How much money?

Posted By David Rothkopf Tuesday, February 10, 2009 - 9:33 PM Share

I got up early this morning and went to the records of the U.S. federal budget. It took the United States of America from 1789 to 1960 to spend the amount of money in this one, a package in the ballpark of $2-2.5 trillion.

In fact, it took the U.S. government 178 years, from our founding until 1967, to spend the amount of money contained in the two spending proposals put forward during the first three weeks of the Obama administration.

This post has been updated.

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11:40 PM ET

February 10, 2009

Wow

Inflation or no that is truly shocking! Those numbers are staggering.

BENJI929

3:42 AM ET

February 11, 2009

Come on

This is just disingenuous. Adjusted for inflation, government spending in the first year after WWII alone totaled more than half a trillion dollars. This is a nice bit of trivia, but it's completely meaningless.

ANON_ANON

4:27 AM ET

February 11, 2009

Mr. Rothkopf, how did you

Mr. Rothkopf, how did you attain your position without knowing anything inflation? Lies, damn lies...

DRLAKE

7:23 PM ET

February 11, 2009

What a silly comparison to

What a silly comparison to make. The US also has more than 75 times the population we had in 1790 (what a lot of sex we've had), our GNP went from $238 billion to about $14 trillion just since 1947 (what a lot of money we've made, we're rich!). Broad historical comparisons like this, especially when comparing dissimilar things like this (yes, due to population growth, economic structure changes, and inflation the US in 1790 or even 1967 is not directly comparable to 2009 on economic issues) are truly meaningless, as Benji929 notes. Hell, our GNP in 1968 was only $858 billion dollars (unadjusted, just like Rothkopf's numbers) so of course we're spending more now. Duh.