reassure consumers." Spin Cycle It's an interesting turn of phrase, "industry needs FDA as the tough cop on the beat to protect us." - Stacy Malkan, Not Just a Pretty Face: The Ugly Side of the Beauty Industry (Get the book.)

"If Washington reported the finances of the United States using Generally Accepted Accounting Procedures—the methodology that public companies are required to use—instead of recording a $318 billion deficit in 2005, the federal budget gap would have been $3.5 trillion, or more than ten times as much, according to USA Today. Hence, when the same newspaper noted that "[t]he nation could soon face its worst fiscal crisis since at least 1983, when Social Security bordered on bankruptcy," the federal entitlement system clearly had become a cancer, growing more dangerous with each passing year." - Michael J. Panzner, Financial Armageddon: Protecting Your Future from Four Impending Catastrophes (Get the book.)

"According to Avorn, Growing deficits in the federal budget now place considerable pressure on publicly funded medical research, which will further limit the ability and the willingness of the National Institutes of Health to support applied studies of drug efficacy and safety in the future. Thus, the scientific questions that are asked in both domains will increasingly be defined by the pharmaceutical industry." - Jacky Law, Big Pharma: Exposing the Global Healthcare Agenda (Get the book.) "In promoting the case for reform, Bush said that medical liability lawsuits, increasing premiums and the defensive practice of medicine cost the federal budget $28 billion a year. While the talk is mainly about capping medical damages against doctors or hospitals, it also includes a clause that bans punitive damages altogether for a manufacturer or distributor of a medical product that complies with FDA standards. Democrat Senator Byron Dorgan of North Dakota, spoke for citizens rather than industry when he said that the President's plan fits a growing and disturbing pattern." - Jacky Law, Big Pharma: Exposing the Global Healthcare Agenda (Get the book.)

"As the nominee of the Republican party, promising to work toward a balanced federal budget, he won a large victory over President Jimmy Carter in 1980, and an even larger one over Walter Mondale in 1984. Early in his presidency, Reagan persuaded a Congress controlled by Democrats to increase spending on defense and to reduce taxes. The federal budget was to be balanced by reductions in spending outside of defense, but Reagan and the Congress were never able to agree on these. Accordingly, the federal government went deeper into debt throughout Reagan's presidency." - James Trefil, Joseph F. Kett, and E. D. Hirsch, The New Dictionary of Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know (Get the book.)

"In 1968, President Lyndon Johnson privatized Fannie Mae to get it off the federal budget. It then became a private shareholder-owned company with certain obligations to the public (to make mortgages easier to obtain) in exchange for certain privileges, which included exemption from taxes and oversight, and access to a stupendous line of credit from the U.S. Treasury. Technically, what Fannie Mae does is purchase mortgages from banks where the loans originate. Its sibling, Freddie Mac, was created in 1970 to prevent Fannie Mae from monopolizing the entire secondary mortgage market." - James Howard Kunstler, The Long Emergency: Surviving the End of Oil, Climate Change, and Other Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-First Century (Get the book.)

"It was not much—less than the value of General Motors, IBM, or Exxon today—but it was a vast sum in terms of the United States economy in 1850, about ten times as large as the federal budget, about a quarter of the gross capital value of everything in the slave states, and about ten times the value of the cotton crop itself. The South had become capital-intensive, the capital being the value of the slaves. Before cotton became so important, three attempts at emancipation had been made. The first, already alluded to, began in the South in the 1780s and foundered on the compensation issue." - Henry Hobhouse, Seeds of Change: Six Plants That Transformed Mankind (Get the book.)

"As the nominee of the Republican party, promising to work toward a balanced federal budget, he won a large victory over President Jimmy Carter in 1980, and an even larger one over Walter Mondale in 1984. Early in his presidency, Reagan persuaded a Congress controlled by Democrats to increase spending on defense and to reduce taxes. The federal budget was to be balanced by reductions in spending outside of defense, but Reagan and the Congress were never able to agree on these. Accordingly, the federal government went deeper into debt throughout Reagan's presidency." - E. D. Hirsch, The Dictionary of Cultural Literacy (Get the book.)

"As the nominee of the Republican party, promising to work toward a balanced federal budget, he won a large victory over President Jimmy Carter in 1980, and an even larger one over Walter Mondale in 1984. Early in his presidency, Reagan persuaded a Congress controlled by Democrats to increase spending on defense and to reduce taxes. The federal budget was to be balanced by reductions in spending outside of defense, but Reagan and the Congress were never able to agree on these. Accordingly, the federal government went deeper into debt throughout Reagan's presidency." - E. D. Hirsch, Joseph F. Kett, James Trefil, The New Dictionary of Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know (Get the book.)

"Huntington pointed to the signs of decreasing government authority: The great demands in the sixties for equality had transformed the federal budget. In 1960 foreign affairs spending was 53.7 percent of the budget, and social spending was 22.3 percent. By 1974 foreign affairs took 33 percent and social spending 31 percent. This seemed to reflect a change in public mood: In 1960 only 18 percent of the public said the government was spending too much on defense, but in 1969 this jumped to 52 percent." - Howard Zinn, A People's History of the United States: 1492 to Present (Get the book.)

"UPDATE: The 1997 federal budget was not balanced on the backs of the poor; nor was it balanced by eliminating huge subsidies for corporate welfare. It just was not balanced. In late September 1996, White House and congressional negotiators agreed on a compromise spending bill to avoid the impasse that led to two government shutdowns over the budget in 1995. (Knight-Rid-der News Service, 9/29/96). Finally, on July 31,1997, Congress and the Clinton Administration celebrated a 1998 budget that reputedly would lead to a balanced federal budget in 2002." - Carl Jensen, 20 Years of Censored News (Get the book.)

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