Compare Spending By State

On June 15, 2013 usgovernmentspending.com loaded state and local spending and revenue for individual states going back to 1957.

Up to now, we have provided state and local finances from the present back to 1992 using data provided by the Census Bureau here.  But the Census Bureau also has data on individual states going back to 1957 here in file Govt_Finances.zip.

There is a break in data series at 1991-92.  The Census Bureau prior to 1992 has fewer line items than the post-1992 data.  There is also a break at 1976-77.  The Census Bureau prior to 1977 has fewer line items than the post-1977 data.    Typically, the data in reports for earlier years is reported in an aggregate item that sums up the detailed items in the more recent data reports.

These breaks in data have produced "notches" in some of the data series, and we have done some "juggle-ology" to produce smoother data series, as detailed below.

One problem in the pre-1992 data is that Medicaid is not broken out of welfare.  Up to now, for pre 1992 years we have estimated Medicaid expenses for all states combined based upon the assumption that the intergovernmental transfers to health care all apply to Medicaid and can be subtracted from the gross welfare expenditures to produce welfare net of Medicaid.  For each state, therefore, we have broken down pre-1992 gross welfare expenditures  between net welfare and Medicaid based upon the overall ratio for all states between net welfare (gross welfare less health care intergovernmental transfer) and Medicaid (health care intergovernmental transfer).

Another problem that the pre-1992 data seems to include judicial and legal system expenditures under "General Control" in the "General Government" category.  Data since 1992 has separate data series for judicial and legal system expenditures and we showed it under "Protection" in the default data view.  We have therefore created a new "default" view with judicial and legal system expenditures included under "General Government."  The old default view -- now labeled "old" -- has the judicial and legal system expenditures included under "Protection."  Typically, any links you have saved previous to June 15, 2013 will categorize data under the old default view.  New links will use the new default view, unless you select the old default view.

For 1958-60 combined state-and-local data only is reported in the Census Bureau data. So we have estimated state data and local data by interpolation from 1957 and 1961.