Show Us the Money

There is a version of civic life that treats government budgets as purely technical documents, as just mere columns of numbers managed by experts, too complicated for ordinary people to worry about. After all, that's why we elect representatives. Many people dismiss the numbers and rationalize the waste, but if a politician doesn’t pay attention to where money is spent, the people they represent get hurt. 

The fact is those hundreds of thousands spent on gold-plated wall trim and the marble bathroom in the People’s House was a choice to spend money on something important to a small group of rich folks. But it wasn't helpful to the majority of the society the government is supposed to be helping to keep running. 

How many people who live in Chico will be able to afford to attend the White House UFC fight in June this year?

That's not a rhetorical flourish. It's the question a budget forces us to ask. Millions of Americans have already been cut off from services they depend on because the costs were re-framed as "entitlements" to make the cuts easier to swallow. Meanwhile the wealthiest Americans watch a pay-per-view spectacle hosted at public expense on the grounds of the People's House.

Another real question: what does it say about the values of the American People? The answer is already visible in the budget.

A government budget is arguably a moral document. It is the clearest available statement of what a society, through its elected representatives, actually values, as opposed to what it says it values. Every dollar allocated to one purpose is a dollar not allocated to another. 

Those are choices. And choices, made on behalf of 330 million people, reflect a summary of the group’s beliefs about who matters, who deserves protection, and what we owe one another.

Why We Form Governments in the First Place

Humans are simply not solitary creatures. Even introverts have family and friends who they rely on. We have always organized in communities, and for a simple reason: there are things we cannot do alone that we can do together. 

• We built roads before there were cars because trade required movement. 

• We organized volunteer fire brigades before there were fire departments because a neighbor's burning house threatened your own. 

• We created public schools because an educated community was a more capable and stable one over the long term. 

• We established public health systems because a disease going uncontained in one household does not stay there.

We live in a society. Social is built into the word.

This is the foundational logic of government, not as an imposition on free individuals, but as an expression of the fact individual freedom and collective wellbeing are deeply linked. 

The Enlightenment philosophers who most influenced the American founders understood this. John Locke argued people form governments to remedy the deficiencies of living without shared law, without impartial judges, and without any power to enforce agreements. Jean-Jacques Rousseau described the social contract as the agreement by which individuals pool their freedom in exchange for the protections and benefits  only collective organization can provide.

The framers of the Constitution built a government on exactly this premise. The preamble does not say the purpose of government is to “stay out of the way.” It says the purpose is to “form a more perfect union, establish justice, ensure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty.”

That is an expansive mandate. It is a mandate rooted in the idea we are in this together, and government is the mechanism by which we act on that belief.

What a Budget Actually Says

Given that mandate, a budget is not a spreadsheet. It is an answer to the question: what are we actually doing together, and for whom?

• When a government funds public schools, it is saying the education of children is a collective responsibility, not just a private one. 

• When it funds a highway system, it is saying the ability to move goods and people across the country is a public good benefiting everyone, even those who never drive on a particular road. 

• When it funds a military, it is saying national security is something no individual household can provide for itself. 

All of these track back to the promise from the Preamble. And, interestingly enough, these are all moral statements, even when they are presented as neutral budget lines.

The same logic applies to cuts. 

• When a government reduces funding for food assistance, it is saying something about who bears responsibility for hunger. 

• When it reduces funding for healthcare coverage, it is saying something about who deserves access to medical care. 

• When it reduces funding for housing assistance, it is saying something about whose shelter is a public concern and whose is a private problem. 

These too are moral statements. And for the sake of illustration, at what point does the homeless population camping in Downtown Chico become a public concern instead of just a neighbor with a private problem?

The gap between stated values and budget choices is often where the most important political information lives.

What the Numbers Show

In fiscal year 2025, the federal government spent approximately $7.1 trillion. 

The Department of Defense alone received $849.8 billion, with a request of $892.6 billion for fiscal year 2026. 

