Visualizations : US government expenses 1962-2004 : Huge variability...is this politics-dri...

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Created by: Frank van Ham Created on: Wednesday January 10, 10:23 AM

Data file: US Budget, $Millions, 1962-2004 (Y2000$)

Data source: Office of Management and Budget (OMB)

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Comments (30)

Anonymous says:

What is this spike in housing assistance?

Posted Wednesday January 10, 8:34 PM
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	Anonymous says: Huge variability...is this politics-driven or weather-driven? Posted Wednesday January 10, 8:51 PM see view for this comment

Martin Wattenberg says:

Veterans benefits are going down, percentage-wise.

Posted Thursday January 11, 1:20 AM
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Anonymous says:

Health care costs exploded in 1990, and then just kept rising. (Compare veterans benefit hospitals, which grow linearly.)

Posted Tuesday January 23, 1:36 PM
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Anonymous says:

Spaceflight funding peaks long before the Apollo landings and never recovers. (Guess someone didn't spin that "one small step" well enough?)

Posted Tuesday January 23, 1:57 PM
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Josh Peters says:

Re: Spaceflight funding.

Had the Soviet Union continued its space expansion to the extent that seemed to compete with the USA's, you can bet our spending would have skyrocketed.

Posted Tuesday January 23, 4:58 PM

Anonymous says:

The national defense expenses in 1968 and 2004 are roughly equal, but the difference in percentage is enormous. Once wonder if this leads to less resentment for spending money?

Posted Wednesday January 24, 5:11 AM
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Anonymous says:

It would be interesting to cross-reference with political periods (i.e. dem/rep presidencies) and major geopolitical events

Posted Wednesday January 24, 7:03 AM

Anonymous says:

It would also be interesting to see this as a % of GDP, and/or per-capita... directionally it's obvious and makes sense that it'd trend up and to the right in aggregate with growth in both GDP and population...

Posted Wednesday January 24, 12:14 PM

Anonymous says:

Are these numbers using inflation adjusted dollars? If so, what year is the base?

Posted Thursday January 25, 5:33 PM
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Frank van Ham says:

Yeah, this is inflation adjusted, base = 2000.

Posted Friday January 26, 1:08 AM
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Anonymous says:

this would be perfect for Swivel

Posted Friday January 26, 10:22 AM
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Anonymous says:

this graph is far from accurate

Posted Tuesday January 30, 10:30 PM
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JasonW says:

How is it inaccurate? Do you think the data is wrong or misleading? Is the graph itself the problem?

Posted Tuesday January 30, 11:12 PM
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Anonymous says:

The amplitude here is HUGE and dwarfs everything in its category, in fact it is about 1/4 of Social Security in the peak year of 1990.

Posted Thursday February 15, 3:15 PM
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Anonymous says:

Appears to be the Savings and Loan bailout cost

Posted Tuesday February 20, 12:30 PM
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Varun Bhagwan says:

This appears to be the SNL scandal.

Posted Wednesday February 28, 2:37 PM
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Anonymous says:

Very nice. It would be useful to have these options:
1. Log scale
2. Eliminate arbitrary items (especially large ones such as Social Security and Medicare and Interest) so that the relative sizes of the remaining ones can be more easily seen.

Posted Friday March 09, 5:35 PM

Anonymous says:

Re log scale: only when viewing single item, obviously.

Posted Friday March 09, 6:19 PM

Jacket says:

Can we expect a similar spike after the Iraqi war gets wrapped up?

Posted Monday June 25, 10:08 AM
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Anonymous says:

What year was the S&L bailout...that might be it.

Posted Tuesday July 17, 5:26 PM
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Anonymous says:

Since this is only budgeted expenses, it ignores the entire Iraq war, which sits outside the budget in its own special category.

Posted Tuesday September 11, 12:15 PM

Anonymous says:

Does anyone have data on war expenses? Or know where to find it?

Posted Tuesday September 11, 9:09 PM
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Anonymous says:

Actually that doesn't mean much in context.

Posted Tuesday October 09, 2:39 PM
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augustinian says:

The spike in Housing Assistance for 1985 appears to be a data error. Here are current dollar outlays (in $millions) for Housing Assistance for FY1984-FY1986:

FY1984 FY1985 FY1986
9,932 11,200 12279

These data are from Table 11-3 of the FY2007 Historical Tables of the Budget of the US, p.220.

Posted Tuesday November 13, 4:39 PM
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Anonymous says:

What is driving the spike in "General Purpose Fiscal Assistance" in 1973? You're near the end of the Nixon administration; Cheney is Assistant Director of the Cost of Living Council from 1971–73 and becomes Deputy Assistant to the president from 1974–1975; Rumsfield was a member of the President's Cabinet from 71-72--am I cynical to think that they found a way to leverage these funds for subsidies to industries favorable to the administration?

Or, less cynically, is this because the Office of Economic Opportunity was dismantled by Nixon in 1973, and many of its programs were transferred to other departments--perhaps the departments represented by this band in the graph? Still, I would think all of that would fall under the "Human Resources" category.

Posted Tuesday April 29, 12:36 PM
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Anonymous says:

National defense just ain't correct. The federal government spent 50% of its budget on the warmachine 2004, and today it is about 65% according to the famous circle diagram explosions called "Death and taxes" that are out on the internet.

References:
http://mibi.deviantart.com/art/Death-and-Taxes-9410862
http://mibi.deviantart.com/art/Death-and-Taxes-2007-39894058

Posted Saturday May 03, 10:40 AM
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Anonymous says:

Sorry, but the data here IS correct.

The Death and Taxes charts don't include huge expenditures like Social Security, Medicare, etc. I think they may also leave out interest on the national debt.

Death and Taxes calls those mandatory expenses. Their interest is in discretionary spending.

While it is certainly legitimate to look at just the subset of spending that Congress can easily change every year, that is only a partial view of where our government is spending money.

So yes, if you want to say Social Security and Medicare are irrelevant to the budget conversation, you can then say that military spending is at or near a record high.

Including all spending, discretionary and mandatory, is not as helpful to the anti-war cause. But it IS extremely useful to look at for anyone concerned with OVERALL government spending.

Military spending is a fair and reasonable topic for debate. Have at it. Just don't forget that from a purely fiscal point of view, the real elephant in the room is Social Security and Medicare.

Posted Saturday May 03, 1:16 PM
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Anonymous says:

so what units are these???
if you don't mention units these are just worthless numbers! and the graph is useless.
did you sleep during your physics classes?

Posted Friday July 11, 8:19 AM
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Anonymous says:

Would it be possible to overlay/label (with vertical bars) the presidential administrations? It would be interesting to see who was president at a given time on the chart.

Posted Thursday August 07, 11:43 AM

Visualizations : US government expenses 1962-2004 : Huge variability...is this politics-dri...

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