Archive for August, 2012
Monday, August 20th, 2012
Federal Receipts and Outlays as %GDP
Another look at how big our government has grown (or not)… Here’s a chart I made from White House data on historical federal receipts and spending from 1931 to the present: Nothing amazing or really stunning to see here, but it is informative. For the last few decades the size of the federal government as [...]
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Monday, August 13th, 2012
Another “How Big?” Question: U.S. Federal Spending
Just about everyone and their dog has seen those scary graphs of government spending shooting skyward along an exponential curve. They look like this: This runs from 1913 until 2011 and was retrieved from http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/budget/Historicals. In 1913 Federal spending was $715 Million. In 2011 it was $3,603,061 Million ($3.6 TRILLION). However, if you’ve seen my [...]
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Monday, August 13th, 2012
In Perspective, How Big is the U.S. Government?
This is another post in which I’m trying to separate fact from rhetoric for my own sake, and I thought I’d share my results. There are a lot of politicians making promises to shrink “Big Government” in the U.S. What I wanted to know was simply how big has that government actually become. Let me [...]
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Saturday, August 11th, 2012
On the Nature of Economic Growth
My last post was a basic investigation into a simple question: would “tax the rich” fix our deficit and or debt? It generated a lively thread over on my Facebook page, but a lot of that discussion went well beyond the scope of my simple question. All that debate got me thinking: in a more-or-less [...]
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Friday, August 10th, 2012
Tax the Rich!!! (or not…)
There’s been quite a bit of talk of making the rich “pay their fair share” as a way of solving the U.S. budget problems. I got curious as to how much good it would actually do. I’m not interested in being super-duper precise here — just enough to know whether there is any sense in [...]
