Category: News and Opinion

A guest column by Todd Breitbart.

An Op-ed in the New York Times alleged that the French are dispirited over the loss of their identity.  This question of a loss of national identity is nothing to fear but rather the signal that the world is moving into a new age where past identities are giving way to new ones.

As shown in my previous post, a minority of federal activities account for the vast majority of federal spending. These are National Defense and Veteran’s Benefits, Social Security, Medicaid and Medicare, and interest on the national debt. The national election should really be about those issues, and federal tax revenues. Yet I’m willing to bet that if your local incumbent member of Congress even bothers to campaign, rather than having secured a guaranteed re-election by being in a safe district and/or keeping challengers off the ballot, he or she will probably talk about anything and everything else.

In the line chart of federal spending that is part of the spreadsheet that is linked here, one can see that the dashed line – “everything else” – fell from 6.6% of GDP in FY 1979 under President Carter to 4.9% of GDP in FY 1995 under President Clinton, with the greatest decreases during the Reagan years. Post Reagan, the pattern had been that spending on everything else fell as a percent of GDP when the economy was strong and rose as a percent of GDP when the economy was weak – implying that it pretty much stayed the same as GDP did better and worse. In FY 2011, however, federal spending on “everything else” jumped to 6.8% of GDP, the highest level since the Carter Administration. To understand why, print out the spreadsheet chart on “Minor Spending Categories,” and read on.