The Blindness of the Chattering Class

One common meme among the chattering class in discussions of how to fix the deficit is to mock the great American public. Polls often show the public preferring to cut foreign aid as their first choice to fix the deficit, not realizing how small a percentage of the budget is spent on foreign aid.

But, as the Bible used to say, remember the beam in your eye before the mote in your neighbor's eye. The chattering classes, both right (Breitbart et.al.) and left (Vilsack and NAACP) missed the lies in the framing of the Sherrod video.  The main one: that RD spends $1.2 billion in Georgia is easily debunked if you have a sense of the numbers.  My thought process:

• how big is Georgia--don't know, but Atlanta has been growing, so let's say it's 15 million people.  
• the U.S. is something over 300 million, so Georgia is 1/20 of the US.
• if Georgia gets 1/20 of the RD funds, that means RD is spending $25 billion total.
• no way RD spends that much.  The USDA budget is somewhere around $100 billion, about 50-60 percent food stamps and other nutrition programs, etc. $15-20 billion for farm programs, doesn't leave much for all of the rest.

Now I haven't checked my accuracy, except to find I overestimated Georgia's population and, to find RD spends closer to $1.2 billion nationally