Federal Debt Sanity Check
September 21, 2010

One of my favorite chart series is this three pack on Federal Debt, Taxes and Politics (click the links a the top to alternate among the three charts). The accompanying commentary, updated last week, is here.

Today, the Political Calculations website posted a stunning chart — one that adds a sobering perspective on government spending.

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Here's the accompanying text:

In this chart, where we've graphed the trajectory of the total spending of the federal government with respect to the median household income in the U.S. for the years from 1967 through 2009, we see that the U.S. federal government's spending today has decoupled from the primary source of income that is required to sustain it.

Worse, it has literally "gone vertical" during the last two years.

In mathematical terms, that's the sort of thing you see when you divide any number by zero. Applied to the chart above, that means that the relationship between the change in total government spending and the typical income earned by an American household from year-to-year is now "undefined."

In practical terms, that means government spending has become completely disconnected from the ability of the typical American household to support it. And until this skyrocketing spending growth is arrested and reversed, we suspect that government spending has become disconnected from the ability of any American household to support it.