RATING THE PUB CONGRESS
How would you measure congressional success?
Even though the new Congress is only two months old, there has been much criticism of both the leadership and the members. The Republicans promised to reduce government spending, reform the tax code, and reduce the regulatory burden.
There are objective ways to measure whether they will have reduced government spending.
Total government spending includes the amount state and local governments spend, some of it transfer payments from the federal government, money spent by the federal government on defense, interest, "entitlements," including Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps and all other federal government programs.
Despite most of the entitlements being labeled "mandatory spending," in fact, Congress can alter these programs and thus can determine how much is spent on them.
In order to measure whether Congress is indeed reducing spending, it is important to establish the appropriate baseline. In this table, I have taken total government spending minus the amount that state and local governments raise and spend on their own.