MetaFilter posts tagged with spending

Why we can't keep track of those $400 toilet seats....

HuronBob — Tue, 14 May 2013 14:10:50 -0800

Contractors Raked in $385 Billion on Overseas Bases in 12 Years "I began with publicly available government contract data and followed a methodology for tracking funds used by the Commission on Wartime Contracting. This allowed me to compile a list of every Pentagon contract with a "place of performance.... There were 1.7 million of them."

Prom spending highest among poor northeastern families

notmtwain — Mon, 29 Apr 2013 01:50:05 -0800

Prom spending rising again, average of $1,139 The USA Today story is based on a recent VISA press release about prom spending that comes out every year. The VISA press release breaks down how prom spending is highest among Northeastern families, with Northeasterners averaging $1,528 compared to Midwesterners paltry $722. It also shows a breakdown by income category with families earning less than $50,000 spending an average of $1,245 while those from higher earning families spend $1,129. The USA today article focuses only on the national $1,139 average and ignores the regional and income differences. Naturally, it has been picked up by the AP and you will probably see versions on all the TV news shows within days, offering shopping tips for those forced to economize. Last year's survey broke down the spending by income category: Parents who make under $20,000 will spend an average of $1,200 Parents who make $20,000-$29,999 will spend an average of $2,635 Parents who make $30,000-$39,999 will spend an average of $801 Parents who make $40,000-$49,999 will spend an average of $695 Parents who make over $50,000 will spend an average of $988 Parents who make over $75,000 will spend an average of $842 The inversion of the relation between family income and spending is striking. Somehow, the USA Today article didn't cover this.

The State of our Metafilter is Strong

Drinky Die — Tue, 12 Feb 2013 17:54:58 -0800

President Barack Obama will tonight give the first State of the Union address of his second term in office. The address will again focus strongly on the issues of jobs and the economy. The Republican response will be delivered by Senator Marco Rubio of Florida and will focus on traditional Republican messages of lower taxes and spending. The bilingual Senator plans to give his remarks in both English and Spanish in an attempt to reach out to the Latino community which has proven difficult for Republican politicians to connect with. There will also be a Tea Party response delivered by Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky. Senator Paul will call for reduced spending and debt and for the Republican party to be more welcoming of immigrants. Jill Stein of the Green Party will also give a response. Comprehensive live coverage is available online via C-SPAN.

Nuts

schmod — Thu, 31 Jan 2013 07:39:00 -0800

Yesterday, the Nielsen Company released a report showing that same-sex partnered households in America shop about 16% more than the average US household. Broken down into categories, Nielsen observes that gay couples drink a ton, while lesbian couples eat an awful lot of cottage cheese.

People will always love to read.

griphus — Thu, 06 Dec 2012 06:25:07 -0800

"HS Dent, an economic forecasting firm, compiled Census data [PDF] on spending behavior and presented them as a series of demand curves... The curves measure average annual expenditure for a given product over the age of the consumer." [via]

Fiscal-Cliff-Diving

the man of twists and turns — Sat, 01 Dec 2012 07:19:08 -0800

There's been a lot of talk in the US media about the "Fiscal Cliff" and the "Grand Bargain" What are they?

The "fiscal cliff" is a confluence of three legal changes taking effect Jan. 1: the expiration of a payroll-tax cut, the expiration of the Bush-era tax cuts, and the advent of mandatory spending cuts known as "sequestration."

