The Federal Budget and Deficit

The Huffington Post just put up some interactive infographics on Obama's $3.83 trillion federal budget for 2011. Particularly interesting to me was how they chose to depict government spending as a percentage of gross domestic product. Using this measure, the numbers can be a bit deceptive because they don't also show fluctuations in actual government spending and GDP. For example, this graph implies at first glance that government spending dropped in the 1990s, when in reality the budget was slowly increasing from year to year (if you look at the numbers posted here) but the GDP was increasing at an even faster rate. All of the infographics can be found here: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/special/politics/budget-2010/index.html

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