How to manipulate the budget numbers...

Our favorite nursing home resident claims CBO historical budget data is manipulative and dishonest

So you want to know how to manipulate numbers? Just watch the how the left is currently manipulating the budget in an attempt to turn Joe Biden into a some sort of heroic fiscal hawk as he "lowers" the deficit from where it was under the previous irresponsible regime.

So here is how it works. You ignore everything relevant, you cherry pick something irrelevant and then you use your cherry picked irrelevant number as your baseline moving forward to compare everything else against it.

So what do I mean? Well were a list of all of the budget deficits starting from 2013 and going through 2019.

• 2013 - $719.2 billion ($3.45 trillion in spending)

• 2014 - $514.3 billion ($3.51 trillion)

• 2015 - $469.3 billion ($3.69 trillion)

• 2016 - $620.2 billion ($3.85 trillion)

• 2017 - $714.9 billion ($3.91 trillion)

• 2018 - $785.3 billion ($4.11 trillion)

• 2019 - $891.3 billion ($4.45 trillion)

What you notice is for seven years straight we did not see a budget deficit higher than a trillion dollars. In fact, if you go back through the history of the CBO tracking the budget deficits you will only see four years with trillion dollar deficits and those were 2009-2012 and were caused by the "great recession". Even then, at the peak, we had $1.549 trillion dollars.

Moreover, you will see that spending went up somewhat incrementally, probably at a rate just over inflation.

So to take a pause.... in nearly 6 decades of tracking we saw over 50 years with budget deficits under a trillion and four where the budget deficit was over a trillion dollars. Only once was that budget deficit over $1.5 trillion. At no time did we see outlays higher than the $4.45 trillion we saw in 2019.

Then in 2020, Covid hit. Our congress asked for and received what was assumed to be unprecedented one time funding to take on this global pandemic and assist with an economy that had come to a screeching halt. We needed medical assistance. We built temporary hospitals, we sent war ships around. We provided financial relief for tens of millions who suffered. We supplied funding for other parts of the world. All in all we ended 2020 with over $6.5 trillion in spending and and a decrease in revenues. Much of this migrated into 2021 as well. While revenues started coming back, our outlays were closer to $7 trillion.

Now none of this can be blamed on any sort of systematic fiscal irresponsibility on anyone's part. We can argue whether the one time emergency funding was too much, too little, or just right. We could argue whether or not it was spent well. But we cannot argue that it was done because of bad economic planning on anyone's part. It was a justified fiscal reaction based on an unexpected global pandemic.

:In those two years of Covid - we had budget deficits of:

• 2020 - $3.14 trillion ($6.55 trillion in spending)

• 2021 - $2.72 trillion ($6.822 trillion in spending)

Now these are big unpreceded numbers. But these also should be seen as temporary. They should not be a baseline for a normal year moving forward. We cannot argue that the new normal is to spend well over $6 trillion dollars and run $3 dollar budget deficits, nor can we use those numbers as a baseline to how our current and future budgets should look.

By all means we should be going back to the pre-covid baselines for our budgets and spending. But are we?

So let's start with 2022? We had record setting revenues due to inflation and the pent up demand for goods and services previously unavailable. In fact our revenues skyrocketed up to nearly 5 trillion dollars. This is approximately 40% more revenue than we saw in 2019 (the last year prior to Covid). By all accounts, with that much extra revenue and little more need for Covid relief spending... shouldn't we have been looking at a budget surplus?

Well... here are the numbers along with the projections moving forward:

• 2022 - $1.38 trillion deficit ($6.27 trillion in spending)

• 2023 - $1.41 trillion deficit ($6.221) projected

• 2024 - $1.58 trillion deficit ($6.42) projected

• 2025 - $1.75 trillion deficit ($6.72) projected

• 2026 - $1.72 trillion deficit ($7.37) projected

So rather than using the previous benchmarks for our comparisons... which never saw more than $4.5 trillion in spending or a deficit more than $1.5 trillion, the propagandists are telling us the spending $6 trillion to $7 trillion and running deficits at or over the all time (non-Covid) highs is actually akin to fiscal soundness and bringing down the deficit.

These $6 trillion budgets are no longer being pushed by Covid relief. The fiscally unsound folks running the show just want us to accept it as the new normal after we spent that same amount during the global pandemic.

An of course, it is complicated as they say. When things look really bad, the propagandists simply demand that it only looks that way. What is really happening is complicated and above our pay grade. Leave it to those who understand.

How exactly is this complicated? Well it is complicated in a manner that is too complicated to even explain how it is complicated. The simple use of Government numbers and a bit of math to show the flaws in the propaganda cannot be taken seriously because it is more complicated than math. In fact, they would probably censor their own Government numbers if they could, because it oversimplifies what is complicated in the manners that they claim them to be. After all, you must trust your talking head and the TPM that they are putting out, facts be damned. Because it is just more complicated than those facts suggest.

Okay... whatever you say! But as someone with more math and statistics background than 99% of the people out there, I can attest to the reality. The only thing complicated here is the spin.