The Federal Fiscal Issue in One Chart

The Federal Fiscal Issue in One Chart

WSJ.com: Real Time Economics

The federal budget is a confusing document. It has all the raw material needed to illuminate the president's priorities and the nation's fiscal health, but it's not always presented in a way that enhances public understanding. And once the allies, critics and the Congressional Budget Office get into the act, it doesn't always get clearer. There are dueling baselines — statistical attempts to show what results CURRENT policy would produce to highlight proposed changes in policy. And then there's the inside-the-Beltway budget geek jargon — "discretionary spending " and "entitlements" and "appropriations" and "authorizations" and "points of order."

So Eugene Steuerle, a veteran budget watcher now at the Urban Institute, took a stab at putting the president's budget in a different perspective. Instead of distinguishing between programs that are on auto-pilot like Medicare and programs that are subject to annual congressional spending bills, he put them on one chart.

He then compared President Barack Obama's estimate for current year (fiscal 2011) spending, known in Washington as "outlays," to what would be spent in fiscal 2016 if the president's proposals were accepted by Congress, and adjusted for inflation (but not for the aging of the population or the fact that health care costs are rising faster than other things or anything else.)

The bottom line: Spending on interest, Medicare and Medicaid and Social Security go up – a lot. Spending on nearly everything else goes down.

C. E. Steuerle and S. Rennane, the Urban Institute

Data from OMB, FY2012 Budget. Medicare outlays assume Sustainable Growth Rate relief is continued through 2016. Other Mandatory includes unemployment insurance, SNAP, other income security programs, as well as disaster costs and funds reimbursed from TARP. Discretionary non-Defense includes, among others, most education funds, and energy.

Sent with Reeder

"A bureaucrat is the most despicable of men, though he is needed as vultures are needed, but one hardly admires vultures whom bureaucrats so strangely resemble. I have yet to meet a bureaucrat who was not petty, dull, almost witless, crafty or stupid, an oppressor or a thief, a holder of little authority in which he delights, as a boy delights in possessing a vicious dog. Who can trust such creatures?"

--Cicero