An In-Depth Look At The US Budget — And The Accounting Tricks That Understate The Deficit

Moving into election season there is a lot of discussion about spending, taxes, tax cuts, budget deficits and the like. But very rarely is the entire federal budget shown in sufficient perspective to make the numbers discussed meaningful. Even more rarely is the data shown over a long enough timeline to understand the trends. The numbers are further obscured by political partisans cherry-picking data to support their positions and by bipartisan accounting tricks which Congress has foisted into the official budget projections.

While the country will certainly be discussing federal spending going into 2020, the issue of the federal budget deficit has fallen sharply in importance to Americans. According to Gallup polling, the issue has fallen from its high in 1996, when 28% of Americans said the federal budget / budget deficit was the most important problem facing the country, to only 2% who felt that way in 2018.

Concern for the federal budget has not dropped because of better fiscal management. Since 1996, the federal government has passed significant tax cuts, increased entitlement costs substantially with Medicare part D and the Affordable Health Care Act, all in addition to spending somewhere between four and six trillion dollars on wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The Federal Budget

Spending has largely outpaced revenue for decades, with a combination of defense spending through the…