Fiscal Cliff 101: 5 Basic Questions Answered. What's Happening: Fiscal Cliff Explained Not all are convinced of the necessity of Congress' self-created problem: 6 Reasons why this Fiscal Cliff Is A Scam. Large numbers get thrown around, making it hard to see what exactly is at stake. How did we get here? Fiscal Cliff Reality Check: Are US Taxes Low Or High? "It’s simply a fact that the fiscal cliff was created in response to GOP threats to force the U.S. government to default on its obligations." Or did we already go over the cliff years ago? Who is involved? President Obama; Speaker of the House John Boehner and House Republicans; Minority Leader Nancy Peolsi and House Democrats include the Gang of Six and the Progressive Caucus. Even the CEO of Goldman Sachs has weighed in. The "Fix the Debt" group of is concerned about the growth of deficit spending, while 'the Left is divided' on the Grand Bargain - or the Great Betrayal. What are the sides? The White House's Fiscal Cliff Proposal, delivered by Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner which Speaker Boehner calls "not a serious proposal." Obama's opening bid and the Republican response is all part of the negotiations. The White House plan "is a start, not an end." Obama's proposal appears to be a break from the negotiating in the middle path that he has taken before, though Robert Reich ( who recommended aiming high) thinks not much has changed. And Republicans have yet to make any proposals of their own, preferring to follow the President's lead. The Economist has a brief summary. Paul Krugman characterizes most of those calling for deficit reduction "hawks and hypocrites". And its always good to remember that elections have consequences.

The Long Treacherous Climb Up The Fiscal Cliff. The so-called fiscal cliff is one of those rare issues where everyone has an incentive to predict the worst. Barack Obama thinks it will force Republicans to accept higher taxes on the rich, Republicans think they can back him into a corner and force him to cave to their demands as they did two years ago, and businesses and consumers are wary that the still-fragile economy may take a nosedive. Figuring out how this will play out is Washington’s favorite parlor game right now, so let’s play.

What will happen now? Obama pushes for stimulus in fiscal cliff deal. 10 easy way to avoid the fiscal cliff. Three Votes Could Make Or Break Fiscal Cliff Deal. Lobbys, like the AARP, the IFA, and various unions, are gearing up. One paper predicts 'lower GDP and higher unemployment' if no deal is struck. The Weekly Standard says Obama's Plan Will Raise Taxes On Small Businesses, Lower Them For Corporations. The White House is apparently worried there won't be a deal by 2013, since prominent politicians like Senator Alan Simpson and Senator Erskine Bowles say falling off fiscal cliff is 'likely.' But perhaps the President should reassure Americans they will survive the fall. But what does the public really want? To "cut military waste, not charitable deductions"? How Obamacare Came To The Fiscal Cliff and The Grand Cynicism Of The Grand Bargain. A failure to reach a bargain may spur 'bond vigilantes' to move, but that may not be a bad thing. Will the Romney-Ryan plan live on? Perhaps a Obamney plan? Of course, the military-industrial complex will be largely spared. What does this mean for you? The Congressional Budget Office outlines options and consequences. Could the 'Fiscal Cliff' Push The US Into A Recession?. But if entitlement programs are your top priority, the fiscal cliff is your friend. 12 Ways the "Grand Bargain" could screw the poor. The mortgage-interest deduction could be on the table. City Journal writes: Localities should worry less about Washington’s spending cuts than about how their own state governments handle them. Costco is paying a special dividend, part of 10 tax moves to make now. And maybe we'll get some tax simplification too. Disney's Bob Iger's position has spawned a hashtag: 15 Best Star Wars Fiscal Cliff Tweets

Buying useful things, like roads and universities and health care and solar energy and spaceships, should be better stimulus than fighting wars.

The Whelk — Sun, 30 Sep 2012 08:34:17 -0800

"Liberals have not always been very good at communicating why liberalism works. There’s many reasons for this, but part of it is that it can be hard to defend the obvious from an absurd and deceptive attack. For half a century you had to be a crank to oppose what Roosevelt accomplished; liberals got out of the habit of arguing for their beliefs. I hope this page will help. Liberals don’t need to apologize for their vision of how American society should work. Liberalism saved American capitalism and democracy, defeated Naziism, created a prosperous middle class, and benefited every sector of society, from the back streets to Wall Street. " Mefi's own Zompist (previously) on Why Liberalism Works.

