Charting the Raw Shark
(posted by Jim Henley)
Strangely, the Ross Perot people look at the chart below and see
that Defense Spending has been the victim of the “crowding out” effect of the increase in Mandatory Spending.
I look at it and see
- Gosh, wars sure are expensive (see the Vietnam and latter-day Cold-War years);
- Pictorial proof that you can’t tackle “spending” without grappling with military spending.
(Chart via Will Wilkinson.)
Meanwhile, a pie chart and a thought:
As we keep hearing, “entitlements” are now over half of all federal spending, with discretionary spending “only” 38% (military and domestic combined). This is supposed to be a tragedy in and of itself, but I’m not sure, philosophically, why that should be so. Translate “mandatory” to safety-net spending controlled by formula and “discretionary” to government actively trying to do stuff and I’m not convinced the ratio itself is out of whack. The safety net itself might be poorly or well-designed, and might or might not be fiscally sustainable. (Another Perot Chart suggests that Medicare spending is on trend to massively grow as a percentage of GDP.) But those are separate issues from the idea that it shouldn’t account for half or more of federal spending.
In theory, mandatory spending inhibits the government’s freedom of action, but that’s the part I like. You can make a pretty good case that government spending should be mostly safety-net spending, with smaller components of genuine defense, as opposed to Run-the-World “defense,” reasonable levels of law enforcement and whatever regulatory apparatus seems prudent.
Meanwhile, Yglesias almost gets it right:
That doesn’t mean that draconian defense spending cuts are called for, but we need to consider the fact that given the scale of the Pentagon budget even small efforts at restraint involve large sums of money.
Of course draconian cuts in “defense” spending are called for. The rest is not bad, though.
What I’d like to see Matt address sometime is the relation of his favorite health-care proposal, “Medicare for All,” and the admission even among most progressive bloggers that Medicare is already trending toward a funding crisis. During the Bush administration’s brief, failed efforts at partial privatization of social security in 2005, liberals argued, largely correctly, that the real looming entitlement crisis was Medicare, not social-security. Social Security was fine. But then, how can expanding Medicare eligibility do anything other than worsen that problem? I wouldn’t be surprised if Matt has an answer. I just don’t know what it is.
July 13th, 2008 at 9:27 am
[...] millenium. (See also the indispensible Fantasia Mathematica anthology edited by Clifton Fadiman.) After writing about some Perot charts on AOTP, I wonder if, by starting social security and medicare, FDR and LBJ may have set us on the road to [...]
July 13th, 2008 at 2:38 pm
I’d like to see a pie chart of military spending that shows what portion is actually involved in real defense. Defense of us, I mean; defense of South Korea can go in a different pie slice.
July 13th, 2008 at 2:58 pm
Was there non-discretionary spending in pre-Civil War America at the national level?
July 13th, 2008 at 9:03 pm
What does the “Raw Shark” in the title refer to?
July 14th, 2008 at 5:20 am
A fair question! It’s an allusion to the Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons graphic novel, “Watchmen,” and is a way one of the characters mispronounces “Rorschach.” So the title suggests how different the meanings of these charts can be depending on who’s looking.
July 14th, 2008 at 5:21 am
TGGP: I wouldn’t think so. But I suppose The Google knows.
July 14th, 2008 at 6:40 am
Was there non-discretionary spending in pre-Civil War America at the national level?
Government pensions? Retirement pay for senior military officers and so on? I suppose that might count as defense spending, but did civil officials get pensions?
July 14th, 2008 at 9:23 am
I’m not sure this distinction between mandatory and discretionary spending is all that meaningful. If Congress wanted to, couldn’t it modify the entitlement program “formulas” to mandate less spending? Or is there something written into the mandatory spending legislation that prohibits Congress from altering it later on?
Obviously, large cuts to promised SS/Medicare benefits would be massive political losers, but if that makes the spending “mandatory” the same can be said for a lot of defense spending.
July 14th, 2008 at 12:22 pm
If the liberals ever think outside the box in the way Jesse Walker suggested (i.e., using pigovian taxation to fund a minimum income and then eliminating the regulatory and welfare state), a huge chunk of the budget will make the transition from discretionary to mandatory.
For some reason, I keep thinking of the old Comtean saw (borrowed by Marx and many other strands of nineteenth century socialism) about legislation over people being supplanted by the administration of things.