Michael Perkins

The "explosion" of federal government spending is a hot topic in recent political debate, so I decided to take a close look at the Office of Management and Budget data to get a better understanding of the issue. The chart below shows federal fiscal year outlays from 1940 to 2009. Move your cursor over the line to see the exact numbers for any year.



First, note that the dramatic increase in 2009, relative to the increases in previous years, is due to roughly $345 billion in TARP and stimulus bill expenditures. If we remove these one-time expenses, we get something closer to George W. Bush's original $3.1 trillion 2009 budget. While this is a large number by any measure, it is certainly more in line with the spending increases of previous years.

Even if we look at 2009 as an anomaly, the chart still seems to show explosive growth over the last 40 years. What the chart fails to show, however, is that the U.S. economy has grown at roughly the same rate as federal spending. If we plot federal spending as a percentage of GDP, we get the chart below.



With the exception of the anomalous jump in 2009, federal spending has hovered around 20% of GDP since the early 1950s. Though it went as high as 23.5% during the Reagan years, it fell back below 20% during the Clinton administration. While we can have a legitimate debate about how much of GDP we should invest in the federal government, it is clear that the growth in federal spending as a percentage of our economy as a whole has been relatively flat for the last 60 years.

What has not been flat for the last 60 years is our unwillingness to fund this spending through taxes. The following chart, which plots both outlays and receipts since 1940, shows that with the exception of four years during the Clinton administration, we have been unwilling to properly fund our expenditures. Of course, this is the source of the current $13 trillion U.S. debt.



This table below shows which administration was responsible for each fiscal year budget. I will leave it as an exercise to the reader to sort out how well the data conform to the political rhetoric from each side.

President	Fiscal Year Budgets
Franklin Roosevelt (D)	1934 - 1946
Harry Truman (D)	1947 - 1953
Dwight Eisenhower (R)	1954 - 1961
John Kennedy (D)	1962 - 1963
Lyndon Johnson (D)	1964 - 1969
Richard Nixon (R)	1970 - 1974
Gerald Ford (R)	1975 - 1977
Jimmy Carter (D)	1978 - 1981
Ronald Reagan (R)	1982 - 1989
George H. W. Bush (R)	1990 - 1993
Bill Clinton (D)	1994 - 2001
George W. Bush (R)	2002 - 2009

See Also:
Taxes at Lowest Level in 59 Years

In the following video, Peter Sinclair provides a nice high-level overview of what we know about global warming:



Click here for additional videos and other information about global warming.

See Also:
Global Warming and Cognitive Dissonance
Denialism
Scientists Create First Synthetic Life Form
Beautiful Hubble Images

According to a recent Gallup poll, 74% of liberals but only 30% of conservatives believe that "the effects of global warming are already occurring." This is an interesting statistic because we would not normally expect disagreements of fact to divide along ideological lines. Facts are neither liberal nor conservative. The methods of science are independent of ideology, and the same data are available to both liberals and conservatives.

Note that disagreement about the facts is a different thing altogether from disagreement about what to do about the facts. It is not surprising that liberals and conservatives disagree about what would be an appropriate response to global warming. Liberals are more likely to advocate the regulation of industrial greenhouse gas emissions than conservatives since conservatives are generally opposed to government regulation of business.

So what are we to make of the data that shows an apparent relationship between beliefs about the facts of global warming and political affiliation? Perhaps the best explanation appeals to the notion of cognitive dissonance. Cognitive dissonance is a state of tension that occurs when a person holds conflicting beliefs or attitudes. A smoker, for instance, might experience cognitive dissonance that arises from the conflict between his belief that smoking will kill him and his desire to smoke cigarettes. In Mistakes Were Made (but not by me), Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson describe this case as follows:

Dissonance produces mental discomfort, ranging from minor pangs to deep anguish; people don't rest easy until they find a way to reduce it. In this example, the most direct way for a smoker to reduce dissonance is by quitting. But if she has tried to quit and failed, now she must reduce dissonance by convincing herself that smoking isn't really so harmful, or that smoking is worth the risk because it helps her relax or prevents her from gaining weight (and after all, obesity is a health risk, too), and so on. Most smokers manage to reduce dissonance in many such ingenious, if self-deluding, ways.

Similarly, a conservative might experience cognitive dissonance arising from the conflict between her belief in global warming and her aversion to regulating business. Just as a smoker can relieve her dissonance by denying that smoking is harmful, a conservative can relieve her dissonance by denying that global warming is happening. Thus, the theory of cognitive dissonance would predict that people's beliefs about global warming would divide along ideological lines.

