Bottom Line—A Cool Trillion
The figures below were downloaded from USASpending.gov, the federal government’s official budget web site/scandal sheet.
USASpending.gov was mandated by the Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act. When President Bush signed the act, he said:
This bill is going to create a website that will list the federal government’s grants and contracts. It’s going to be a website that the average citizen can access and use. It will allow Americans to log onto the Internet just to see how your money is being spent. This bill will increase accountability and reduce incentives for wasteful spending.
Lovely. Now we know what we’re getting for our $3,000,000,000,000.00 federal budget. For one thing, we get a website that tells us we just spent $3,000,000,000,000.00!
In 2000, the last year under Clinton, the government spent $1.81 trillion. The bottom line during the Bush administration looks like this (in trillions of dollars):
2001: $2.03 2002: $2.28 2003: $2.52 2004: $2.52
2005: $2.6 2006: 2.87 2007: TBA 2008: TBA
The federal budget for 2007 hasn’t been calculated yet. If we didn’t hit the $3 trillion dollar mark last year, we’ll hit it this year. That means that as we near the end of the Bush administration, this President and this Congress have increased the size of government by more than 33%–an increase of a trillion dollars this year alone.
At this rate, during fiscal years 2001-2009, the federal government will have grown by about SIX TRILLION DOLLARS.
And the Democrats are proposing more and larger government programs?
Who do they think they are? George Bush?
