Federal Spending 1972-2011: What The?!?

ByJohn Brown

Last week a chart made the rounds, ranking the Presidents since Reagan on spending.  Look at Reagan.  That happy man is a freaking profligate. Obama, on the other hand, heck, he’s doing better than Bill Clinton.

Except there are a few problems.

First, I can’t tie this data out to the official CBO numbers.

Second, it does a bit of apples and oranges because the numbers are based on each president’s whole time in office.  What does it mean when Obama increases the debt by 35% over three years, but it takes Bill Clinton almost EIGHT YEARS to increase the debt that much?  A better measure would be an average per year.

Third, some have suggested this chart monkeys with the numbers, allocating the first year of each president’s first term to the previous president.

Fourth, the president isn’t the only one in Washington. Senators and Congressmen also have responsibility.

Finally, while a % increase in debt is a helpful measure, it’s not the only story. And it can be misleading if viewed on its own. For example, if we have $1 of debt, and I increase that to $10, I’ve increased our debt by 1000%. Holy Schnitzel!  But if we have $500 million of debt and I increase it to $600 million, I’ve only increased it by 20%. Which is worse?

So I went out to the CBO and took their numbers from 1972 – 2011.  You may get the XLS file yourself: http://www.cbo.gov/publication/42911. Then I made sure to identify who was in charge when and marked it with spiffy colors (Red is Republican, Blue is Democrat). Here are the results. Click on it to see it in its full size glory.

 

 What does this tell us?

First, there was only ONE four-year stretch in the LAST FREAKING FORTY YEARS where the folks in Washington did not spend MORE than they took in. That was the four year period from 1998 – 2001.

What the?!?

Look at that chart again. There is a serious and systemic spending problem in Washington.

What happened in 1998 to change what had been going on for almost three decades? That was when the citizens got fed up with Washington, threw out a great number of the Senators and Congressmen, and bought into the Contract with America.  This was when Newt Gingrich was Speaker of the House. This was when Clinton was getting pounded for all sorts of stuff and worked with those particular Republicans in Congress to balance the budget.

Second, the deficit, the purple line at the bottom, tripled when Obama took office.  And stayed!  Who put that first chart together? Oh, yeah. It was Nancy Pelosi.

You might say, well, raw dollars is good.  But what’s really important is how big a percentage that spending is of our nation’s GDP. If you’re spending 100 billion when the nation is producing 1 trillion, that sounds big, but it’s actually not as big a deal as when you’re spending 100 billion and the nation is only producing 200 billion. Okay, let’s look at these numbers as a % of GDP.

Again, 1998-2001 were good years. On a % basis, the folks in Washington during that time did better than anyone else in not spending the nation’s wealth.  There’s no doubt that Reagan, Bush 1, Clinton during his fist 3 years and the Congress during those times were all happy to be big spenders.  Look at the debt burden during their years. But Obama and the Democratic majorities in Congress since 2007–drunken sailors compared to those guys. And then the Republicans come in and it doesn’t change. Gridlock?

Let’s look at our presidents since 1972 and see how well they do on an annual basis. Those numbers in the first list, BTW, are stated in billions.

Seems to me the most fiscally responsible groups were those in charge during the latter part of the Clinton years, the Nixon years, and the year when Nixon resigned.  It appears that during that year the folks in Washinton were so busy with the Watergate scandal they forgot to feed their spending appetites.

Bottom line: as I said before, Washington has a serious and systemic problem with over spending.

And when I say “systemic” I mean it appears the whole thing is rigged to produce over spending. We don’t just need new people out there. We need a system that prevents the overspending. We need an ammendment that requires a balanced budget and caps the size of the government in relation to GDP.

We also need to find a way to incentivize Congress to pass a budget each year.  No budget, no pay is a good idea. The current House has indeed passed a budget. But the Democratic Senate has not, preventing us from having a budget at all. Obama submits budgets, but not a soul in the Senate, Democrat or Republican, will vote for them. It’s only the Republican House who seems to want to actually do their job. How can that be? Read It’s Deja Vu All Over Again with National Fiscal Policy for more info.

This November we need to get a bunch of folks like those in 1998 back in Washington. A President AND a Congress who will actually finally tame the nation’s out of control spending.  Let me suggest you look at your Congressman’s and Senators’ records.  How have they voted? As for President Obama, well, I’m looking at the numbers above.

