I made this point in an earlier post, and got a lot of flak about where my numbers came from and a lot of other predictable partisan complaints. The Governor recently made the same point, and got a lot of inane responses about nobody living off their 1999 salary today.
But there is really no other interpretation of the numbers possible, and it puts all this end-of-the-world rhetoric to rest. We were not living in a state of anarchy in 1999. I was here. I would have noticed.
Spending in 1999 was $215.6 billion. Adjust upward for an 8.6% increase in population and a 34.8% increase in the consumer price index and you get $315.3 billion. That’s about $100 billion less than the 2009 number.
An alternative is to measure state spending as a percentage of GDP, which was around 18% in 1999. Put that against this year’s estimate for GDP and you get spending of $336 billion, still around $80 billion less than the 2009 number.
Leave a Reply