In West Virginia, money grows on trees

thewalrus — Fri, 11 May 2012 20:26:21 -0800

In the state of West Virginia, the government has just purchased 1064 Cisco 3945 routers at a price of $22,600 each. These are being used to service small public libraries with as few as four PCs when a much smaller router such as the Cisco 1801 would be more appropriate. Local journalists have found out about this and are starting their own investigation. A consulting firm has been retained to audit what exactly happened. Notice how the small public library has retained its old PCs with CRT monitors, but it has a shiny new Cisco 3945 strapped to the wall... If they absolutely need something with a T1 interface, an 1801 would be sufficient, if not, what they're doing could be accomplished with a $75 Mikrotik.

"I don’t think most people could bear to pay more."

Snarl Furillo — Sun, 12 Feb 2012 21:52:24 -0800

"We’re not going to say, 'Give it to me and let my grandchildren suffer.' I think they underestimate seniors when they think that way." But 71-year-old Barbara Sullivan cannot imagine asking people to pay higher taxes. And as she considered making do with less, she started to cry." (slnyt) The New York Times speaks to residents of one rural Minnesota community about the government benefits that keep them afloat- and about their deeply-held belief that those benefits are too generous.

Is your food spending normal?

desjardins — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 15:16:48 -0800

Is Your Food Spending Normal? This interactive calculator from Mother Jones compares your spending with others in your location and income bracket.

Red state in the red?

dubold — Sat, 06 Aug 2011 13:10:33 -0800

Where Federal taxes are raised and spent. "Some American states receive more in federal spending than they pay in federal taxes; others receive less. Over twenty years these fiscal transfers can add up to a sizeable sum." A graph of the United States, color-coded to indicate surplus or deficit.

Of sound mind and but not so much sound body

autopilot — Mon, 20 Jun 2011 16:35:49 -0800

Life imitates O'Henry's "The Cop and the Anthem" (tl;dr): James Verone robbed a bank to get health care while in jail. In a similar move, Nathan Bootz, Superintendent of Ithaca Public Schools, "proposed to make his school a prison" to increase the state's spending per-student to the same level as it spends per-prisoner in the jails.

Deal of the Century

kliuless — Mon, 21 Mar 2011 18:00:09 -0800

How two American kids became big-time weapons traders - "Working with nothing but an Internet connection, a couple of cellphones and a steady supply of weed, the two friends — one with a few college credits, the other a high school dropout — had beaten out Fortune 500 giants like General Dynamics to score the huge arms contract. With a single deal, two stoners from Miami Beach had turned themselves into the least likely merchants of death in history." (via; previously on arms contractors)

Budget Balancer of the Year: You

escabeche — Sun, 06 Mar 2011 20:07:16 -0800

The Program for Public Consultation carried out a different kind of budget poll -- they asked each of their respondents to generate a package of tax increases and spending cuts sufficient for substantial deficit reduction, then averaged the results. The outcome was not what you might expect. The mean package included twice as much tax increase as spending cut: big deficit-reducing moves included substantial income tax increases for the highest brackets and deep cuts in defense spending. Republicans cut less spending than Democrats, as did people who identified as "very sympathetic to the Tea Party." Hardly anybody likes the reduction of the estate tax. Why is the public consensus so different from the Washington consensus? Read the full report (.pdf) Or try the interactive budget exercise.

XOXO to Title X

limeonaire — Fri, 18 Feb 2011 17:45:53 -0800

Enjoying your Friday night? Be careful out there. In between other things, including voting for huge cuts to the EPA's budget and regulating power, the U.S. House of Representatives just voted to eliminate Title X, originally signed into law 40 years ago by Republican President Richard Nixon, which provides funding for Planned Parenthood. If Title X is cut, a number of services for low-income women would likely be reduced or eliminated across the U.S.—including vaccines and screening to prevent cervical cancer. According to CDC statistics, cervical cancer was previously the leading cause of cancer death among women in the United States. The single biggest factor, according to the CDC, in reducing cervical cancer mortality over the last 40 years: the availability of Pap tests, which can detect precancerous cervical cells (for instance, changes resulting from HPV, which more than a quarter of U.S. women ages 14 to 59 tested positive for in 2007) before they develop into cancer. The House did not, incidentally, vote to prevent the military from sponsoring NASCAR race cars.

