The Congressional Budget Office’s recently released scorecard for fiscal year 2011 begs a simple question: Why is the federal government spending nearly one-third more money now than it did just five years ago? The CBO says that the federal government spent $2,729,000,000,000.00 in 2007 and $3,600,000,000,000.00 in 2011. That’s an increase of 32 percent in just five years.
Most Americans probably wish their income, the value of their home, or the value of their retirement funds, had gone up even 10 percent during that span — or simply hadn’t dropped. Could it be that a shortage of “revenues” wasn’t really the problem after all?
