Government Spending By Ideology \ stacker news ~econ

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In response to the growing trend of the stance that “everything I don’t like is because of capitalism,” I thought it would be an interesting exercise for ChatGPT-5 to create a pie chart of federal spending organized by ideology wherein the AI decides what the buckets are and how to fit spending categories into the buckets.

In other words, does the US government spend money as if it values capitalism?

This is what GPT-5 came up with:

It had suggested back to me that veterans might fit in socialism but I think it makes sense as it had put it as a causal necessity of militarism. But then I also asked it to create a visualization for China and the results are even more interesting as (according to the zeitgeist of AI data), China appears to value Capitalism as a higher percentage spending category than the US:

Some friends had suggested that military itself (e.g. China paying for internet trolls) could be considered a form of socialism so I asked if to further differentiate militarism to account for military spending that extracts value from external entities (imperialism) vs military spending that is purely extracting value from internal labor:

Curious if anyone else finds this interesting or has other feedback on the model.

One of my friends believes that the US government is tasked with protecting the private property rights of capitalism so all spending (even building roads) is in service of capitalism, but I’m not convinced that that is the purpose of the government, that such goal is reflected in spending, or that if it is a goal, that it’s effectively achieving it.

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153 sats \ 5 replies \ @antic OP 20h

A lot of interesting discussion threads can spin out of this on AI, the definitions of these ideologies, whether this model reflects social values, etc.

I’m not actually convinced that these ideologies are fully capturing values, but I don’t believe that the United States primarily values capitalism. Since the advent of fractional reserves, we have been demonstrating something closer to a kleptocratic society in which the value of labor is extracted from individuals for multiple purposes: to enable everything from socialism to nepotism.

And I think most of the complaints that sound like “if it weren’t for capitalism…” would be more accurately framed as “if it weren’t for theft…”

11 sats \ 4 replies \ @Undisciplined 16h

I agree that this is pretty interesting.

It would be interesting to see if it can differentiate capitalism from cronyism (or kleptocracy): i.e. how much is genuine market support and how much is handouts for donors?

In a similar vein, how much is actually socialism (in as positive of a sense of the word as possible) and how much is vote buying?

53 sats \ 3 replies \ @optimism 14h

With this kind of data, I'm always super nervous to conclude anything, because it's all self-reported. On China, no one ever trusts the figures. In the US, DOGE finding those "magic money printing computers" but then running it through a shame campaign against DNC figures instead of letting a proper CPA make a nice list of all the dark money. So probably same difference?

We don't know.

111 sats \ 2 replies \ @Undisciplined 14h

I think the "ideology" in this case is inferred, rather than stated: i.e. x is socialist type spending, y is capitalist type spending, etc.

53 sats \ 1 reply \ @optimism 14h

Ah! Agreed.

But I'm thinking like this: if I were a sneaky statist that needs to spend money, would I make that part of a visible budget? Or would I just print baby print off the books? If accounts like Legacy of Ashes have a grain of truth, probably the latter?

Therefore we could as ourselves questions like: if China's military expense according to public data is #1 by a long shot, then what are they hiding?

111 sats \ 0 replies \ @Undisciplined 14h

Fair enough, but we can only analyze what we can see. It'll almost certainly be biased data and we can try to think about how after doing the breakdown.

There's always a fair amount of art to doing empirical social science.

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