Defense firms lure retired generals

kliuless — Mon, 10 Jan 2011 13:49:09 -0800

From the Pentagon to the private sector - In large numbers, and with few rules, retiring generals are taking lucrative defense-firm jobs BONUS Meet General Warbucks - Warfare and corporate welfare What Ike Got Right - Why his warning against the military-industrial complex still matters Eisenhower's 'Military-Industrial Complex' Evolution - Documents released by the National Archives shed new light on the genesis of the phrase "military-industrial complex"

The Opening of a Conservative Mind

kliuless — Mon, 26 Jul 2010 11:22:40 -0800

Bruce Bartlett, senior policy analyst in the Reagan White House, speaks out against Republicans - The monumental hypocrisy of the Republican Party is something amazing to behold. And their dimwitted accomplices in the tea-party movement are not much better. They know that Republicans, far more than Democrats, are responsible for our fiscal mess, but they won't say so. And they adamantly refuse to put on the table any meaningful programme that would actually reduce spending. Judging by polls, most of them seem to think that all we have to do is cut foreign aid, which represents well less than 1% of the budget. Martin Wolf, éminence grise of the Financial Times, also fulminates:

Republicans have no interest in doing anything sensible ... To understand modern Republican thinking on fiscal policy, we need to go back to perhaps the most politically brilliant (albeit economically unconvincing) idea in the history of fiscal policy: "supply-side economics". Supply-side economics liberated conservatives from any need to insist on fiscal rectitude and balanced budgets.

BONUS -The election in one graph -Can American Conservatism Ever Be Reformed? -Towards Economic Humility -How To Balance The Budget -High-debt History -Some Thoughts on the Bush Tax "Cuts" Expiration More BB on (lack of) stimulus - Thus it appears that there is virtually nothing that can be done to stimulate the economy. For various reasons—political, institutional and substantive—there is no prospect of either fiscal or monetary stimulus. [1,2,3] A Toxic Toolkit - Why is the Fed unwilling to do more to help the economy? Trickle Down Meanness - There is more at stake here than our economy. We must, as a nation, decide whether we want to continue on the path we have been on since roughly 1980. Do we want to continue to reward disproportionately a small fraction of the population that (based on recent performance) seems better at misallocating financial, physical, and human capital through speculative endeavors? Do we want to continue the trickle down of meanness? Shall we live in a society in which trust and fellow feeling are lost, replaced by mindless (not rational, not productive) winner-take-all competition that favors one group disproportionately? If the answers to these questions are all "yes," then the social fabric may already be torn beyond repair and I fear we are about to learn firsthand how empires crumble. A titanic struggle to decide whether the jobless should get money for longer - There are two main reasons why Republicans oppose extending benefits: because the country cannot afford it, and because benefits, they believe, have given the unemployed an incentive to stay out of work. Neither reason is well founded. Is Another Economics Possible? - Textbook economics also largely ignores worker-owned businesses and consumer cooperatives, although these are geographically widespread in the United States. Recent research suggests that many workers would like to play a larger role in the management of their companies and that "shared capitalism" works remarkably well ... One could say, therefore, that another economics is now under way. Still, it seems fragmentary and incomplete and not yet adequate to the task of institutional design. We still don’t know how best to organize cooperative efforts or how to mobilize the capital necessary to support them on a large scale.

