The U.S. Budget Trends

I looked up the recent years of federal spending. We are spending a LOT more while revenues have dropped over the past couple years. You have to start looking at these numbers to start getting the concept of how bad of a situation we are in. In 2009, revenues were $2.165 trillion and on the spending side just the categories of Social Security, Medicare, Health (includes Medicaid), and Income Security (unemployment insurance, federal pensions, housing assistance, food stamps, etc.) added up to right around $2 trillion. People complain about war spending in Iraq and Afghanistan, but those are only $100-150 billion annually. I say "only" only in comparison to the rest of the massive amount being spent. With the deficit at $1.5 trillion, even if you stopped the wars tomorrow and could save all the money being spent on them, you would have only cut out 10% of the deficit.

Year            Receipts    Outlays    Surplus or Deficit(−)
2008            2,523,999   2,982,554    -458,555
2009            2,104,995   3,517,681    -1,412,686
2010 estimate   2,165,119   3,720,701    -1,555,582

By the way, the last Republican Congress' budget for fiscal year 2007 (before Democrats won in 2006 and took office in 2007 and created the 2008 budget) was $2.7 trillion. Bush's first budget was in 2002. We did not like that he let the budget increase so fast. But he signed off on a spending increase from $2 trillion to $2.7 trillion, an increase of $700 billion, in 6 years. The Democrats and Obama have increased spending by $1 trillion in just 3 years! And this as revenues were dropping.

Overall, spending has over doubled since 2001 even as revenues are currently only 9% higher than 2001.