In contrast, Social Security and Medicare together accounted for more than one-third of all federal spending — programs that reflect a long-standing national commitment to the idea that Americans who have worked their whole lives should not face destitution in old age or illness.

In July 2025, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act was signed into law. According to the Congressional Budget Office, the law's Medicaid provisions cut federal Medicaid and CHIP spending by $990 billion over ten years. In it, SNAP provisions (SNAP is the federal food assistance program, formerly known as food stamps) cut approximately $186 billion through 2034, a reduction of roughly 20 percent. 

The CBO projects 22.3 million families will lose some or all of their food assistance as a result of the OBB. Work requirement provisions alone are projected to leave an additional 4.8 million Americans without health insurance by 2034.

At the same time, the law extended and expanded tax cuts disproportionately benefiting higher-income households.

These are not apolitical accounting decisions. They are a statement. The statement says reduced taxes for those at the top of the income scale is more important than the impact of those cuts on families who rely on food assistance and healthcare coverage to get through the month, and infers Americans are comfortable with that.

Whether one agrees with that trade-off or not, it is important to see it clearly for what it is: a choice about whose needs the government will prioritize, and whose it will not.

How to Read a Budget Like a Citizen

You don’t need to be an economist to evaluate a budget as a moral document. You need to ask a few straightforward questions.

• Who benefits from this spending? Defense contractors, universities, hospitals, individual families, entire regions of the country... different spending decisions reach different people. Following that question tells you whose interests a budget treats as worth serving.

• Who bears the cost of these cuts? Cuts do not fall evenly. A reduction in food assistance falls on families who depend on it, not on families who don't. A reduction in Medicaid falls on low-income adults and children, not on those with private insurance. Asking who actually absorbs the impact of a cut is different from asking which line item was reduced.

• What problem is this allocation solving? Every budget choice is, in theory, a response to a problem the government has decided is its responsibility to address. Asking what problem a cut is supposed to solve, and whether eliminating that spending actually solves it, is an important habit for us to start up as voting citizens. Hunger does not go away when food assistance is cut. It goes somewhere else, often into emergency rooms, shelters, and school systems, at costs harder to see and sometimes harder to measure. Cutting the funds doesn’t stop the problem, it just ends the effort to solve the problem.

• Whose lives become easier, and whose become harder? This is the most direct version of the moral question. A budget that funds universal pre-K makes some lives easier. A budget reducing Medicaid eligibility makes some lives harder. A budget that increases military spending while cutting food assistance makes some lives easier and others actively harder.

These are not hidden facts. They are the predictable and documented consequences of the choices being made.

A Shared Responsibility

In a democracy, a government's budget is ultimately our collective moral statement, made by the representatives we elect, in our name, with our tax dollars. That is not a rhetorical point. It is the actual mechanism of self-governance. We need to vote for the people who will spend the money they are entrusted with for the things making society as a whole work better. This is not a partisan idea. It is the foundational logic of self-governance.

This is why civic engagement is not optional for people who care about the values their government expresses. We can't shove these things under the rug with “oh, we don't talk about politics here.” Life in a society is ultimately political. 

Understanding a budget and knowing what is in it, who wrote it, who voted for it, and who it helps and hurts, is one of the most direct ways to understand what your government actually believes, as opposed to what it says. It is a moral issue. Every major ethical tradition humans have developed, religious or secular, asks the same core question: who do we have obligations to, and how do we fulfill them? A budget is how a government answers that question.

Politicians routinely speak in the language of values: they talk about hard work, fairness, family, freedom, and responsibility. The budget is where those words get translated into action or revealed as rhetoric. When the words and the numbers align, that is integrity.

When they don't, that is information for voters to pay attention to, and in a democratic republic, it is exactly the kind of information citizens need to act on. Our Constitution begins, "We the people, in order to form a more perfect union," because it is meant to work for all of us.