Sometimes, I doubt our commitment to Sparkle Motion

kliuless — Tue, 08 Jun 2010 09:45:22 -0800

Make Work^[1,2,3] or: How I Learned^[4,5] to Stop Worrying^[6] and Love Deficit Spending^[7,8,9] (during a general glut at the zero bound) -- When I was a kid, if I was sitting around the house and complained I didn't have anything to do, my mom would always respond the same way. "I'll find something for you to do," and she would. It was make work, she was finding something for me to do on the spot to cure my unemployment problem... If you look around the city or countryside with the same eye that my mom looked around the house, you will find many, many things that need to be done, things of high value to residents in the area. There's a whole backlog of useful things that people could be put to work on, and with unemployment so high and interests rates (i.e. the required return on spending) so low, it would be a good time to pursue these projects vigorously.

Set Your Spreadsheets to Stunned

Electric Dragon — Fri, 04 Jun 2010 13:32:42 -0800

The UK Government has published extracts from COINS, the Combined Online Information System used by the Treasury to track all public spending by the Government. Together, the files constitute about 11Gb of data in delimited text format containing consolidated financial information for each department and account type. The Guardian have produced a web interface allowing search and drill down within the dataset. For instance: how much did the Department of Transport spend on consultants in 2009/10? So far it only covers 2009/10 and 2008/09. Data back to 2005 will be released "in the next fortnight", but the current year's data will not be released until next June.

Infographic: Food and Drink Spending by City

jjray — Thu, 13 May 2010 20:37:53 -0800

Infographic: Food spending in the biggest U.S. cities. Austin, TX is living large. Detroit, MI must be losing weight.

US Military Cuts And A Step Towards Equality

zarq — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 10:00:55 -0800

Yesterday, US President Obama signed a $680bn military policy bill, which cuts military spending, including $2bn in funding for new F-22 fighter jets. However, the bill also contained the first major piece of federal gay rights legislation, and fulfilled an Obama campaign promise: acts of violence against gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people have now been added to the list of federal hate crimes.

Don't worry, it's monopoly money anyway.

Justinian — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 12:59:03 -0800

Overly confident in the economic health of the United States? Feeling sanguine about current spending levels? Haven't yet been scared out of your wits about your financial future? No worries! The U.S. National Debt Clock page is for you! Your one stop shop for all things financial meltdown related: Total debt, debt per citizen, budget deficits and spending year-to-date, total governmental bailouts, and much much more!

ARR! "dramatic action" ahoy :P

kliuless — Sun, 11 Jan 2009 09:41:28 -0800

President Obama's plan for American Recovery and Reinvestment [pdf] might be thought of as TARP round two [1,2] -- instead of hiding the bodies, this one's preparing the ground for a big tent or the economic equivalent of war. There are critics and detractors (cramdown nation ;) left and right, natch, but also conservative supporters and progressive defenders to save or create ~~three~~ four million jobs; hooray! ...then there's the question of how to pay for it all [entitlements, ORLY?] -- of course it pays for itself thru the (one) wonders of self-financing! like a key difference in my mind between the current situation and depression-era US or 'lost decade' Japan is reliance on external creditors to finance deficits; the dog isn't barking yet, so to speak... [personally i'm eagerly awaiting the obama corps and a (borked, esp if jerked) military/civil space elevator :]

The Next New Deal

Kwantsar — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 18:27:33 -0800

The Next New Deal With the vaunted post-Cold War "Peace dividend" evaporating, the United States found itself unable to invest adequately in either its infrastructure or its children. Eventually people began to talk of another Great Depression, before the coming of the next New Deal.

Government spending and tax levels

russilwvong — Fri, 30 May 2008 12:18:50 -0800

Want to know how government spending and taxation levels have gone up or down over the last 20 years, and how they compare with other countries? The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development has a handy set of tables (Excel, HTML-ized by Google): total spending, total revenues, fiscal surplus or deficit (Norway's surplus is 17% of GDP). Part of the statistical tables for the semi-annual OECD Outlook.