Visualizations : US government expenses 1962-2004

What is this spike in housing assistance?

Huge variability…is this politics-driven or weather-driven?

Veterans benefits are going down, percentage-wise.

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

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

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.

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?

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

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…

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

Yeah, this is inflation adjusted, base = 2000.

this would be perfect for Swivel

this graph is far from accurate

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

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.

Appears to be the Savings and Loan bailout cost

This appears to be the SNL scandal.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

Actually that doesn’t mean much in context.

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.

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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.

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

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.

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?

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.

I’m having a hard time comparing this visualization with the one at:
http://www.truemajority.org/oreos/
Can anyone help answer why the military’s share of the budget looks so much different?