>> there's no denying that federal spending is way up
>> and revenues are down.
Here's some more this morning, linked from Krugman's blog[*]:
http://www.econbrowser.com/archives/2010/10/the_everexpandi_1.html
<quote> I've been lecturing on the government sector in my macro course. In updating my lecture notes, I plotted out some interesting graphs, which link up nicely with this previous post. The following four figures highlight: (1) normalized Federal outlays are not much higher than in 1986; (2) government consumption to GDP is back up to 1991 levels; (3) the cyclically adjusted budget deficit is only 2 ppts larger than that recorded in 1987; and (4) Federal consumption remains far below the previous peak in 2007. </quote>
The graphs are worth the click-through ...
/jordan
[*] http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/10/15/big-spender-update/