In general, cognitive dissonance is a universal and powerful motivator. All of us are prone to various forms of self-delusion when our beliefs and attitudes come into conflict. We should all take special note when groups disagree about the facts along ideological lines. In such cases, there is a good chance that one side or the other is motivated more by cognitive dissonance than by good science.

See Also:
Denialism
Scientists Create First Synthetic Life Form
Beautiful Hubble Images

Google should be applauded for launching a Government Requests Tool for reporting the number of requests for private user information and the number of requests for removal of content that the company receives from governments around the world every six months. For instance, during the six months ending in December 2009, Google received the following requests for private user data:

Country	Requests
Brazil	3663
United States	3580
United Kingdom	1166
India	1061
France	846
Italy	550
Germany	458
Spain	324
Australia	155
Argentina	98
Poland	86
Belgium	67
Netherlands	67
Singapore	62
Portugal	45
Japan	44
South Korea	44
Switzerland	42
Canada	41
Israel	30

In a blog entry announcing the tool, David Drummond, SVP, Corporate Development and Chief Legal Officer wrote:

Article 19 of the Universal Declaration on Human Rights states that "everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers." Written in 1948, the principle applies aptly to today's Internet -- one of the most important means of free expression in the world. Yet government censorship of the web is growing rapidly: from the outright blocking and filtering of sites, to court orders limiting access to information and legislation forcing companies to self-censor content.

So it's no surprise that Google, like other technology and telecommunications companies, regularly receives demands from government agencies to remove content from our services. Of course many of these requests are entirely legitimate, such as requests for the removal of child pornography. We also regularly receive requests from law enforcement agencies to hand over private user data. Again, the vast majority of these requests are valid and the information needed is for legitimate criminal investigations. However, data about these activities historically has not been broadly available. We believe that greater transparency will lead to less censorship.

A denialist is someone who champions certain beliefs despite clear and overwhelming evidence that the beliefs are false. Holocaust deniers are paradigm examples of denialists. Despite the overwhelming and incontrovertible evidence that the holocaust did indeed occur, Holocaust deniers claim that the genocide of the Jews during World War II was a hoax perpetuated as part of a Jewish conspiracy. Other examples of denialists are those who deny that HIV causes AIDS, those who believe that the U.S. government was complicit in the 9/11 massacre, those who deny that tobacco use causes cancer, and those who deny that Barack Obama is a natural born citizen of the United States. Some commentators also claim that those who deny evolution, those who believe vaccines cause autism, and those who deny global climate change are denialists in this sense.

In his 2009 book, Denialism: How Irrational Thinking Hinders Scientific Progress, Harms the Planet, and Threatens Our Lives, science writer Michael Specter claims that denialism occurs "when an entire segment of society, often struggling with the trauma of change, turns away from reality in favor of a more comfortable lie." The denialist denies the facts because the facts are uncomfortable. One might argue, for instance, that the Holocaust deniers are anti-semites who are faced with the fact that anti-semites were responsible for one of the most horrific crimes in the history of mankind. Their denial of the Holocaust resolves the conflict between their anti-semitism and this uncomfortable truth.

In a recent New Scientist report on denialism, Michael Shermer argues that the denialist's discomfort is usually based on a conflict between the facts and an ideological or religious belief. This discomfort causes the denialist to filter the evidence so that these ideological or religious beliefs need not be discarded.

Denialism is typically driven by ideology or religious belief, where the commitment to the belief takes precedence over the evidence. Belief comes first, reasons for belief follow, and those reasons are winnowed to ensure that the belief survives intact.

In the video below, Michael Specter provides an interesting discussion of denialism and the harm that it causes.



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Taxes at Lowest Levels in 59 Years
The Whole Problem with the World
Bertrand Russell
Blind to the Look of Disgust
The Taste of Fine Wine
The UK Statistics Authority
Facebook Linked to a Rise in Syphilis

Data from the U.S. Department of Commerce's Bureau of Economic Analysis show that in 2009, Americans paid, on average, 9.17% of their personal income in Federal, state and local taxes. This is the lowest share of income paid in taxes since 1950. The 2009 percentage is 21.7% lower than the 2008 percentage, and it is 21.9% lower than the average of 11.75% for all years since 1950. The chart below shows the percentage of income paid in taxes for every year since 1950. Move your cursor over the line to see the exact number for any year.



This analysis is based on data from the National Income and Product Accounts Table 2.1, Personal Income and Its Disposition.

See Also:
The Growth in Federal Spending Since 1940
Denialism