21 January 2010
Bush vs. Obama on spending
Would you call this “A New Era of Responsibility”?
I wouldn’t exactly call George W. Bush a penny pincher, but Barack H. Obama is making him look absolutely like a Scrooge McDuck. During 2009, I found it very difficult to keep track of all of the spending taking place in the U.S. government. It seemed like it was a few hundred billion here, a few hundred billion there as if money didn’t have meaning or value. The money was thrown around so casually almost like me saying that I’m going to give you 700 billion grains of sand. Sure it seems like a lot, but it doesn’t have a lot of meaning.
Many of the numbers that I reference can be found in the Summary Tables of the United States Budget from the Office of Management and Budget.
Let’s start by taking a look at the budget for 2009. The government expected to spend 3.938 trillion dollars. Just so you can envision that better, let’s use real numbers: $3,938,000,000,000. With an estimated population in the U.S. of 304,059,724, each man, woman and child on average was responsible for $12,951.40 in 2009 alone. If everybody paid the same amount, then my family would need to pony up $51,805.60. That is insane. I can tell you that I do not receive $50,000 worth of benefit each year from my government. But wait, there’s more. That was the first year in office. Let’s take a look at the future. Each year, the outlays grow gradually until in 2019 when the number increases to $5,158,000,000,000. I don’t know about you, but I believe that the number will be modified to be much higher by the time 2019 rolls around, but for now, we’ll give him the benefit of the doubt. We will also be generous with the population growth rate at 1% which has been declining continuously. In 2019, the population could be approximately 332,545,642 which brings the responsibility of each person to $15,510.65 or $62,042.60 for a family of four. Just for reference, the responsibility for each person went up from $9,810.57 in 2008 to the above-mentioned $12,951.40 in 2009 (one year).
Now, where do you think this money is going to come from? Some of it will come from more loans. The deficit is planned to increase by almost 9 trillion dollars from 2009-2019. Yes, that is quite a bit more than the total current deficit (since the birth of our nation), racked up in only ten years. The rest of the money will come from… yes, you guessed it, directly out of your pocket. Let’s look at the expected receipts over the same date range. In 2009, expected receipts were $2,186,000,000,000. In 2019, $4,446,000,000,000. Yes, that is over double the current amount. Since almost all of this comes from some sort of income tax, prepare to have your wallet lightened.
If you want to read the article that got me started chasing this path of research, you can read it at
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704320104575015072822042394.html
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