Federal Government Spending 2000 through 2020

Given that my life is already very boring, I decided to bore myself to tears with a digital trip to the Office of Management Budget where I found federal government budget numbers. Talk about a nap-inducing exercise. 

I could have chosen budget numbers back as far as when Tuna's grandtuna was a mere minnow.  Instead I decided to be modern and look at recent numbers -- looking at the columns for 2000, 2010, and 2020. I could have gone out to projections through 2026 but I decided that I was interested in history and not fiction. 

Where do I start? I printed some of the numbers and they lay in front of me like an army of wannabees.  I have to be choosy over what I report here as I know you might need a little nap too. So let's hit the high points. 

Total government expenditures rose from $1.8 trillion in 2000 to $3.5 trillion in 2010, and then landed on $6.6 trillion in 2020. That's a lot of change, but keep in mind that these numbers reflect decades of change and that government is an unstoppable runaway train. I won't do the calculations, but the changes between decades are pretty similar. Government spending roughly doubled in each of the two decades. These government numbers are not adjusted for inflation -- they have not been purged of inflation like a lot of GDP numbers. So they are going to look pretty large because of this.  Just fyi -- the CPI rose by 28% in the first decade. It rose by 16% between 2010 and 2019. It rose by 19% between 2010 and 2020. 

What else? How about national defense spending? After rising by nearly $400 billion in the first decade -- it rose by $31 billion in the second one. Luckily the world because a safer place and so we didn't need to waste all that money on national safety and security. Please note the sarcasm as indicated by italics. 

And then, that's when it hit me that my results were too much affected by Covid by using 2020 as my terminal point for the second decade. So I used instead changes between 2010 and 2019. My results changed markedly. Instead of total government spending rising by $3.1 trillion in the second decade, they rose by only $990 billion. 

Wow. What's the point? Covid meant that the government was going to come to the rescue with spending. In just one year (2020), the change for the "decade" went from less than a trillion before Covid to $3.1 trillion after government had a little time to react (in 2020). 

What else? Defense spending was goosed some by Covid -- rising in the second decade through 2020 by $31 billion. That was a lot more than the planned decrease through 2019. Before Covid hit, defense spending was going to shrink from $693 billion in 2010 to $686 billion in 2019. That's a Covid-induced increase of $39 billion for defense. 

Similarly, income security spending was set to decline from 2010 to 2019 by $107 billion. By 2020, the change from 2010 was  an increase of $642 billion or a swing of almost $750 billion. Clearly Covid made a huge difference for federal spending for income security.

Similarly, the Feds were going to spend an additional $57 billion between 2010 and 2019 for Commerce and Housing Credit. And then Covid caused that number to swell to $651 billion between 2010 and 2020. That's a swing of almost $600 billion. 

Most of the key categories of federal government spending show the same increases because of Covid. Education, Health, Medicare, Social Security, and many others show increases beyond what was planned in 2019. 

Note that the numbers I quoted above are past outcomes. They do not count any of the spending increases planned for the future. When the emergency is over, will we have the discipline to move these spending numbers back to something more normal? It's hard to imagine it. The budget requires legislators to either reduce spending or raise taxes. They don't seem to excel at either. If they don't, then the only other option is a much large national debt.