Where Has the Spending Gone, Joe Dimaggio?

Posted by Dan Crawford (Rdan) | 4/27/2011 11:13:00 AM

federal deficit, national debt, Presimetrics

8 comments

by Mike Kimel

Where Has the Spending Gone, Joe Dimaggio?

Lately there's been a gnashing of the teeth about the deficit and the debt and what to do about it. Democrats point out that when GW took office, there was no deficit, and that a big part of the problem is that federal tax revenues have fallen from 20.6% of GDP in Fiscal Year 2000 to 14.9% in Fiscal Year 2010 (warning - Excel file), and are slated to fall to 14.4% this fiscal year. I found a nice graph here. Despite the nonsense that gets referred to as Hauser's Law, the big fall in tax revenues is is in large part due to the tax cuts, although the poor economy also plays its share.

(Note - so I don't have to keep typing it, all years in this post are fiscal years.)

But for there to be a deficit, tax revenues (whether high or low) have to be less than spending. And spending has also gone up (again see OMB Table 1.2 referenced above) from 18.2% of GDP in 2000 to 23.8% of GDP in 2010, and is slated to go above 25% of GDP this fiscal year. (It is worth noting – federal spending as a percentage of GDP fell in every single year during the Clinton administration… which means Newt Gingrich doesn’t get credit for it unless you believe he had one heck of a time machine.)

I thought it would be interesting to see where that spending is going, so I pulled the data from OMB Table 3.1 and graphed it below. (Dotted lines indicate future projected spending.)

Figure 1

The figure indicates that for the most part, spending in most categories has been pretty flat. Defense spending, though, rose from 3% of GDP in 2000 to 4.3% in 2008, 4.8% in 2010, and is slated to go above 5% this year. Afghanistan, Iraq, and now Libya all cost money, especially if conducted with sweetheart no-bid deals. The bigger ticket category that saw increases was "human resources" - that was 11.4% of GDP in 2000, reached 13.2% of GDP in 2008, and is expected to top 16% this year.

So what are these human resources? I don't have the definition in front of me, but I think that includes things like unemployment compensation, food stamps, and the like. Put another way, some of the spending (it's 3:36 AM right now - I think the "how much" part of "some" has to wait for another post) is happening because the tax cuts didn't work as advertised. But then, its not like that should have been a surprise.

Cross-posted at the Presimetrics blog.

BE SURE TO ACCESS THE PDF EXCEL FILE - a real eye opener !!