This coming year, in 1999, our Federal Government will spend over $1.7 trillion. They use this money to support causes that aid to the betterment of society, the health of the people, research for better and new materials, education, and one of the biggest, the military. Each year, by the first Monday if February, the President of the United States presents to Congress the proposed Federal Budget for the next fiscal year. Each fiscal year starts on October 1st of the preceding year. This budget is gathered and created by the White House's Office of Management and Budget (OMB). They create the budget based on requests made by individual agencies and from consulting with the President's senior advisors and officials from cabinet departments and other agencies. After receiving the proposed budget from the President, the congress meets to overlook it.

During the process of overlooking the budget, the congress, with the President, decide how much they are going to spend to each activity that the government endorses. Some examples are public libraries, police forces, education, national zoo's, the CIA, FBI and other organizations. Once they have a concrete estimate of how much money the

Even with the amount the military spends each year and the percent of our taxes that go to the military, is it enough? As of now, the United States is the owner of the finest, strongest force in the world. Recently, in order to save money and diminish our budget deficit each year, the government has slowly been declining the defense budget. For the fourteenth strait year, the government has taken away the resources the government needs to maintain their forces as the strongest. Our active-duty force has diminished from 2.2 million soldiers to 1.4 million. Yet, even as this happens, our forces are being called upon to do more all over the world.

The money the government allows the Defense Department to spend is not considered to be gone. The majority of the money the Military spends is on products made by U.S. companies. Each depends upon each other to exist. Without the U.S. companies making our weapons and materials, our military would not be anything that it is today. Without the military funding, many companies would not even exist and the technology of today would be much less than it has turned out to be. This type of spending allows the economy to prosper because we are keeping the circulation of money within our own country. We are making ourselves richer by buying products from ourselves.

The money used by the Government comes from various types of taxation. Most of what the government collects comes from individual income taxes. In the year 1997, the Internal Revenue Service collected 737 billion dollars from the people of the United States. This amounted to 46 percent of the total income for the U.S. and is equal to about 9 percent of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP). Social Insurance payroll taxes were the second largest collection of income in 1997, amounting to around 539 billion dollars. The rest are described in the pie chart

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Approximate Word count = 1264
Approximate Pages = 5 (250 words per page double spaced)