All About Intergovernmental Transfers

THE FEDERAL government counts as spending monies paid as grants to state and local governments. But the state and local governments also count these monies in their spending totals. There is a name for this sort of spending. It is called intergovernmental transfers. To avoid double-counting at usgovernmentspending.com we show a “Gov. Xfer” column. It represents intergovernmental transfers from the federal government to the states and local governments. For instance, Medicaid (included under Health Care) is a joint federal-state program in which the federal government reimburses state governments for 50 percent or more of their expenses. You can see that Health Care has the biggest “Gov. Xfer” number.

The intergovernmental transfer numbers used in the table are organized by Census Bureau ITE “B” code. For example, ITE code “B01” is an intergovernmental transfer for “Air Transportation (Airports)”. The numbers are rolled up to provide the totals you can see at the top level.

If you drill down two levels (using the [+] controls) you will uncover the specific Census Bureau ITE “B” spending codes used to compute the “rolled-up” intergovernmental transfer numbers. Each ITE code is a link to the Census Bureau page that lists ITE codes.

Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.

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Mutual Aid

In 1911... at least nine million of the 12 million covered by national insurance were already members of voluntary sick pay schemes. A similar proportion were also eligible for medical care.
Green, Reinventing Civil Society

Education

“We have met with families in which for weeks together, not an article of sustenance but potatoes had been used; yet for every child the hard-earned sum was provided to send them to school.”
E. G. West, Education and the State

Democratic Capitalism

Three dynamic and converging systems functioning as one: a democratic polity, an economy based on markets and incentives, and a moral-cultural system which is plural and, in the largest sense, liberal.
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Government Expenditure

The Union publishes an exact return of the amount of its taxes; I can get copies of the budgets of the four and twenty component states; but who can tell me what the citizens spend in the administration of county and township?
Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America