Flutterby™! : Government spending 2008-05-30 22:09:46.082772+00

Government spending

2008-05-30 22:09:46.082772+00 by Dan Lyke 3 comments

Stolen wholesale from a Metafilter post entitled "Government spending and tax levels", here's government spending as a % of GDP for the past two decades , HTML-ized by Google from this Excel spreadsheet from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

Compare your country to those around the world. USAnians can look at the tail end of the Bush the elder era, check out the trend under that big spending Democrat, and watch the numbers zoom back up as those "fiscal conservatives" (*choke*, *gasp*, *snort*) took back the White House...

Hrm.. I'm wondering how to account for the difference in gov't in GDP terms. There was this article I saw a little while ago in the WSJ (I've gotten mixed reports on these requiring a pay account or not, so ymmv (seemed to load after I logged out)): http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121124460502305693.html

two thoughts come to mind. 1)The despotic Holy Roman Empire limited it's take to 10%. 2)You're absolutely right that the Republicans are going to get their heads handed to them in the Congressional elections. They 'went native' and became what they used to be against.

I even sent email (via house.gov form) to my Representative telling him how disgusted I was with his vote for the Agriculture bill veto override (can you believe that in a period of 7%+ increase in food costs they want to spend Billions of taxpayer money to pay farmers not to farm!!!).

I'm hoping for divided gov't (Obama stumbles) with the Democratic Congress short of veto-proof majorities.

If divided gov't last long enough, the parties will be forced to work together. (has anyone else noticed the shenanigans with the FEC? talk about politics before principle)

Bush41, Bush43 and Reagan have been in office during the growth of the overwhelming majority of the national debt. Despite claiming to be the party of economic responsibility, their silent strategy has been borrow and spend. Tax and spend seems to have limits, but the borrowing by these three administrations is wrecking the dollar.

For a visual of the annual deficits that better demonstrates the effect of each of the presidential tenures see:

You may notice in the graph that around 1971 the system really got overdrawn; that's the same time frame when Nixon unhooked the dollar from Gold, and the congress went on a spending spree - like a credit card with no limit. Money is now created out of thin air in a computer in Virginia and lent out to the US which pays interest on it.

If we went back to a gold standard it would not be possible to spend without recourse. Of course we are now feeling the end result of this: the debasement of the currency. Inflation must result so they can spend their way our of it. And in faxct inflation is now 10 - 12% they say. The government of course says it 2% but they calculate it by leaving out housing, energy and food off I understand.

Yes the Bushes are awful. And this Bush is the epitomy of evil - he does not understand ideas, he prays for his solutions, he acts on a world stage by spending our money on the rest of the world; he fights wars needlessly; and he has no respect for the constitution or the rule of law. Someday the historians will look back and say that he and all the politicians of the last 40 years were criminals in that they bancrupted the country, unconstitionally. All except of course Ron Paul!