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Tea Party Fact Sheet

A usgovernmentspending.com brief by Christopher Chantrill

Government Spending since 1900

Chart S.03t: Total Spending as Percent GDP

Would you believe it? Back in 1902 the government spent only six percent of our national income for public use. That was for everything: defense, education, the Post Office. Today in 2016 the government takes almost 36 percent of our nation’s product. And for what?

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Government Debt since 1900

Chart D.13t: Total National Debt as Percent GDP

Used to be that the National Debt only went up to pay for wars. Then President Reagan increased the debt to win the Cold War. Now President Obama is increasing the debt to bail out the banks — and anyone else that needs a cool trillion or so.
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Decline of the Dollar

The federal government took control of the nation’s money supply in 1913. President Roosevelt cut the value of the dollar to get out of the Great Depression. President Nixon cut it again to get re-elected in 1972. Now the dollar is worth about 3 cents of the dollar in 1913. You decide how well the feds have done.

Welfare Spending. Destroying the low-income family

Chart S.33t: Welfare Spending Since 1965

The great achievement of government welfare programs is that now 40 percent of children are born out of wedlock and over 30 percent of children of high-school dropouts aren’t living with both parents.
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Education Spending. Dumbing us down

Chart 2.52: TEducation Spending by Government Level

Back in 1842 Horace Mann promised that public schools would cut the crime rate by 90 percent. That was when nearly all Americans were able to read. Today the government reckons that only 13 percent of adult Americans are “proficient” in literacy and numeracy. But government spending on education has never been higher.
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There’s More...

usgovernmentspending.com. Where you go to get facts about government.

Prepared by Christopher Chantrill.
email: chrischantrill@gmail.com

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Next Data Update

> Federal Budget FY18

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Medicaid Update for FY2024

On January 14, 2026, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) published its annual report on National Health Expenditures and its NHE Tables includes data on Medicaid from 1960 to 2023. On January 15, 2026, usgovernmentspending.com updated its Medicaid data.

Item	2024 Estimate	2024 Actual
Federal Medicaid	$567.2 bn	$567.2 bn
State Medicaid (net)	$124.4 bn	$253.2 bn
Total Medicaid	$691.6 bn	$820.4 bn

The federal Medicaid number comes from the Federal Budget Subfunction 558: Grants to states for Medicaid. The state contribution comes from the NHE Tables.

usgovernmentspending.com publishes "guesstimates" of state and local spending from the latest year published by the Census Bureau (currently FY 2023) to the last year in the Historical Tables of the federal budget. (currently 2029 from the FY25 budget). So we have developed "guesstimates" of Medicaid spending going out to 2029, assuming that the overall Medicaid spending increases at the same rate as the federal "Grants to States for Medicaid" increases.

National Health Expenditure data is updated each year in mid December.