Are "deficits" still above the pre-Great Recession trend?

Twitter is a great place to be wrong, because smart people often correct you in real time. That happened yesterday, when I commented on this graph tweeted by David Andolfatto:

Nominal federal government expenditures over time are plotted along with nominal federal receipts.

Noah Smith (and David, at least implicitly) was making the case that net government outlays had returned to pre-Great Recession trend. I suggested that the current levels remained above trend despite spending growth being negative in real (inflation adjusted) terms. David suggested I check the same graph out in real, per capita terms. 

This seemed like a good opportunity to work with some macro data, which I rarely do, and add an inaugural post to my blog. Here is what I did to create the graphs below:

• Downloaded federal government expenditures, total expenditures, federal government receipts, state and local receipts, consumer price index less food and energy, and U.S. population from the St. Louis Fed's FRED data.
• Normalized the dollar denominated variables to be in 2014Q4 dollars.
• Normalized the now "real" dollar denominated variables to be in per capita terms.

The egg timer went off on this project before I could make these graphs pretty, but here the graphs of real per capita federal expenditures and receipts (plus the same for federal+state+local):

These graphs tell basically the same story as David's. It is obvious the Great Recession generated large deficits, and that those deficits have shrunk in the years following the stimulus response. But how large are current deficits relative to those before the Great Recession? To better answer that question I graphed the difference between real per capita expenditures and real per capita receipts.

What do these graphs tell us? The real per capita surpluses at the end of the last century represented a substantial deviation from the trend beginning in 1960. Similarly, the deficits during the Great Recession were substantial. And deficits in recent quarters are approximately at the levels of 1980s (AKA the Reagan Glory Years).

This means my "eye-balling a graph while leaving a winery after moderate day-drinking" self was wrong: we have returned to deficits that are roughly on trend.

Mea culpa

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

A few notes on the construction of these graphs:

• The data and stata .do files are included below.
• There isn't a total receipts variable, and the state & local are only reported annually.
• As a result, the "total" data (federal + state & local) only run through Q4 of 2014.
• The federal data are through Q2 of 2015.

Perhaps someone more fluent with FRED data could accomplish this within FRED. Feel free to let me know if there are better FRED (or other) data series to use to address this topic.

blog151012.do
File Size:	3 kb
File Type:	do

Download File

---

blog151012.xls
File Size:	78 kb
File Type:	xls

Download File

---