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Political calculations: The Biggest Issue of 2010, In One Chart
20 comments on “Political calculations: The Biggest Issue of 2010, In One Chart”
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Sobering indeed.
Looks a near vertical asymptote to me! YIKES! Can you say spending is OUT OF CONTROL!!!!!!?
If American voters can’t see the obvious, then it makes one wonder if unqualified sufferage, the right of all adults to vote, was a huge mistake.
It seems to go back to the old axiom,
“Ignorance begets ignorance.”
And the an ignorance of the consequences of the deliberate/oblivious decisions of our politicians over the past 45 years is what has gotten us into this mess.
We haven’t forced our politicians, through feedback at the ballot box, to be accountable for the effects of their individual decisions and those of their political partys.
Many of our voters are so “simple” that they see political contests as something akin to the rivalries between sports teams such as the New York Yankees and the Red Soxs.
Or they only look at politics through their lenses of narrow social issues and, it seems, remain willingly oblivious to the major very very serious national issues that affect their own personal lives and the long-term welfare and security of our nation.
I wonder what proportion of US government spending is for military purposes? It would be interesting to see that breakdown; I suspect it would be quite high. If so this could be significant because historically great powers have seen their international influence and domestic well-being suffer because of military overspending, e.g. Britain during and after WWII (unavoidable, but they were in rationing until 1956 and only paid off their WWII debt to the US in 2006!) and the Soviet Union through the 1980s (where military spending reportedly reached as high as 27% of GDP – the exact figure is disputed but the impact seems clear – sucking money and basic goods out of the economy, thus leading to political instability). I’m pro-American, but I fear that when the history is written, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan will be seen to be strategic, political and economic failures which inaugurated the American retreat from the world. If so, this is perhaps even more ominous for the US’s allies than for the US itself – not to mention the world as a whole. Whoever steps in to the vacuum, be it China or a resurgent Russia, they will surely be less magnanimous with their power than the US.
It’s not that big. See http://www.truthandpolitics.org/military-relative-size.php In 1943-45 military spending was about 37% and in 2003 it was 3.7 %. As a percentage of discretionary spending it was 72.9% in 1962 and 49% in 2003. The horrendous increase in spending is social welfare spending.
The Federal spending trend is proof that the American education system has failed. What other possible explanation is there??
Don
Which would presumably mostly be directly related to the impact of the GFC, Br Michael? And as I understand it these are mostly mandated payments under US law, whereas defence is truly discretionary. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying don’t have a strong military, but is the money -which I believe is about 20% of the US budget – being spent wisely? Are you getting “bang for your buck” in terms of national security? Even Eisenhower, decades ago, warned about the danger of tying the US economy too much to the “military-industrial complex”. I heard a news report this week about a new contract the US has signed to export arms to the Saudis. A US critic -can’t remember who, must have been a politician – said military equipment was now about the only thing the US manufactures that the world wants to buy. That can’t be good, for the world or the US economy.
Of course, out of control spending on welfare is not sustainable either, or good for a society, but without a boost to the production of goods and services how do you address unemployment, etc. ?
Again, don’t get me wrong, I hope the US pulls out of the recession and gets its financial house in order, it’s crucial to world stability that it does, but it seems to me addressing military spending is crucial to that endeavour. Spend less but spend smarter, I guess.
7. acroamaticus:
Even Eisenhower, decades ago, warned about the danger of tying the US economy too much to the “military-industrial complexâ€.
I appreciate your concern. I assume then that you are therefore even more comcerned about the education-industrial complex that takes an even greater share of our national treasure.
Don
The ‘rate of change’ commentary in the article misses what I see as the big point: one would figure that the correlation between household income and federal spending would be a positive one (i.e., more income goes along with more spending). But it is now a negative one: with LOWER household income we have HIGHER government spending – for the first time since 1967.
I strongly suspect that something similar happened during the Great Depression and probably all of our major wars.
Perpetual wars have simply got to be expensive, really expensive. All the expensive equipment blown up or wearing out, all the medical costs of treating the injured and dealing with the deceased, all the costs of transporting thousands of troops in and out of war areas, all the infrastructure costs of maintaining hundreds of thousands of troops in countries that can only be supported by air transport. Simply the fuel costs have got to be astronomical. Costs to the future involve treatment of battle injuries both physical and mental; especially mental; not to mention repair and replacement of all our worn out or destroyed equipment and military personnel. I fully realize my simple list doesn’t even begin to describe the costs to our country of our perpetual wars. I simply do not believe the numbers war supporters come up with to try to explain what we are doing is really not expensive at all.
