i want to believe...

I made some charts of the CBO budget projections to help understand it better. Did not expect to see that Bush increased spending and Clinton and Obama cut spending!

Edit: The big drop in 2011 was when the Tea Party Republicans got control of the House, and the big drops during the Clinton administration were when Republicans controlled both houses of Congress.

@ahalekelly Clinton was famously a small government advocate and practioner.

Checkout federal employee headcount statistics under Clinton. I monitored this during his terms and stunned associates. Best kept secret in Washington since Democrats weren’t proud of it, Republicans were ashamed because it happened under a Democrat president, and the media is too lazy/obtuse to analyze any of this. So, it was a nonstory that led to four years of budget surpluses!…until W violated millenia of history by starting two wars and simultaneously passing two tax cuts. Throughout all of history, going back to ancient Rome and Greece, the wealthy have always ponied up tax funding for war. That completely erased the Clinton federal budget surplus years’ work.

The CBO's annual budget projections seem like a good resolution source, I edited the question criteria to specifically use these projections. Their mid-2024 report is available here, raw data is available on the CBO Github(!) here.

The current projection for 2024 expenditures is $6.8T, ramping up to $10.3T in 2034 (non-inflation adjusted). Expenditures pre-pandemic were $5.2T in 2018 and $5.5T in 2019, in inflation adjusted 2024 dollars.

@ahalekelly so getting it back to pre-covid levels would do the trick. Doesn't seem too hard.

I think this would be a good goal for the whole 4 year term. One year seems difficult

@JamesGrugett people don't like to trade long term markets as much, but yeah I should probably make a market for that as well