The Central Issue of Our Time: Federal Spending

Federal spending has gone insane, bursting all historical bounds, since the Democrats took control of Congress in January 2007. Our friend and technical adviser Joe Malchow forwarded a link to the site Political Calculations, which posed this question:

If you were asked to produce a single chart illustrating the biggest single political issue in America today, what would it look like?

And produced this chart, which plots total federal spending against median household income from 1967 to the present. Note how the essentially linear relationship that prevailed throughout almost all of that period started to change around 2000 and has gone completely haywire since 2007. Click to enlarge:
US-Total-Federal-Outlays-vs-Median-Household-Income-1967-2009.PNG
The obviously unsustainable explosion in federal spending that the Democratic Congress has embarked upon since 2007 is the central issue of our time. Among other things, it is the genesis of the Tea Party movement. That which can’t continue, won’t; the only question is whether sane hands will take over the tiller and restore some sort of balance, or the federal government will crash in a fiscal disaster.

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