Republiucans = Borrow and Spend
These charts come from the CATO Institute report called The Grand Old Spending Party: How Republicans Became Big Spenders.
This ain't your father's GOP anymore. Disgusting...
These charts come from the CATO Institute report called The Grand Old Spending Party: How Republicans Became Big Spenders.
This ain't your father's GOP anymore. Disgusting...
nice charts.
'ping'
Spiff, WOW
Those cahrts are certainly illuminating, and disgusting, and disheartening and, and........WOW
Now I know what a "compassionate conservative" is.
Not even Rush can pretend the GOP is fiscally conservative.
Your last graph, "Federal budget as a percentage of GDP" is the most useful, but you must be careful to interpret it correctly.
First, the majority of the budget is spent on Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, and other social services. Since these services are used mostly by the elderly, and the fraction of the elderly to the total population of the US is increasing, the budget has to go up. With less workers (due to the fraction increasing), the GDP will not increase as fast to compensate.
Second, the rate of GDP increase has slowed down due to wars, and the .com crash.
Third, poor foreign trading relationships have sucked money out of the US. With roughly $800 billion in exports and $1.5 trillion in imports, we are losing about 6% of our GDP (that's a large amount!).
Finally, the war has increased DOD spending by about 2/3's. Considering that your last graph puts it at roughly 20% shows that even with all these factors, the government is being pushed into a conservative direction. If many of the factors I discussed were reduced, the budget would look a lot more impressive.
And don't forget that "Borrow and Spend" eventually by it's necessity, becomes "Tax and Spend" because the borrowing has to be paid back.
Much of these declining spending years in Clinton's era were done out of the muscle of our military.
What were the long term costs of Clinton's dismantling of our military? Cutting our navy to 1930 levels?
9/11 was what we bought. Penny wise and pound foolish we were. How much spending occurred after 9/11 to prevent this from happening again? How big of hit did our economy (and tax revenue) take from 9/11?
Not that I don't agree that our government spending is out of control and the new "Free drugs for seniors" socialist plan.