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    The book trade is a . . . trade

    ByJohn Brown

    James Dawson, YA author, feels it’s somehow wrong to hold back on cussing in his fiction. He wrote an article about this in the UK Guardian called “Why Teens in Books Can’t Swear.” He thinks it’s unrealistic. He thinks it’s about gate-keeper censorship. You know, parents wanting to steer their children towards certain experiences and away from others.  

    People.

    Dawson’s approach to the whole problem is wrong-headed. This isn’t about the virtues and vices of fiction. Or about gatekeepers, especially in today’s ebook world.  Or what experiences parents want to provide their children. And it’s not about art reflecting reality. Reality includes trips to the toilet, and yet we somehow fail to include realistic bum wiping in so many of our tales. Good heavens, have we betrayed our artistic integrity? No. We’ve just naturally chosen to include things that appeal to us and leave out others that don’t. Every book is an exercise in hundreds of such choices.

    The fact is that Dawson’s forgetting that a fundamental aspect of the book trade is the trade.  The buyer trades his or her money for a product (the book) that provides a service (the entertainment, thrills, chills, etc. of the reading experience) he or she values.  A customer preferring one kind of experience over another isn’t censorship (the horror, the horror).  It’s choice.  

    As an author, you make your offer. If folks like it, they buy it. If not, they don’t. Nobody owes you a purchase.

    This means that in any business, and selling fiction is a business, the most sensible way forward is to offer your intended buyers something they are likely to value.  Something they’re going to like.  Something they want.  If your buyer is thirsty and wants water, offer him a cold glass of water, not a waffle iron.  And if you can’t bear to develop anything but waffle irons, then, by all means, develop waffle irons.  Just make sure you offer them to the folks looking for . . . waffle irons. 

    This business of making offers also means that we package our products and services so that customers can easily tell what’s in the box. You don’t want someone to purchase your box thinking it contains breakfast cereal when in reality it’s a bunch of bolts.

    Yeah, writing is an art. But offering it in trade to others is also a basic economic act.

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    Indie Thoughts: When an author should self-publish and how that might change

    ByJohn Brown

    From publishing consultant Mike Shatzkin:

    For a number of reasons, the belief here is that most of the time for most authors who can get a deal with an established and competent house, their best choice is to take it.

    Sounds reasonable, but then we get to the money quotes.

    The strength of the traditional publishers and the traditional deals is directly related to the amount of the market that is served by inventory in stores. When that proportion was “nearly all”, the power allocation was “nearly all” to the traditional publishers.

    ***

    Self-publishing and new-style digital-first publishing can grow more to the extent that the book-in-store share of the market shrinks more. But while that’s happening, the big publishers are also adding to their capabilities: building their databases and understanding of individual consumers (something that all the big houses are doing and which the upstarts seem not to believe is happening, or at least not happening effectively), distributing and marketing with increasing effectiveness in offshore markets, and controlling more and more of the global delivery in all languages of the books in which they invest.

    It will compound the pressure on the alternative players if Amazon continues to grow its global market share for ebooks. The bigger the percentage of the market that can be reached by self-publishers with one stop at Amazon, the less interest they’ll have in picking up smaller chunks of the market with additional deals and the more powerful will be any incentives Amazon cares to offer for making the title exclusive to them.

    Link to the rest at The Shatzkin Files, and thanks to Passive Guy for the original link.

    Shatzkin’s discussion of the amount of the market served by inventory in stores is right on. But his “best choice” conclusion doesn’t follow.

    Why?

    Because the question for each author has to be which stores will I be in, what kind of floor space will I have, and how long will I be there? And in many cases the answers to those questions do not compete well with indie options.

    For example, a lot of in-store sales come from the drug store, grocery store, airport, Walmart, Costco type venues. But it’s rare than an author getting an average deal will see the light of day in those places. Those are reserved for bigger sellers. And not very many of those. So unless you’re getting a big deal, you can’t count that floor space.

    Poof. Tens of thousands of venues are now no longer part of the equation.

