{"id":50138,"date":"2014-12-31T06:00:55","date_gmt":"2014-12-31T12:00:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=50138"},"modified":"2014-12-30T17:17:58","modified_gmt":"2014-12-30T23:17:58","slug":"thanks-tea-party","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=50138","title":{"rendered":"Thanks, Tea Party!"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Federal spending (as a percentage of US GDP)\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.washingtonexaminer.com\/federal-spending-drops-to-20-percent-of-gdp\/article\/2557957\">drops close to the historical average<\/a>&#8230;<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>The federal budget is shrinking as a percentage of gross domestic product, falling just below 20 percent in the third quarter of 2014. That&#8217;s down four points from its peak of 24 percent in 2011, according to market analysis firm Strategas&#8217; survey of recent Treasury Department data.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;That&#8217;s a pretty large drop in government spending,&#8221; said Daniel Clifton, head of policy research for Strategas.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>The drop puts current federal spending close to the norm for the last half-century. While the budget has grown in absolute numbers \u2014 the omnibus spending bill passed earlier this month totaled more than $1 trillion \u2014 federal spending has averaged just over 19 percent of GDP since 1963.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>The decline is due to a combination of factors, <strong>the main one being the restraints that were put on federal spending in 2011<\/strong> as a result of the debt ceiling standoff in Congress<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>&#8230;for the past half-century. \u00a0Which, to be fair, is about when the Fed started its orgy of spending like a crack whore with a stolen gold card in peacetime.<\/p>\n<p>Who&#8217;d have thought we&#8217;d be talking about the Johnson years as a positive baseline?<\/p>\n<p>At any rate, it&#8217;s an incremental step in the right direction &#8211; thanks, in its entirety, to the Tea Party.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Federal spending (as a percentage of US GDP)\u00a0drops close to the historical average&#8230; The federal budget is shrinking as a percentage of gross domestic product, falling just below 20 percent in the third quarter of 2014. That&#8217;s down four points from its peak of 24 percent in 2011, according to market analysis firm Strategas&#8217; survey [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16,308,123],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-50138","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-conservatism","category-entitled-america","category-taxes"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50138","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=50138"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50138\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":50141,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50138\/revisions\/50141"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=50138"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=50138"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=50138"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}