Tax brackets

Dshort.com has a graph of tax brackets through the years, superimposed with a budget deficit graph:


Update: I wonder what percentage of the population is aware of how high the highest tax brackets were from the 50s until Reagan in the 80s.

Military spending, in historical perspective

I came across usgovernmentspending.com that allows you to generate historical charts of government expenditures. (You can view the data in actual dollars or inflation-adjusted dollars or percentage of GDP by changing the units.)

Here is a graph of military spending using inflation-adjusted dollars (and a link to it and the underlying data):


I went looking for the data because a Facebook friend of a friend claimed that the drop in military spending as a percentage of GDP during Clinton's administration was the cause of 9/11. Ew boy. For starters, it should be obvious that our external threats are what they are regardless of GDP, so I don't get why you'd look to percent-of-GDP data to make the case that the spending was insufficient (or sufficient) to keep the country safe from attack. Further, military spending at the end of Clinton's term was still historically plenty high. Does anyone writing here believe that the drop in military spending under Clinton allowed 9/11 to happen or caused 9/11? I hope not.

Setting all that aside, I have to say that as I looked at this chart I was amazed at the extreme increase in military spending since 2001 relative to historical levels. I'm curious to know whether those who believe the Iraq war was a good idea also feel that the benefit you see is commensurate with these costs. In other words, was our takeover of Iraq as important as our role in WWII? Was it far more important than the Cold War?

What we owe

Per USA Today (h/t The Atlantic):

That's the biggest leap in the long-term burden on taxpayers since a Medicare prescription drug benefit was added in 2003.

The latest increase raises federal obligations to a record $546,668 per household in 2008, according to the USA Today analysis. That's quadruple what the average U.S. household owes for all mortgages, car loans, credit cards and all other debt combined.

This is from an anlalysis for 2008! Where are we going?

[Ed. note: for some reason I can't cut and paste text so any errors in quotes are mine.]

Saving $100,000,000

Mankiw on the $100M budget cuts:

To put those numbers in perspective, imagine that the head of a household with annual spending of $100,000 called everyone in the family together to deal with a $35,000 budget shortfall. How much would he or she announce that spending had be cut? By $3 over the course of the year--approximately the cost of one latte at Starbucks. The other $34,997? We can put that on the family credit card and worry about it next year.

Truth in budgeting

Yay. Obama has done away with Bush's underhanded approach of leaving select items out of the official federal budget, thereby obscuring exactly how much the deficit was. It's a gutsy move; a less honest man might instead have opted to leave, say, stimulus spending off the budget using Bush's rationale for leaving the cost of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars off the books.