Interesting: I’ve been playing around with budget trends by agency since 1962 today and I observed some interesting trends.
Focusing on Unconstitutional government agencies:
- Total unconstitutional spending has jumped from 37.3% of the budget in 1962 to 62.3% in 2010. That’s an increase of over 25 percentage points!
- Health and Human Services spending has jumped from 3.3% to 24.7% of budget expenditures. It accounted for 85.6% of the increase in unconstitutional spending since 1962.
- Social Security spending has jumped from 13.4% to 21.8% of the budget, an increase of 8.4 percentage points.
- Agriculture and Education have offset one another, trading 2 percentage points between them so that the net remains constant at just under 3% of total spending.
- Department of Energy has dropped from 2.6% to .9% of total spending, a net drop of 1.7 percentage points.
On balance it is clear that the bulk of the increase in unconstitutional spending since 1962 has been in entitlements. I know that’s obvious, but it was fun seeing the numbers for myself. It’s also obvious that the Senate Finance Committee will be central to the effort to reverse these spending trends and get us closer to a constitutional government. Whoever we elect to the Senate, if he’s not on Senate Finance Committee, then he isn’t going to do any of us much good.