The Myth of the Spending Orgy

On September 1, 2006, in General, by Neil Stevens

Continuing my improbable defense of the current era of federal spending, I now address the rallying cry of the critics from the Heritage Foundation on down: non-defense discretionary spending. To summarize my findings: I don’t see the pattern of spending that the critics claim exists, as usual.

In part one of this informal series, I found that total spending is in line with the historic trend. In part two, I showed that pork spending is a negligible part of the federal budget. Previously I have dismissed my doubters as slicing and dicing the figures too much, but I have grown curious as to whether even that analysis holds up, so here it goes.

The sources for the following figures are Federal Spending – By The Numbers by Brian M. Riedl of The Heritage Foundation for the spending breakdowns (see the last page for the table I used), The Bureau of Labor Statistics for CPI deflators, and Citizens Against Government Waste for pork spending estimates.

We know we spent more money in 2005 than we did in 1990, the first year in the Heritage analysis, but where has that money gone? Broadly, we split the budget into two categories. So-called mandatory spending is fixed by law and the Congress does not even bother to decide how much to spend on an annual basis. This spending is on total autopilot. The rest of the federal outlay is then grouped into the so-called discretionary pot.

As it turns out, of the $688 billion (all dollar figures are 2005 dollars) in spending growth in the period, $470 billion of it is in the mandatory pile:

Discretionary vs Mandatory growth, 1990-2005

That doesn’t tell us much, though. So let’s break it down more specifically. The following chart uses the figures from Riedl with two exceptions. I added his categories of “Other Discretionary Spending” and “Katrina” together, then subtracted 20 billion from that to create a new discretionary spending category: Pork. And here’s what we get:

Discretionary vs Mandatory growth, 1990-2005, in detail

For the first few minutes this post was up, the graph was incorrect. I inadvertently left off a digit in the pork figures, making that slice too small. The graph has been corrected. The other graphs were unaffected by this typo.

(SS stands for Social Security, HS stands for Homeland Security) Aha! Non-defense, non-homeland security discretionary spending is right up there with Medicare as a top growth area in the budget! That’s true, but do we really want to pretend that about 20% of the total spending growth is the One True Indicator of conservatism?

For the sake of argument, let’s say we do. So, let’s look at where this non-defense, non-homeland security spending has gone year by year:

Non-defense growth, 1990-2005

Well what do you know. We did have an ‘orgy of spending’ for exactly one year: 2002, the year we were all running around like chickens with our heads cut off after 9/11. That spike leads me to believe that Riedl missed some Homeland Security money in the Other pile. But even if he didn’t, look where we’ve gone since 2002: right back to normal, below even the final Clinton years.

So slice and dice our Congressional majorities if you must, but please keep things in perspective.

 

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