    So you are now left with whatever number of stores the publisher can get you into at Barnes&Noble (a max of 675 stores), Books-a-Million (max of 200 stores), Hastings (max of 149 stores), non-chain stores,  etc. I think the total number of book stores in the USA is around 10,000 or so. But publishers won’t get you into all of them. Some don’t carry your type of book: they’re used books stores, or kids book stores, or Christian book stores. And even if it’s a store like Barnes&Noble, you probably won’t get into all their stores. So how many stores will you actually be in?

    Next, you have to wonder where you’ll appear in the stores you do get into. Will you be face-out somewhere prominent? Or will you have two copies spine-out in the back? If you’re spine-out, that’s just reduced the value of the floor space publishers offer you yet again.

    Finally, how long will you be there? If you sell your two copies in a store, are you done at that store? Will your books be there longer than 12 weeks? Will they be there even 8 weeks?

    James Patterson can sell millions of books because he has multiple copies in tens of thousands of stores with great display. And he’s usually there for more than just a handful of weeks. If you have two books spine-out in each of 500 stores for eight weeks, how well are you going to do?

    Here’s some math on author revenue and units sold. Is selling 1,000 books with the royalties and contract terms offered really worth it? What about 4,000 books? 7,000? Are you going to be in enough stores with a decent placement to get those numbers?

    If you’re going to be in thousands and thousands of stores with good placement, and the terms of the contract are reasonable, then, good golly, working with a publisher looks great. But if you’ve got a book that’s good enough to make an editor somewhere want to buy rights to it and the publisher is offering to put you spine-out in a little over a thousand stores with all sorts of contract crap, then Shatzkin’s “best choice” is really a poor one. In those situations my money is on going indie.

    EDIT: It seems there are about 12,700 book stores in the USA. But that includes big-box stores, which I think are the Walmarts and Costcos.

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  • The secret of Mormonism

    ByJohn Brown

    If you want to understand the secret to Mormonism, something 99.9% of the world does not know, even though many think they do, read on.

    This last Tuesday I was at dinner with a number of wonderful coworkers. We were talking about religion and listening to the guy who helps set up our training environments talk about the interesting hunting ministry he’s involved with (it’s very cool—12,000 acres of woodland in Alabama all dedicated to hunting, outdoor survival, and God).

    At one point in the conversation, a delightful fellow trainer, who shared with us the night before the definition of diplomacy as being able to tell someone to go to hell and have them look forward to the trip, asked me, “Does your church believe in Christ. Or, no, is it some other fellow?”

    It’s a great question, and I realized that many people are confused. And so I wanted to take time to clear it up.

    So what the heck is a Mormon?

    It’s not what you think.

    And for those of you who think you know, nope, it’s not about that book.

    Let me explain. You’ll come away knowing more about us than anyone in any of your circles, and you can lord your superior knowledge over them at dinner parties, when playing games that require vast stores of smarts, or at random moments, just because you can.

    Here’s the deal. The first part of the name of the church is “The Church of Jesus Christ.” So, yes, we believe in Christ, that he died for us, was resurrected, is our Lord and god, etc.

    The last part of the name is “of latter-day saints.” We don’t use “saint” to mean super-holy people like the Catholic church does, but more as followers or disciples. So you could translate the last part of the name of our church as “of latter-day followers.”

    So the whole name would be The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day People who Follow Him.

    Okay, then what’s the deal with the name “Mormon”?

    Well, here’s where we get to the nub of it and the thing that 99.9% of the world doesn’t know. The key difference between the Mormon church and other Christian churches is that we believe that Jesus has called apostles again in our day, just like he did back in the good old days. And when I say apostles, I mean guys like Peter, James, John, Paul, etc.

    You might be wondering what an apostle is. What made those guys special?

    It wasn’t that they had great faith in Jesus. Lots of people had great faith. It was that they were called to bear special witness of him. And that special witness was not merely that they believed, but that they knew Jesus was the Messiah because they had seen and heard him after his resurrection.

    Peter himself said it best when he wrote in his letter, “For we have not followed cunningly devised fables, when we made known unto you the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, but were eyewitnesses of his majesty.”

    When the apostles had to choose someone to replace Judas, Peter said, “Wherefore of these men which have accompanied us all the time that the Lord Jesus went in and out among us, beginning from the baptism of John unto that same day that he was taken up from us, one must be ordained to be a witness with us of his resurrection.”

