Over the past 9 decades, the U.S. population has increased from 106 million people to 304 million - an increase of about 200 percent.  Yet in that same time period, federal spending has risen from 215 billion annually (in today's dollars) to over nearly three trillion dollars.  This represents an increase of close to 1,300 percent!

So what happened in the last 88 years that was so expensive?  For starters, there were a handful of big wars, an increase in government protection of food, water, and air, elevated medical expenses, massive construction and road building projects, and of course, the escalation of military spending brought about by the Cold War, to name just a few of the reasons.  So looking at a chart that dates backs to 1920 is a bit misleading.  However, one interesting question does arise from it: Are Americans 1,300 percent better off today than we were in 1920?

That question is best left for historians and the few still alive today to discuss.  But what we can examine are trends in spending over the past twenty years, after the major environmental, military, medical, and construction hurdles had already been crossed.

Sources: U.S. Census Bureau, Department of Commerce 

 
Looking at the charts above, you can see that in 1985, U.S. spending topped $946 billion.  Twenty years later, federal spending reached nearly $2.5 trillion - an increase of 164 percent.  In the same period, the population grew by only 24 percent.  So why did the government need to increase spending by so much? 

The simple truth is that in government and politics, it's much easier to spend money than to save it.  In fact, in the past forty years, there were only four years in which a federal budget surplus (savings) occurred: from 1997-2000 under President Bill Clinton. 

Source: Perotcharts.com