Side note: The federal government costs about $19 billion per day to operate based on an annual budget of roughly $7 trillion.

So $1 billion is about equal to 4 hour hours of government spending.

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pchristensen 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Operations is about 1/4 of the budget ($1.75T), and half of that is DoD. 60% is payments for entitlement programs like Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. The remaining 15% is debt service.

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mmooss 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> The federal government costs about $19 billion per day to operate based on an annual budget of roughly $7 trillion.

$7 trillion is not operating expenses. Much goes into assets that are retained decades or more. The Interstate Highway System isn't an operating expense.

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craftkiller 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Every mile of road is an operating expense. Looking at a report from NY state:

> Based on aggregate highway spending reported in 2009, the average statewide cost of maintaining a lane mile was $13,841.

source (pdf): https://www.osc.ny.gov/files/local-government/publications/p...

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telotortium 2 hours ago | parent [-]

> Every mile of road is an operating expense.

Has, not is. Clearly you didn’t take Intro to Object-Oriented Programming in CS.

	▲	craftkiller 19 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Nah, I use rust so every mile implements OperatingExpense.

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ImPostingOnHN 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Yikes, that is a lot.