[jimkress]

With the upcoming elections and budget wars, I thought us Freepers might like some factual information for ammo against the Left's lies.

[TopQuark]

This is really, really bad arithmetic, based on common misuse of averages.

The rightmost column in the table is completely meaningless: there is no compounding here. If you were to look at cumulative values, build running totals as below:

	Annual:				Cummulative:
	Proposed	Actual	% Difference				% Difference
1982	695.3	745.8	7.3%		695.3	745.8	7.3%
1983	773.3	808.4	4.5%		1,468.6	1,554.2	5.8%
1984	862.5	851.8	-1.2%		2,331.1	2,406.0	3.2%
1985	940.3	946.4	0.6%		3,271.4	3,352.4	2.5%
1986	973.7	990.3	1.7%		4,245.1	4,342.7	2.3%
1987	994.0	1,003.9	1.0%		5,239.1	5,346.6	2.1%
1988	1,024.3	1,064.1	3.9%		6,263.4	6,410.7	2.4%
1989	1,094.2	1,144.2	4.6%		7,357.6	7,554.9	2.7%

As the lower-right cell shows, the cumulative difference between proposed and actual values is 2.7%.

Nothing to talk about.

[Willie Green]

If the cumulative column is not clear, visualize it as the acceleration of spending beyond what Reagan asked for.

Yes, Congress consistantly appropriated more than what was asked for.

But if more was appropriated in one year than what was asked for, why wasn't LESS requested the following year? If you follow the trend, it looks like they kept on trying to outbid each other, like in a poker game.

Nobody EVER came out and actually proposed a DECREASE.

I can still recall the bullcrap rhetoric that was fed to the taxpayers from both factions of the Republicrat Party:

"We decreased the rate of increase"

What a crock o' $hit!!!

[Pagey]

Thank you for posting this information.Now,Jeopardy Question:

"cut spending later"

What is an 'Oxymoron'?

[eleni121]

Thanks for the posting. We know that Reagan would have cut far more than he did but for the Cold War spending. Even so, the Democrats were responsible for the huge increases in government spending.

Thanks to President Reagan the Cold War ended without total annihilation and the Russians are now our allies. And with all that, the American spirit soared again with the Gipper's optimism after the malaise of the Carter years.