Sojka's Call

The Republicans have seemingly given up on any kind of leadership on the US economy. Brian Wesbury puts this in perfect perspective. Wesbury is very much sympathetic to policies that promote smaller government and that will reign in spending on entitlement programs. Yet, he argues that the Pubs keep trying to bash the current economy and that jumping on every little negative economic number and ignoring that the US has been in a steady recovery going on now for about four years is hurting their credibility with voters as seen in the last election. The Dems have certainly shown that they are not going to lead on reducing the size of government and it is something that needs to be done. Unless the Pubs are willing to embark on a true strategy of leadership that acknowledges where the economy is at, the US is going to continue to see the discussion dominated by Krugman and his type of economic theory. Hopefully, the Pub leadership like McConnel and Boehner will listen to this adv...

In a discussion with some friends we started talking about spending and which Presidents, Party, and time periods had the most and least. One of the factors I thought important was to adjust the total Federal Spending for inflation. From the OMB the total outlay number was obtained. The CPI number was found on the Bureau of Labor Statistics website. Then it was easy to adjust the total outlay number and reduce or increase it based on the CPI. Remember the US experienced deflation back in the 1920's and 30's. The blue line is the inflation adjusted number and uses the right y scale. The purple line is the actual spending and uses the left y scale. A few things were surprising to me. The US really cut spending back dramatically at the end of WWII. There was no delay at all! Then using those same numbers, I took the amount of decrease/increase by President for their term. To be fair that number was divided by the number of years they were in office. These numbers were sur...