WP Article

I was reading the following article from the Washington Post concerning area's most impacted by the shutdown. 

I have two issues. 

1) It doesn't really differentiate Govt Civilian vs. Govt Contractor vs. Military.  I hope they do an update.  As I am myself a contractor (prior military), and living in Colorado, I see this pretty close.  The place that I work is still going full steam as civilians are the vast minority of worker bee's, followed by military, followed by contractors.  The military is still getting paid, and our contract is paid up for quite awhile yet.

2) After the shutdowns in the 90's the civilians got back paid.  So unless they are on the low end of the GS scale and are living paycheck to paycheck or less, then I don't see many people suffering greatly for the next few days before this all works itself out and they end up right back where they should have been with no shutdown.

The Article:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/special/business/diversify-economy/?hpid=z2

10,000 foot view of the US Economy

So without further adieu, I give 100 years of US fiscal health from a 10,000 foot view:

 



So what do we get out of this?  Not much yet, but it's a start.  I have several topics bubbling around in my head.  What this chart shows is total GDP in gray overlaid with total receipts (taxes, etc) in blue, outlays (expenditures) in a nice red line, and surplus/deficit in green.  You don't see it above 0 very much.

This data was taken direct from the source (Office of Management and Budget):
http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/omb/budget/fy2014/assets/hist01z1.xls

WhoWhatWhy

I'm not exactly a professional blogger.  I certainly don't make any money at it (hint, feel free to hit an ad or two while you're here).  I don't have much of a background in politics, and the news drives me nuts.  Republicans blame Democrats and vice versa about the same issues day in and day out.  So one day I went and tried to figure out what was really going on.  That started a mini-hobby about trying to find the reality behind the mass media frenzy.

So my goal here is to provide hard data in digestible layman's terms.  My full intent is to keep political rhetoric out of it.  I'll really, really try...  I truly am a geek.  In real life I'm a systems engineer and I crunch numbers and build statistics all day and I have years of experience 'dumbing down' technical data into executive speak.  So this should be a fun experience for me.