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Pastimes : Let's Talk About Our Feelings!!! -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Neocon who wrote (73770)	2/2/2000 11:35:00 PM
From: Daniel Schuh	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 108807

Oh, great. The famous Reagan home page 3*8=24 "Miracle of compound interest" again. This is even better than "the best data" from "the definitive metastudy". Don't bother replying, con man, I'm sure your goon squad will carry your heavy burden for you here, as usual.

To: Neocon who wrote (73770)	2/3/2000 1:01:00 AM
From: wonk	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 108807

Sigh! There are lies, damned lies, and statistics. 1. In these 8 years, the President's proposed budget increased every year - a compounded annual growth rate of 6.7% (1094/ (1+.067)^7). 2. The President never proposed a balanced budget. 3. The President's smallest proposed deficit was larger the Carter's smallest actual deficit. 4. These analyses invariably ignore the effects of entitlements which amount to approximately 50% of the budget. Neither Reagan nor the Congress were willing to expend the political capital to tackle entitlements. If one re-examines the Reagan budgets eliminating entitlements, Congress spent less than the President requested on non-entitlements. 5. Even considering entitlements, the national debt grew by 2.25 trillion dollars. Since the variance, including entitlements of Congressional overspending was $554 billion shall we then lay approximately the $1.7 trillion of additional national debt at Reagan's feet? 6. So there you have it. On average, Congress spent 2.8% more than Reagan asked for, while the cumulative (yearly compounding rate) was a whopping 24.5% more. If the budget in 1989 had been 24.5% smaller (i.e., 280 billion dollars) there could have been a surplus of about 130 billion dollars instead of a deficit. This is equivalent to a constant compounding increase of 2.8% every year during the 8 budgets above and beyond the previous year's spending.... A gently as possible, your math is flawed. Using the starting point of Reagan's first budget of $695 billion and an end point of the 1989 appropriated funds results in a compounded annual growth rate of 7.4% (1144/(1+.074)^7). 7.4% - 6.7% results in a variance of only 0.7% between the Reagan proposed budgets and the actual Congressional allocation, including entitlements. ww p.s. 0.7% variance between a proposed budget an actual expenditures would probably rank in the upper echelons of Corporate American performance.

To: Neocon who wrote (73770)	2/3/2000 8:57:00 PM
From: Brumar89	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 108807

I see the numbers do indeed show the budget requests were slightly smaller than actual spending. I'd seen somewhere before that the reverse was true but that may have applied to the Reagan-Bush years together. Nevertheless, the difference is pretty small ($197 billion) in comparison to the deficits for those years. The federal debt increased by about $1.7 trillion during those years. BTW, compounding the annual deltas between proposed and actual spending does NOT mean that 1989 spending would have been 24% smaller without those deltas as the Reagan website implies. If spending had been exactly equal to Reagan's budget proposals, the 1989 deficit would still have been about $100 billion and the federal debt would still have increased by about $1.5 trillion over the Reagan years.