Posted by
IndyBlogger on Friday, November 14, 2008 3:38:11 PM
I had been working on compiling some numbers with the intent to understand just how much money the government was spending and put that in some historical context. Now matter how you look at it the numbers are not good, and they are not getting better. The second questions I wanted to know was if it was getting better or worse by electing the Democrat controlled Congress and Senate. The answer is that it’s getting worse. So I tried to dig in a little more to see what's going on. I have had to estimate the final 2008 numbers. I will certainly correct them when I have them.
Spending in the last 2 years:
Since the 2007 Democrat's took over, they have incurred more debt than the Republican congress did in the prior 6 years. Its close, but as of today, I have them at about $100B higher in the last 2 years, then the previous 6. I don't think this is the right direction.
Mandatory and Discretionary spending:
Mandatory spending has been growing over the Bush years as well and Discretionary has been keeping pace. Mandatory was around 53% and rose for a few years. What is further surprising is that spending on the war while higher than pre-war obviously, has not been the major spending contribution. Also its not domestic spending its Defense spending that has grown. I can’t find out where that money went.
As a Percentage change the 2007 numbers for Democrats had discretionary spending down to 53% again and the percentage increase was lower than ever at ~2% increase. One can only suspect they cut out the Defense money that I can’t find where it went because the war is still going on. If you know – Comment and let us know.
*Update – Please let me know if you can confirm this. I was told that the ‘Defense spending’ increase is really earmarks attached to the defense appropriations.
2008 will be an entirely different story:
I don't have the final numbers yet. But lets for the moment assume that the Mandatory will increase at approximately the same rate and we can project the final total we can back into an approximate Discretionary spending number. We are looking at about an 73% increase if we hit a total budget of $3.5T (estimate).
This type of outrageous spending can only lead to dramatic inflation and hardship on the American people. We need to find a way as the people of this country to limit the amount of money the Congress is allowed to spend and seriously try to impact the spending over the next 2 years. This type of out of control spending will pull down the entire country instead of just letting the failing companies fail.
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I'm including this link as a difference analysis of the data. I didn't see the data here, but only summary information. They took a longer term view of the spending, while I focused on the last 8 years during Bush.
http://www.heritage.org/research/features/budgetchartbook/Federal-Spending.html