Spending Estimates From Previous Budgets

EVERY YEAR in February the federal government publishes the Budget of the United States Government for the next fiscal year. As part of the budget, the federal government publishes Table 3.2 — Outlays by Function and Subfunction: 1962–2013 that includes details of spending at the “function” and “subfunction” levels. For the FY 2009 budget this table, available as spreadsheet “hist03z2.xls,” includes the following categories of spending:

Actual spending from 1962 to the FY 2006.
Budgeted spending for FY 2008 and FY 2009.
Estimated spending for FY 2010 thru FY 2013.

But what did the estimates for FY 2009 look like in Table 3.2 in the FY 2008 budget? Exactly. Now usgovernmentspending.com allows you to look at previous estimates of spending.

The default setting at usgovernmentspending.com is the current federal budget. At the time of writing the current budget is FY 2009. There is a control at the bottom of the spending table on the home page that allows you to change the data source from “fy09” to “fy08” or “fy07.”

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

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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

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

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

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.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism