A friend sent me this editorial cartoon showing the federal budget and proposed $85 billion “sequestration” put into perspective with a pie illustration. I think it a fun data visualization exercise, but when I looked a bit deeper I became skeptical. The cartoon shows federal spending as having grown 40 percent since 2007, from $2.7 trillion to $3.8 trillion. That did not seem credible but it is backed up by
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007_United_States_federal_budget
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2013_United_States_federal_budget
What is it that we’re getting 40 percent more of?
[Related: my own attempt to make federal budget numbers comprehensible by dividing by 10 to the 8th power (April 2011). This analysis caught the public imagination and appeared in a bunch of magazines and Web sites, usually with the original source long forgotten.]
The numbers don’t look inflation adjusted, plus I wonder if the wars were included in the 2007 defense budget.
DK: Good point on the inflation adjustment issue, but the government keeps assuring us that there is in fact hardly any inflation.
It’s a little hard to suss out because the two Wikipedia articles don’t report the budget breakdowns in the same way. It appears at a first glance there have been big increases in Medicare and Social Security, as we’ve been hearing would happen for decades. So, we’re getting 40% more old people who aren’t sick and starving. Veteran’s benefits have also taken a big jump up, as the longest war in US history continues.
I would love to reach through the Internet and slap some of the commenters on the editorial cartoon. It’s not President Obama’s fault that a lot of people are getting old (unless those commenters would like to see the president march everybody over 65 into death camps).
Thanks, Alex. Blaming whoever happens to be president does seem unfair given that it is Congress that sets the budget. Maybe someone can explain the sequestration thing to me. I don’t understand why the FAA would have to cut air traffic controllers, for example, rather than the people who run around looking at single-pilot operations see if drug testing paperwork is complete. Or why the FAA would have to cut controllers in busy airports rather than reducing hours, for example, at smaller airports that don’t have full-time control towers to begin with. (I landed a jet airliner at Burlington, Vermont, one time after the control tower had gone home. We had to click on the lights with the radio transmitter and self-announce. The passengers did not complain.)
“I don’t understand why the FAA would have to cut air traffic controllers, for example, rather than the people who run around looking at single-pilot operations see if drug testing paperwork is complete.”
Seriously? A smart guy like you fails to detect the political demagoguery right beneath your nose? No wonder Obama is such a success.
Without entering into the 40% question, a quick measurement shows that the big pie is actually over 50% larger than the small pie in terms of diameter.
However, if I remember correctly, Edward Tufte decries this sort of diagram because we humans actually focus on the *area* of the pie when perceiving relative size.
Calculating Pie * R squared (sorry, couldn’t resist :-), the big pie is actually about 1.4 times the size of the small pie.
So though the 40% number may be correct (and official inflation numbers are a lie, in my opinion), the cartoon is giving a grossly distorted picture of Federal budget growth, which we perceive on a gut level, overriding the 40% number that is transmitted to our intellect.
If I recall correctly, the 40% increase is almost all federal pension and healthcare increases. Mandatory spending.
Correction to my #6
Big pie is actually 2.4 times the size of small pie in terms of area
I think we’re getting at least 40% more people murdered by random missile attacks.
Now that I’m eating my lunch:
On the spending side, while inflation is at historic lows,
http://www.google.com/publicdata/explore?ds=dhcr7fgrs7s0l_&ctype=l&met_y=infl_y
it is non negligible, non zero rate to compare 2007 and 2013.
* I used this calculator for normalization
http://www.bls.gov/data/inflation_calculator.htm
Giving a 2.7T in 2007 dollars, that is 3.08T in 2013 dollars
So now we are at a 23% increase with 0.78T on the spending side to make up for.
I did a spot check for the numbers in the 2012 budget for Medicaid vs 2007, which (assuming I’m doing this correctly) is an inflation adjusted increase of 7% over the course of five years. I hazard a guess that most of the major federal programs have increased this much. So I can believe 7% federal increase in spending.
The war costs weren’t included in the 2007 budget, so without running the numbers, I’d make a side bet that is the rest.
It’s not really fun making a pie graph summarizing a 7% increase.
On the eaten pie side, I know I’m saying the obvious but the United States has been in a revenue reducing recession and the federal government hasn’t made much progress at increasing the tax side of the equation for the past decade (or longer).
[Anyway, who uses pie charts?
http://knockyourbloggoff.wordpress.com/2012/12/10/why-pie-charts-suck/
And why isn’t this an apple pie? Cherry pie is the pie of socialists!]
We get 40% more complaining that the budget can’t be cut.
Saw a local news story yesterday about how all research at our local uni would be cut due to sequestration and because of that nobody would want to go to school here anymore. The word “devastating” might have been thrown around, but I’m sure they wouldn’t have exaggerated.
The sequestration legislation was specifically written to disallow flexibility in choosing where to cut. According to a Salon article I found, “Agencies are supposed to cut each “activity” they undertake by the same amount rather than setting priorities.” I had heard this from several other sources, and it explains what we are hearing about impacts. The stupidity of this lousy outcome was supposed to make it less likely to actually occur.
2007 Global WoT supplemental off-budget, was $170b.
The rest is Medicare+Medicaid, Social Security and Unemployment Insurance, all mandatory.
