Chart Shows Federal Government's Fiscal Problem
Recently we've growled about fiscal child abuse and the "war on children" -- August 26, 2012 and September 1, 2012. At the website, Carpe Diem, economics professor Dr. Mark Perry has a chart showing how the composition of federal spending has changed from 1952 to 2017 (2011 actual; 2017 projected). As the title emphasizes, "America's real long-term fiscal problem: the federal government has become a gigantic wealth-transfer machine." Dr. Perry's post reinforces the point we made in our growlings. Here's the chart:
Dr. Perry explains "why this matters" this way:
When will members of Congress stop the fiscal insanity?"Our long-term fiscal problems won’t be fixed until we address what might be our nation’s most serious fiscal-related problem: we’re increasingly becoming a European-style “entitlement nation,” with “payments to individuals” increasing both in absolute dollar amounts and as a share of total federal spending, while at the same time the share of Americans who face a zero or negative tax liability is above 40 percent and rising. In other words, a declining share of American taxpayers is being forced to finance the rising cost of the federal government, which is increasingly being spent on payments to individuals.
Read the entire post since Dr. Perry has another chart that shows how tax returns "with zero or negative tax liability" have changed over the sixty years from 2050 to 2010.