So often I will read deficit hawks rail against “Mandatory Spending” programs. This completely perplexes me. When looking at government spending, what is the point of looking only at Mandatory or just Discretionary. The only difference between the two is if congress has to re-approve the spending every year. That’s it. So why do . . . → Read More: There is no correlation between “Mandates” and Budget Deficits
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Over at the whitehouse site, they have an excel sheet that also summarizes a large portion of the Mandatory spending programs. Unfortunately, they group programs together differently so it’s hard to tell what to add or remove, or what was grouped together differently. Fortunately their totals are about equal to the totals that the . . . → Read More: Adding to the Mandate List I figured out a few days ago the difference between Mandatory and Discretionary Spending. At the time it didn’t sound like there were a lot of Mandatory spending. However, reading this about.com article, it seems there are dozens of them: Social Security – $730 billion Medicare – $491 billion Medicaid – $297 billion TARP . . . → Read More: Need a Full List of Mandatory Programs My first task towards understanding the federal spending is to find websites that might explain it for me. After quite a few fruitless google searches, I stumbled upon a pamphlet(pdf) created by the New York Fed back in 2000. The target audience of the pamphlet was kids which is great because it’s explaining things at . . . → Read More: The Two Types of Government Spending |
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