    These guys didn’t simply believe. They knew. They were eyewitnesses to the fact that Jesus wasn’t just some preacher—he was the son of God and was resurrected.

    So Mormons believe that Jesus has called apostles again today who bear witness of an absolute certain knowledge of the reality of Jesus the Christ. We believe their purpose is also to be the Lord’s spokesmen when He wants to make general announcements or give general instructions. Finally, we also believe they’ve received the authority to offer the covenants the Lord wants to make with all of us.

    We believe the first apostle called in these latter days was a fellow by the name of Joseph Smith. We don’t worship Smith. He was just an apostle. Just like Matthew or John of old were. But we do believe the Lord called him to be an apostle and restore some truths that had gotten lost or confused over the years.

    We also believe the Lord asked him to bring forth other scriptures in addition to those in the Bible. One of these new scriptures was a translation of an ancient record called The Book of Mormon. It’s called that because Mormon is the name of the guy who wrote it. And Mormon was another apostle—one called by Jesus in ancient America.

    And guess what the purpose of The Book of Mormon is? It’s to testify of Jesus Christ and explain his gospel.

    So the name of the Mormon church is really The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Mormons believe that Jesus has called and commissioned apostles in our times, right up to today, to bear special witness of him. And in addition to that, those apostles have brought forth additional scriptures that witness of the divinity and mission of Jesus Christ.

    For Mormons, it’s all about Jesus Christ.

    So when someone asks, what’s a Mormon? You can say, let me tell you the real answer. It’s not about an additional book of scripture. Yes, folks gave them the nickname of Mormons because of that book, but the key difference is that Mormons believe that Jesus has called apostles like Peter and Paul again in our day to be his spokesmen, and bear a certain witness of him and his good news, and help folks receive all the blessings the Lord wants to pour out on them.

    And, O, what a wonderful message we Mormons believe that is.

    If you liked those videos, you can see more here.

    Please feel free now to randomly lord your superior knowledge over your family and friends.

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  • Good Stuff! The Chosen

    ByJohn Brown

    Nellie and I stumbled onto a new TV series that we are really enjoying. It’s made us laugh, think, and feel. It’s called The Chosen and is based on the life of Jesus Christ, but it’s not like any Jesus series I’ve seen before.

    Now I have to admit that when I first saw ads for this, I wasn’t interested. It’s not that I don’t like videos about scriptures. There are some I love. It’s just that the purpose of so many of them is to illustrate a scripture instead of tell a story. And there’s nothing wrong with that. It’s just that when I’m looking for a drama, I want to watch a drama.

    But this series is different. They have taken a historical fiction approach, which means that while they adhere as closely to the facts as we know them, they don’t limit the story to those facts. And so they imagine people, events, and motives that are plausible, and then tell a story. A great example of this type of storytelling is Gerald N. Lund’s bestselling The Work and The Glory series about a family in the early 1800s who join The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Or Michael Shaara’s bestselling The Killer Angels about the battle of Gettysburg in the United States Civil War.

    The Chosen focuses on stories about characters surrounding Jesus and those who plausibly could have met him. It also imagines Jesus as more than a sober Lord. He laughs, jokes, engages with children. It is a reimagining of the familiar that makes the story fresh again and leaves you wondering and pondering.

    It’s created by Dallas Jenkins, an evangelical Christian, and produced and distributed by VidAngel Studios, run by Latter-day Saints. And their love of and delight in the subject show. I can’t wait to see the next episode. You can watch it right now for free. Go to the VidAngel site or to https://studios.vidangel.com/the-chosen/. Or you can watch it on YouTube with ads.

    If you like religious fiction, if you like a good drama, if you’re interested in knowing more about the life and times of Jesus Christ, then I think you’ll love this.

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2 Comments

  1. Nice analysis, particularly the %GDP chart.

    I have a simple set of rules for who I vote for:

    1) Never vote for the incumbent

    2) Of the remaining candidates, pick the one who has the best record of the smallest increases in government spending

    3) If there is no useful record available, try to guess which candidate will be responsible for the least increase in government spending

    I think if everyone followed similar rules, we would have a better (i.e., smaller) and more thrifty government.

  2. I think with the Obamacare ruling this November is going to see one of the highest fiscal conservative turn outs in history.

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