Two quotations come to mind (paraphrased):
1. American democracy will last until the public learns to vote itself the largesse of the public purse – de Tocqeville and others;
2. Socialism works well until you run out of other prople’s money – Margaret Thatcher
Americans do not comprehend that govt expenditures are a less than zero sum game. Govt programs can easily take $1.50-2.00 for every $1.00 delivered. The last estimate I saw was that for every $100 raised by the corporate income tax, the cost of compliance was $67. The situation will continue as long as Americans go along for crumbs. (Guess who gets the loaves?)
There is a missing element in this graph, and that’s the number of households.
I don’t know what the situation is the USA but in the UK households are getting smaller (e.g. more elderly people living longer often as single individuals, younger people delaying marriage and childbearing etc). So if you had, say, 100 million households in the year 2000 and 120 million in 2010, surely even if the median income had not grown much, the total income could have grown? I’m not a statistician!
And in any case, while multiplication of smaller households might go some way to explain the decoupling of the two trends around the year 2000, it wouldn’t help much with explaining the massive change of relationship between the two trends in the past couple of years.
Don,
I’m not so familiar with the education sector of the American economy, how well it functions or how well funding is utilised. The general budget figures show, I think, that in 2009 the US education department received c$32 billion. The defence budget was in the vicinity of $700 billion. It would seem that the US could afford to spend quite a bit more on education, which could increase the employment opportuniteis of people who might otherwise be welfare dependant, perhaps offsetting that expenditure with cuts to defence. Countries which are experiencing economic growth generally have good public education systems which equip students to adapt to new technologies, etc, and instill in them a public-minded ethos. I think this is intimately connected to the US’s general prosperity and social capital in the past – going right back to the Puritans you historically had very high levels of literacy and numeracy compared to the rest of the world. Of course, that was a fringe benefit -education is of value in its own right – I’m not a utilitarian. But much has changed since then, and I suspect that your education sector, like most in the West, is suffering from a decline in values and standards that is threatening to drag us all into a new age of barbarism. Sorry, don’t mean to sound so apocalyptic, but…it’s hard to avoid that conclusion, unless our societies can fin dthe will to turn it around. Homeschooling is a great alternative, but it’s not an option for the masses of working folk, let’s face it.
Sorry all – I’m writing too much; I’ll sign off now.
13. acroamaticus:
I’m sorry, I really needed to support my numbers.
1. I include all public spending on the education-industrial complex.
2. I also include post-secondary education in that figure.
“The United States spent $553 billion on public elementary and secondary Education in 2006-2007”
http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2008/09/does-spending-more-on-education-improve-academic-achievement
I am not able to find national spending at all levels on colleges and universties but it is likely to be a number that would match or exceed Federal military spending. An education-industrial complex, indeed.
Don
13, well of course it is always possible to stand down the military. We can go back to the staffing levels of 1920 and 30. We can even enter the types of arms limitation treaties that we entered into with Germany and Japan. Quite frankly I am starting to think that it might do us good of loose a war to a foreign power. On the other hand as a Southerner, the South has already done that and from sectional experience loosing is not as much fun as winning.
Now on the other hand I do think there is a need for a Constitutional amendment to require an actual declaration of war before the President can commit troops to combat. We need to restore effective checks on an all to powerful Executive.
Defense of the country is required by the Constitution. It’s apples to oranges to compare costs of social programs to the cost of the military. If the government should be spending on anything, it’s on defense. The U.S. Constitution does not require the government to spend on education, etc.
The reason for the sudden vertical is not federal spending at all; it’s that median income has stopped growing. Also, it’s pleasant to go after entitlements, but the two digressions from the long-term trend relate to military spending (the other being back in 1990-1991 for the Gulf War).
Eisenhower never imagined a unionized tecaher workforce. If he had, he would probably have condemned that as well.
Eisenhower could probably also spell “teacher”.
@ 14. Don
Thanks Don. More food for thought. I agree that increased spending doesn’t always lead to improved outcomes in education. There needs to be root and branch reform. In Australia we are moving to a national curriculum (like the US we are a federation) and better standards for teachers and even tax credits/vouchers towards school fees to give parents more choice. This is being done by a Labor government (roughly equivalent to your Democrats) over against the power of left-wing dominated teachers’ unions, which have stymied reform to date. Most Australians want to see increased spending on education (we currently spend less than the US as a percentage of GDP) but also see the spending linked to reforms that produce measurably better outcomes.