For no particular reason, here's a graph of federal spending:Federal spending by president.If you're wondering why it stops at 2010, the answer is that I made this over two years ago, and I'm only posting it now because I happened across it while organizing some files. I've broken down the spending data in various ways: red regions represent republican presidencies while blue regions are democrats; also, you can see that, these days, most federal spending is in the form of transfer payments, and that almost all the rest is the military--a perfect illustration of Krugman's point that the Federal government is just an insurance company with an army. I will leave it to my readers to infer how party affiliations affect spending policies.
