What happened to the surplus?

Damn, BAC, and I was just musing to myself: "I'll bet if I check now, someone will have argued that the surplus never existed."
 
Corsair 115 said:
You can get budget numbers from the Office of Management and Budget.
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And who does the OMB work for? The Whitehouse. No, if you want the real deficit/debt numbers, you have to go to Treasury, as my source did. Check it yourself. :D
 
BeAChooser said:
And who does the OMB work for? The Whitehouse. No, if you want the real deficit/debt numbers, you have to go to Treasury, as my source did. Check it yourself.
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I would—but I don't want some other site's interpretation of the Treasury Department's numbers; I want the Department's own numbers on its own site. So feel free to list the specific pages on the Treasury Department's site that has historical budget information similar to the summary the OMB provides. Then a direct comparison could be made between the Treasury's numbers and the OMB's.
 
Bob Blaylock said:
In case you hadn't noticed, the economy is in terrible shape right now, having been greatly aggravated by a rash of wasteful, fraudulent “stimulus” plans that Obama put into effect shortly after he took office. As these took place in 2009 and 2010, they wouldn't show up among the spending in 2011.
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How would one reach that conclusion??!?!? Are you seriously proposing that the stimulus aggravated the economic meltdown? I suspect there is some misunderstanding about the words, economy, stimulus, or aggravated on your part.

Daredelvis
 
BeAChooser said:
And who does the OMB work for? The Whitehouse. No, if you want the real deficit/debt numbers, you have to go to Treasury, as my source did. Check it yourself. :D
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In this argument the difference between slightly negative (deficit) and slightly positive (surplus) is moot. Plug your numbers in, they don't change the overall conclusion.
 
Undesired Walrus said:
Why didn't non-security spending change (P.S, what does discretionary mean)?
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Discretionary spending is essentially the total spending of US government departments.

It's different from mandatory spending in that government departments other then defense need to have their spending approved by congress every year. Mandatory spending is spending dictated by congress for things like Medicaid, Medicare, Social Security etc. for these, congress has already passed a law saying who gets what, and when the budget comes around each year the president simply says how much it will cost to implement.

Defense is kind of a hybrid, in that many of it's appropriations run multiple years. I.E. just like Medicare, etc for these items the president doesn't have to go back to congress each year to spend the money. Congress has already authorized this spending and short of them changing the law it's supposed to be paid.
 
Bob Blaylock said:
Two things jump out at me from this table.

First, taking it at face value, it shows an increase of approximately 35% in spending, and a decrease of approximately 18% in revenues. Or to put it in absolute terms, it shows an increase in spending of $935 billion, with a decrease in revenue of only $496 billion.

So, contrary to what you claim this table shows, what it really shows is that between increased spending, and decreased revenue, that it is the increased spending that is the bigger problem, by aproximately a factor of two.
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The table doesn’t just show that spending goes up it shows where spending goes up. IOW if you are going to say “spending has increased too much”, you had better also be saying “defense spending has increased too much” or “Medicare part D should not have been passed” because this is where the additional spending has come from.


Bob Blaylock said:
Second is the asterisk next to the number for “Discretionary: Security” for 2001, which references a footnote that reads “Adjusted for inflation, but not population growth”. Why is only this number adjusted, and what effect does this have on the comparison to the corresponding 2011 number?
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The asterisk indicates that this number was adjusted for inflation only not inflation and population growth like all the others. This is likely because the cost to provide service in question (defense) doesn’t scale with population but only increases with inflation. I.E. a defense of a given strength doesn’t cost any more or any less if population goes up.
 
Corsair 115 said:
I would—but I don't want some other site's interpretation of the Treasury Department's numbers; I want the Department's own numbers on its own site.
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What are you? Too lazy to plug a few numbers into this page (http://www.treasurydirect.gov/NP/BPDLogin?application=np ) to get the data and compare it to the numbers stated by my source? I did. They agree. Just look for the debt on 9/30 (or 9/29 and 9/28 the final two years) of each year in question. And then just do the math. And by the way treasurydirect is indeed a website linked to by the US Dept of the Treasury. Here: http://www.publicdebt.treas.gov/

Bureau of the PublicDebt, United States Department of the Treasury

You haven't heard of the Bureau of the Public Debt before? We're a small agency within the Department of the Treasury.

One of our primary responsibilities is to account for the U.S. public debt. We update this number daily at TreasuryDirect.gov
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:D
 
So, B, what you're saying is that George W. Bush lied to the American people when he used the the surplus as an excuse to refund tax money that we didn't have the extra to refund?

Eta: linky
 
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BeAChooser said:
What are you? Too lazy to plug a few numbers into this page (http://www.treasurydirect.gov/NP/BPDLogin?application=np ) to get the data and compare it to the numbers stated by my source? I did. They agree. Just look for the debt on 9/30 (or 9/29 and 9/28 the final two years) of each year in question. And then just do the math. And by the way treasurydirect is indeed a website linked to by the US Dept of the Treasury. Here: http://www.publicdebt.treas.gov/



:D
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You are looking at numbers that include Intragovernmental Holdings. When talk is about government deficit, it's typically changes to Publicly Held debt.

http://www.treasurydirect.gov/govt/resources/faq/faq_publicdebt.htm#DebtOwner
 
daenku32 said:
You are looking at numbers that include Intragovernmental Holdings. When talk is about government deficit, it's typically changes to Publicly Held debt.
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Yes, which as explained in my first post is just smoke and mirrors ... a way of hiding the real debt. You did read that post, didn't you? :D
 
Puppycow said:
Remember the surplus? Back in 2001, the last budget of the Clinton administration?

Here's what happened to it:

[qimg]http://talkingpointsmemo.com/images/AppropsTable.jpg[/qimg]

To blame it all on "out of control spending" when tax revenue went from 19.5% of GDP to 14.8% of GDP is simply not true. In fact, the non-defense discretionary budget, which is the only part of the budget the politicians ever consider cutting, hasn't risen at all, in ten years.

Two wars, the Bush tax cuts, and Bush's Medicare Part D pretty much account for all of it.

If tax revenue were 19.5% of GDP rather than 14.8%, that would be another $695 billion, or roughly half of the deficit.
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Discretionary spending dramatically increased. Your chart says it didn't which just causes your whole premise to unravel. Moreover, revenue is down due to incomes being down and since the tax code is highly oriented towards incomes, revenue has dropped. Tax cuts have little to do with that.
 
randman said:
Discretionary spending dramatically increased. Your chart says it didn't which just causes your whole premise to unravel. Moreover, revenue is down due to incomes being down and since the tax code is highly oriented towards incomes, revenue has dropped. Tax cuts have little to do with that.
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Are you looking at a chart in the same dimension (never mind forum) as we are?
 
Undesired Walrus said:
Why didn't non-security spending change (P.S, what does discretionary mean)?
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It merely kept pace with inflation and population growth. So yes, it did change, but the change was proportional to the rate of inflation and population growth.

Discretionary means anything besides entitlements (Social Security, Medicare, etc.). As demographics change, the mandatory part of the budget will automatically grow faster than inflation because more people are at the age where they become eligible to receive Medicare and Social Security.
 
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