Medicaid, Social Security and Unemployment spending should decrease when unemployment drops.
To eyeball Medicare check out http://www.census.gov/population/age/data/2011.html
over 65 population increased by 3mm or 9%, but within that, 85 and over increased 25%, and 80 and over (including 85+) increased 22.5%, that’s where most of the Medicare gets spent.
So unless we institute some death panels or some such cost controls (like most countries with more sensible healthcare systems – didn’t Romney praise Israel’s?) it’s going to continue.
Let’s not forget about millions of new beneficiaries of the food assistance program, the 99-week unemployment program and other such leeches. Yes, they are parasites. And yes, the people who work for the Obama government have done everything in their power to buy as many votes as possible by actively encouraging people to use these programs. I still remember hearing top ranking Obama officials explaining how these programs “create jobs”.
Don’t be fooled by the pie chart – the areas are very misleading. The area labelled as representing 3.8 trillion is around 90% larger than the area representing 2.7 trillion, not 40% larger.
It also doesn’t make sense to me represent the deficit in sum with the total spending – it just represents the subset of spending not paid for.
Basically it’s what everyone already says, Social Security (586 to 882, 50% increase), Medicare/caid (670 to 940, 40%), and to a lesser extent, Defense spending (546 to 672, 23%, not including all the other hidden Defense spending in other agencies, like VA, Homeland Security, Energy, NASA?, Intelligence). Even with almost everything else going up at like 5 to 10%+ a year, for instance Transportation from 77 to 98, if we eliminated literally everything else but the big three/four, we’d still have debt each year.
It seems like crazy pensions are probably not a terribly huge worry considering. I found these graphs a few days ago which are basically reprints of Federal Reserve charts with descriptions, but helpful at seeing debt and spending information in a lot of different ways.
http://www.businessinsider.com/politics-economics-facts-charts-2012-6?op=1
The White House OMB budget outlays historical rough breakdowns in their report:
http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/omb/budget/fy2013/assets/hist.pdf
Defense rose by $150 billion from 2007 to 2013
Though the majority is Human Resources where it increases $905 billion.
Medicare & SS is a good portion of that.
Obviously can’t do much about aging, but Medicare D being pushed through without “funds to pay for it” under GWB’s tenure did _not_ help things. And that only went through because the previous Congressional Budget law expired which required explicit funding in order to pay for any new programs.
Phil,
The only place where the Congress sets the budget is in the Constitution, an imaginary land far far away. In fact the budget is hammered together in the appropriately named Office of Management and Budget, and is sent over to Congress by the equally appropriately named Congressional Relations Office of the Administration – though the nature of the, uh, relation, is not made too explicit.
There was a time when the Congress had some relevant action over the budget, and that was the time when the Real Rule by which things operated was a cleverly worked out balancing mechanism put in place by Mister Sam, the long-time Speaker of the House Sam Rayburn, a noble Democrat of Texas, back when it was a great state. The mechanism was as follows: under the almost bulletproof seniority system which was n place until late LBJ/mid-New Gingrich, the Speaker put into the Chair of every authorizing committee and subcommittee a person who both knew about and supported the legislative ends of that committee of subcommittee. (It must be noted that ensuring that this took place in the teeth of a supposedly automatic seniority system too a Speaker of some skill and intelligence…) The Chairs of the corresponding, one-to-one mapped, committees and subcommittees were by contrast filled with equally intelligent, dedicated and sensible people — but people who rarely shared the enthusiasms of the authorizers, and often were dead-set oppose to them,
(As far as I know this observation is original with me, though I am sure that many other sensible people have made the same observation It has not yet been worked over by a generation of PhD candidates — but now that the system is no longer in place, so that PhDs on the subject will be irrelevant, perhaps people will get around to studying the phenomenon and confirming what I say.)
Since the tension between these two sets of forces brought about the shape of the thunder-heads and intermittent storms which are and always have been the Hill’s contribution to its supposed Constitutional responsibilities, and since the tension brought about something that worked in the world of electoral balance — saw-offs sensible enough to be actually sold to the electorate — the Congresses of that era could be said to have had some role in the budget process.
With the establishment of the warfare state by JFK, Nixon and Bush, since the passing of the last great Speaker the House has seen, and since the weakening of any form of law, order, commonsense, discipline or rationality in either House or Senate — LBJ was the last to be of anything like Rayburn’s mould — all of this has passed into the mists of time. Congress no longer has anything to say about the budget, though of course this does not cut down on its production of words, thunder, and massive random blunders.
-dlj.
Word missed: “appropriating,” (committees and subcommittees), to balance “authorizing” in the middle of secod paragraph.
-dlj.
Tax cuts and War Philip
http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2011/05/chart-day-where-debt-comes
Bush kept them off budget, the next administration had no choice but to swallow them.
It is evident that there is a rise (albeit modest) in the tax revenue intake (2007 vs. 2013) that rise is likely not significant if you take into account any inflationary influence. Having said that… The US has winded-down operations in Iraq and is in the midst of down-scaling presence and associated costs in Afghanistan.
So to the question: “what is it that we’re getting 40 percent more of?” We’re getting more folks that will likely never return to the work force, simply because you actually get more from the government than a potential employer.