Big Spending Increase in US Budget

It’s "Dead on Arrival." That’s what the Democrats like to say when a Republican president sends them a Budget of the United States Government.

What they mean is that they intend to make a few changes on the margin, and make sure that a few more Democrats get their noses in the federal trough. This is called compassion.

But here at Road to the Middle Class we have a better way of analyzing the president’s budget. We have usgovernmentspending.com.

Already, within hours of the official release of the federal budget for Fiscal Year 2009, usgovernmentspending.com has the new budget numbers up online.

You know the headline news. President Bush’s final federal budget has cracked the $3 trillion barrier, at $3.107 trillion.

What you might not know is that the federal budget includes a spreadsheet, Table 3.2 — Outlays by Function and Subfunction: 1962—2013 that includes estimates of expenditure for FY 2009 made a year ago. Let’s see how the estimates for 2009 changed in the year since President Bush last sent a budget to Congress.

Estimated Federal Spending for Fiscal Year 2009

Change from FY08 to FY09 Budget

Amounts in $ billions

Item 2008 budget 2009 budget Change Pensions 765.2 767.9 0.35% Health Care 712.6 712.7 0.01% Education 97.4 99.9 2.57% Defense 723.9 805.0 11.20% Welfare 266.1 283.1 6.39% Total Spending 2,985.5 3,107.4 4.08%

Oooh. That does hurt. Defense spending is up 11 percent over the estimate made last year. Of course, a lot of that comes from bringing the Iraq war fully on-budget.

And overall spending is up four percent. This is not the natural increase in annual spending. This is the change in the estimate for FY 2009 spending totals made between last year and this.

I’ll have to think about that.