Its not a projection, its an actually submited budget request. Not a real budget yet, and certainly not a spent budget yet, but its more than a projection. Projections (like any budget figures for FY 2012 or later) are basically just educated guesses. They can be far off in either directions. Submitted budget requests can be off, but rarely by nearly as much, and usually by being slightly lower than actual spending.
Still I have no problem waiting until the money is really spent, except that it means we have to wait to the end of 2011 (or perhaps even slightly past that) in order to even know the exact terms for the bet.
Or we could go backwards a bit. Instead of comparing actual 2011 spending to actual 2013 spending, we could compare actual 2010 spending to actual 2012 spending (then we don't have to wait as long to start), or actual 2009 spending to actual 2011 spending (then we have actual spending figures currently available for the beginning year). I'd even be willing to compare actual 2009 spending (the last year for which we have actual spending figures) to the lowest of 2011, 2012, and 2013 spending.
Well there should be actual 2009 spending data somewhere. The CBO historical data ( cbo.gov ) only goes to 2007.
Maybe here whitehouse.gov It shows outlaws of 3.58 trillion for 2009. That would appear to be actual since its more than the 2009 budget request, OTOH the same chart has goes through 2020, apparently mixing one years actual spending data, with a year or two of budget subimition data, and a number of years of projected data.
Maybe its just too hard to get the data without looking back 3+ years in the past. In which case we might not have the end of the bet data, the 2013 information until mid 2016 or so. Its starting to seem like too much work for ten bucks, but maybe not if you have a data source you can accept that has 2009 data now, or will have 2010 data in a timely matter. Maybe instead of sending money to the winner the loser can send money to the non-political charity of the winner's choice.
In any case if you look at the projections from the Obama administration in that last link the only YoY drop is from 2011 to 2012, and its only a 2 percent drop. I'd be a little surprised to see even that in the eventual actual spending figures (but not so surprised I'd bet against it, one year of a two percent drop has happened before and could happen again) |
