Spending

Reading this article from the Cato Institute, I started thinking about the post where I demonstrated that Clinton did not balance the budget,and looking at government expenditures. (Yes, I know that I have no life.)

Let me walk you through this:
This site has an interesting chart, showing you the National debt as a percentage of GDP.


Looking at the GDP of the nation in 1980 (when Jimmy Carter left office), it was $2.725 trillion dollars, or if you want to adjust them to the year 2000 inflated dollars, $5.221 trillion. Government spending that year was $531 billion, ($1.017 trillion in 2000 dollars), or about one fifth of the economy.

In 2000, the year Clinton left office, the GDP was $9.629 trillion and Federal spending was $1.8 trillion (still about 1/5 of the economy).

In 2008, the GDP was $14.373 trillion ($13.366 in year 2000 dollars) and the FedGov budget was $2.9 trillion (still 1/5 of GDP).

Now look at what we spent in 2008, by turning to page 90: Social Security and Medicare is 37% of the budget, Social giveaway programs like Medicaid, welfare, and food stamps were 29% of the budget, and the stuff that the FedGov is actually supposed to be doing (provide for the common defense, yada, yada) was less than 25% of the total budget.

This means that we are pulling dead weight in our economy to the tune of $2 trillion a year, and it makes me wonder how long before the whole thing simply stops working.