Well sorry for the outburst i thought Alot of the fluff was going away , my bad . <| sep |> At the same time , I will point out the hypocrisy of blowing that much dinero and then claiming that things like medicare expansion , investment in infrastructure , and funding education are just too expensive and a financial burden on households businesses . I ' m a big fan of small government as a registered libertarian here in NC , though I do believe in spending on infrastructure . Big fan of it . With that said , I was curious about just how significant the expenditures of Medicare and Medicaid are in relative measure to what we ' re talking about in this post . Per the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid S e r v i c e s s t a t i s t i c s d a t a a n d s y s t e m s s t a t i s t i c s t r e n d s a n d r e p o r t s n a t i o n a l h e a lthexpenddatanhefactsheet . html we typically spend , as a country , ~ 1 trillion dollars annually between both Medicare and Medicaid . Sometimes hard to put down a number on how many tax payers there are in the US . Some might quote only 120 million paying income tax , but to be generous let ' s go with the equally quoted ~ 240 million number of people paying some sort of tax . So in that case , $ 1 T 240 M $ 4167 per tax payer on average . I don ' t know about you , but I feel like that is a significant quantity for an individual . I don ' t feel like it ' s hypocritical to point that out , relative to $ 0 . 25 per year being collected per North Carolinian tax payer on defending controversial bills or laws . They ' re different by a factor of sixteen thousand times .