A Look at the Budget

A friend from work showed me an interesting article from The Kiplinger Letter. It listed the percentage of federal spending by program from three different years: 2008, 1983, and 1968. Some interesting things I learned:

• Despite the fact that we're fighting a war, defense spending as a percentage of the federal budget today (~21%) is lower than in '83 when Reagan was rebuilding the military up during the Cold War (26%). It is much lower than spending during Vietnam (46%).
• While Social Security's share of the budget has largely remained constant over the last 15 years (~21%), Medicare and Medicaid have been growing exponentially and are now as expensive as Social Security or National Defense.
• The low income tax credit is much larger than it used to be.
• Agricultural subsidies are actually down by quite a lot in comparison to past years. In '68 and '83 they were about three percent of the budget, now they're less than one.

I have to wonder what this data would look like in real dollars though instead of percentages. Has the federal budget just ballooned to such an extent that certain things look the same or have gotten smaller in proportion. We're probably paying far more in agricultural subsidies today than in '68, but the federal budget is so much larger the actual percentage of federal spending has dropped.

UPDATE: Jim the Baptist points out that largely the war has been funded by supplemental spending requests that don't appear in the main budget. He is right. However the reason Kiplinger did this comparison is that their 2008 budget doesn't have this problem. Which is why the Defense portion of the budget is $600 Billion instead of some smaller amount.