So I’ve been thinking about this issue of our poor, cash-starved federal government. The press has done a fantastic job of making ordinary Americans believe that the government needs “revenue increases” to balance the budget. The biased coverage has led many Americans to believe that tax increases must be part of any rational attempt to balance the budget.
The press would never get away with this if they would print the actual numbers of dollars the goverment spends year by year.
I’ve spent a few minutes adjusting federal spending figures for inflation and US population. Here are the figures for four different years, in per-capita 2010 dollars:
1928 – $311
1945 – $7,900
1948 – $1,820
2011 – $14,300
In 1928 unemployment was 4.2%. The economic growth rate during the ’20s was around 4.6 percent annual. No government “stimulus” was needed.
In 1945 WWII spending peaked. The deficit was enormous, but it takes a lot of spending to win a world war.
Today’s spending is nearly twice that of the peak spending of WWII, after adjusting for inflation and population. Is the problem insufficient revenue, or is it too much spending?