Hey, you're the guy who said it was "small".
I said it was small compared to the US economy.
The exact statements was
"The deficit borrowing for SDI was very small compared to the economy."
Message 26561282
That is obviously true, without having to rigidly define small, or having to look up the total of SDI spending, determine the percentage of that spending that is considered to be borrowed, or add up the GDP for the years since the program started.
When the program started the GDP was trillions. Now its in the (very low) tens of trillions range (since its more than 10 trillion).
Spending on SDI has typically been billions, or at most very low tens of billions per year.
So in very rough terms, even if you count all of SDI spending to be borrowed money its on the order of .1 percent of the economy.
But of course the government doesn't get 100% of its revenue from borrowing.
Even in 2010 (with its unusually high deficit) the deficit was only about 40% of spending. I don't know the weighted average for the last couple of decades with any precision but borrowing for 2008 was around 10 percent of spending, for 2007 it was about 15 percent of spending, for 2006 it was under 20 percent, moving back a bit 1997 was less than 10 percent. (All of that data from Wikipedia's US federal budget page for the years in question. The years are not cherry picked, I detailed the recent years, and 1997 is the only non-recent year where the data is available from that source.
Looking back to the 80s I see recipets for 1988 where $997.2 bil, and spending was $1,118.5 bil. Giving a deficit of $121.3 bil or under 11 percent of spending.
(Data from infoplease.com )
So it would seem that the deficits over the period tended to be under 20 percent of GDP. Being generous to the other side of the argument, I won't try to go below 20 percent.
So we assume 20 percent of spending is borrowed. If around .1 percent of the GDP was spent on SDI, that would mean that around 2 hundredths of one percent, or two parts per ten thousand of the economy was borrowed for SDI.
This is all fairly rough, but if you half it or double it, it doesn't make any difference. Doubling it to .0004 (or .04 percent), still leaves it as pretty insignificant compared to the US economy. There is no plausible way that either a reduction in deficits by that size, or a reduction in taxes of that size, would have increased the size of the US economy by a noticeable amount. |
