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    Here begins your journey into the mind of everybody's favorite asian, and I don't mean Jet Li.
What follows is the somewhat inane, mostly irrelevant, and self-important ramblings of a man on the brink of madness.
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Thursday, September 23, 2010
 All you need to know about our government    [L]

Take 30 seconds and really understand what this chart is displaying.

Once you see it, YWSB, as they say:



You can see from 1967 through 2000 that the ratio of federal spending to private prosperity has been increasing consistently. That's kind of what you'd expect - that as the economy grows, so would federal spending. The spending ratio is pretty darn consistent. That's not to say it's right, but it's expected.

I'm guessing the small bump in the early 90s is probably due to the Clinton administration, with the downtick associated with the GOP congress of the mid-late 90s.

The jump in the early 2000's is obviously due to 9/11 and related spending, but it's still shocking. GWB's detractors were absolutely right about his increasing the size and scope of the federal government. Of course, it was mere child's play for what was to come in 2007 after the Democrat takeover of Congress, then the presidency.

The trend is now going VERTICAL. Worse, it's also going BACKWARDS. Meaning that federal spending is INCREASING even though private prosperity is DECREASING.

In mathematical terms, that's the sort of thing you see when you divide any number by zero. Applied to the chart above, that means that the relationship between the change in total government spending and the typical income earned by an American household from year-to-year is now "undefined."

In practical terms, that means government spending has become completely disconnected from the ability of the typical American household to support it.


Both parties, Republican and Democrat, are at fault - however I think you can draw the conclusion that one party in particular is excessively more so.

Is it any surprise that the Tea Party movement exists, when we see more and more evidence of an out-of-control and disconnected government? With behavior like this, it's easy to see why the popular sentiment today is both A) anti-Democrat as well as B) anti-incumbent (even Republican).



Interesting graph, Chu. Took me a minute to notice that the X-axis was not Years.

If the X-axis was years, one could safely assume there are no significant disturbances in the annual increment. But the x-axis is not years.

All of your analysis in the post seems to me based on the assumption that the growth of Median Household Income is as regular as time.

For example: "The trend is now going VERTICAL." This effect is seen, not in 2007, but in 2008 and after. It might easily be the result of a severe recession driving Median Household Income down and (at the same time) driving countercyclical government spending up.

The length of your vertical line would then indicate the severity of the recession.

I don't mean to be critical of your work; I'm sure you spent much more time with this graph than I have. But I do like tossing these ideas around.

Art

By Blogger The Arthurian, at 1/23/2011 07:05:00 PM      


^^^ speak up ^^^