Plan B Forum

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Per Capita Government Spending by President

This graph in this post showing real per capita growth in government expenditures under recent presidents got more attention than I expected (e.g.), probably because for many people the growth under Obama was unexpectedly low. Here's the updated version of the graph (as before, this came to me via email):

Per-cap-gov-spending

Here are the notes that came with the older version of the graph:

Seeing the Krugman commentary comparing real government spending under Obama and Reagan made me curious about what it looks like if you express it in per capita terms? In particular, how does the Obama period compare with other presidencies in terms of penury/austerity versus spendthriftness?

To compare presidencies, I did the calculation two ways. One starts in the quarter before the president was elected (e.g., 2008Q4), the other starts in the first quarter of the presidency (e.g., 2009Q1). (The ARRA probably had some effect in Q1, but most of the change was simply economic conditions that the incoming president had nothing to do with, so I think I prefer the Q1 to Q1 method). ...

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That's all folks!


yrs,
rubato

So we are now spending less per person, but still have over $1 trillion defecit every year.
OK
Not sure what it all means.

ETA
I don't give a crap what the spending per capita, per GPA, per DNA per whatever it was in the past. The economy sucks and has sucked for over four years. Graphs and charts do not change that. All they do is spin whatever one wants to say. Last night Obama said we have gained 5 million jobs, yet UI benefits, welfare and disablitity claims have all gone way up. We need 100,000 new jobs a month just to stay at the reported 8% unemployment. (we all know it's much higher than that).

So graph on with graphs that have nothing to do with the situation of the average working man/woman.
Graphs don't fix anything and explain even less.
OOOOOOH we're spending less per capita now than we were during Regan and Clinton years. Lets all cheer!?!?!?!?!? How many former workers give a hoot and would rather go back to those economic times than collect welfare or unemployment or just go out and beg for a living?

The obvious cherry-picking of data to create this graph is too obvious: remember the stimulus spending started under Bush and increased under Obama to try to head off a depression? Remember the Iraq War where we were just about to start reducing our presence and thereby greatly reduce expenditures as Obama came into office? If you start with an extraordinarily high number, that you know is going to be reduced, how can you not have a reduction? If you apply some common sense and take out extraordinary expenditures and compare baseline, continuous spending, and take account for the fact that some expenditures early in an Administration are a carryover from the prior Administration, and take into consideration things a prior Administration did (e.g., Win the Cold War) that makes it possible for a subsequent Administration to slow expenditure growth (e.g., reduce defense spending) then you might have a graph that is worth considering.

We did reduce our presence in Iraq, while expanding our presence in Afghanistan, so that would offset some of the gains.

The economy was a failure from 2001 to 2008 not including the Republican-engineered collapse.

Median income went down for two consecutive presidential terms for the first time since the great depression.

http://www.census.gov/hhes/www/income/d ... household/

(adjusted for inflation)

year … median income … change
2009 ……. 51,940 ……. 95.91%
2008 ……. 52,367 ……. 96.70%
2007 ……. 54,202 ……. 100.09%
2006 ……. 53,793 ……. 99.33%
2005 ……. 53,342 ……. 98.50%
2004 ……. 52,880 ……. 97.65%
2003 ……. 53,303 ……. 98.43%
2002 ……. 53,511 ……. 98.81%
2001 ……. 54,155 …….

Sucks to be in a Republican-controlled economy!


yrs,
rubato

And it's so much better now with 2/3rds of the gov in Dems hands.

< 1/2. Senate and WH. But the party of "NO" has engineered more filibusters than at any time in all of history to block the Senate and controlls the House of Reps and the SC.

More on "why are things bad and why do we have such a large deficit":



We will be crawling out of the wreck that the Republicans made of our country for years yet.

yrs,
rubato

T< 1/2. Senate and WH

Three branches of gov who control the fiscal portion. The dems have 2/3rds of that. Executive and Senate. Only the reps is in repubs hands and they can't get together on a water bottle, so it should be an easy play.
The Supreme caurt has nothing to do with this until lawsuits and court issues are presented.

Besides, for his first two terms it wa all Dems.

Still have not seen a budget anywhere, anytime during Obamas admin even when he controlled it all. To easy to push it down the road, keep borrowing (to the tune of 6+ trillion during his 4 years, oh but that was Bushes fault, but still not stemming the tide). Plea on the artificial crisis caused by people 4 years out of office and say "it's not my fault". It might not be his fualt but I see absolutely no solutions.

So, pay your taxes and more (but I doubt you contribute one penny more than you have to) and blame it on a regime that has been gone for four years and give the current bunch of scum a pass as it's still all the reps fault.

There is no plan. Show me his plan. I have yet to figure it out other than to create crisis after crisis. Obama asked for sequestering. Now he is blaming it on his opposition.

Stop the madness.

The economy was a failure from 2001 to 2008 not including the Republican-engineered collapse.

Median income went down for two consecutive presidential terms for the first time since the great depression.

Again, a cherry-picking of data that ignores obvious factors outside the control of the then Administration.

If you look at the full table, you see a substantial gain in median income from 1981 to 1989, from $45,000 to over $50,000. Then it tails off with the economy slowing and recession of 1990-91 the median income ends at $48,000 in 1992-93. Then median income starts growing again with the growing economy that started in 1992 (median income will lag an economic recovery), to arrive back over $50,000 in 1996-97. Then there is the tech bubble that causes it to shoot up to almost $55,000 in 1999-2000. Then the bubble bursts, followed by a recession, followed by 9/11 and the median drops to under $53,000 in 2002-03. Then it starts to rise again to over $54,000 but then the 2008 recession hits and it drops steeply and keeps dropping even with a complete change in government.

If you are going to blame Bush for reduced incomes, then you have to blame Obama too, and you have to give huge credit to Reagan. Or you can exercise some discretion and see that there are often other factors that drive the economy.

If you are going to blame Bush for reduced incomes, then you have to blame Obama too, and you have to give huge credit to Reagan. Or you can exercise some discretion and see that there are often other factors that drive the economy.

But blame is easy, solutions are hard. Thus we only see blame rather than solutions.
I would love to see solutions be presented, impemented and gain hold as I would love to see the economy turn around no matter who is president. I want America to move forward to be better than we are because as far as I can see, we are worse off than we were 8 or 4 years ago.

As usual, Long Run hits the nail on the head, (twice). What's being presented here are cherry picked, out of context bits of data that really tell us nothing without considering the whole context and all the factors involved.

oldr_n_wsr wrote:Still have not seen a budget anywhere, anytime during Obamas admin even when he controlled it all.

The Democrats had a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate for approximately 14 weeks and have not had that much of a majority since then. So President Obama had four months out of four years where he could have forced through whatever he wanted. Assuming the Republican minority in the Senate didn't try to do anything else to slow down the process at all.

So his control of it all was less impressive than you realize.