Gordaen's Blog

The first chart shows US Federal Government Debt and Receipt history since 1981. The second chart shows the number of people employed by the Executive Branch and the DoD. The third chart shows yearly deficit/surplus data.

I think these charts pretty much speak for themselves. I didn’t include any of the figures, because I think the visual curve of the lines is more significant that X-number vs. Y-number. Of course, all of the data used to make these charts is freely available to the public at the online Government Printing Office (oxymoron?). I’ll try not to influence anyone’s political beliefs by bloating this post with my thoughts on these charts, but I suppose a brief explanation is in order.

The debt and receipts chart is to dispel claims that I constantly hear about X party stopping the debt. No party has prevented the debt from accumulating, though you can easily see which party has affected the debt in a positive or negative way. The receipts are included in the same chart mostly as a quick comparison. I’ve heard claims about high taxes being bad, low taxes being good, etc. I think the question is more about stability. For instance, in 2001 President Bush cut taxes to spur the economy, yet tax income did not increase (it decreased). It took about three years to get to the prior level. In 2003 another tax cut was issued and two years later tax income has increased. You can’t really say if it is a direct result for sure, but you can eyeball where tax income would have been if the curve never had the dip. Good or bad, it’s hard to attribute short-term changes when so many factors influence the statistics.

The employment chart shows how many people are employed by the Executive Branch and the Department of Defense. I’ve included this chart for a few reasons. I commonly hear that “X political party is for/against big government.” What better way to see who is for or against than to compare the effect each party has on the number of people employed by the government? I chose the Executive Branch because much of this is a presidential comparison. I also included the DoD because I commonly hear that our military was short-changed by a previous administration, and it’s hurting us now. Obviously, if that is the case, then we would see a large dip from that administration and then a huge rise by the next one. That isn’t the case here. We can see the numbers drop down, but they do not make any significant increase, so perhaps all those people weren’t necessary? Yet, you can compare that to the Executive Branch to find that it has gone back up… funny that in a time of war we would need an increase in politicians (and people working to meet their needs) but not an increase in DoD employees…

The last chart shows the yearly budget. For those who don’t know, deficit is how much you spend beyond your income. For instance, if you make $1000 a month and spend $1200, the deficit is $200. The deficit accumulates as debt, so if you continued like that for five months, the debt would be $1000. A deficit indicates the government is overspending. As the government continues to overspend, the debt increases, which causes the interest payment to go up. Currently, the expected FY2006 interest payment is greater than $400 billion dollars. Compare that to the FY2007 $54.4 billion President Bush requested for education! That’s right, our government spends around eight times as much on interest as on education!

The more I researched on the way that the US government spends money, the more frustrated I became. Any business that has the same financial properties as the government would collapse. If we continue to hit deficits larger than half a trillion dollars, our interest payments will quickly exceed our ability to pay them. How can we claim economic prosperity when we run straight toward ruin?