Top 10 Spending Pgms As % of All Spending, Since 1999

The President's budget for 2012 was released this morning, so it is appropriate to review where all that money is being spent. The top 10 budget items are shown in my below blog, as a percentage of total spending, for the years 1999-2011. This is also available to be viewed as a percentage of GDP, if you look on my blog, abelesnik.blogspot.com. (You can follow me on the  blog by going there and clicking on the "Follow" and or" Subscribe"  box).

Some things are worth noting about the way government spends, since there are some surprises there, and often the conventional understanding may differ from the actual facts, as follows:

1. Social Security (since 1999) has actually been decreasing as a percentage of all spending! However, as a percentage of GDP, Social Security has been flat through 2008, and then jumped up significantly in the last 3 years. Probably a lot of baby boomers retiring in the face of the bad economy. But it safely can be said that growth in Social Security, while it is about 20% of the spending (like Defense) is  NOT the big budget problem.

2. Interest on the debt, as a percentage of spending and also GDP, has FALLEN to halfl of the percentages in 1999. In real dollars, the interest on the debt has stayed at about $200 billion per year (5% of all spending).  We have to thank Ben Bernanke for low interest rates for this. This is a dangerous item, because when the economy recovers in about 2 1/2 to 3 1/2 years from now, interest rates will go back up, and then interest payments on the debt will double or triple or more. But again, interest on the debt is far from dangerous levels, and  not a big budget problem.

More to come.