American families understand that adhering to a budget is relatively simple: Don’t spend more than you take in, and don’t borrow more than you can afford to. Those lessons are lost on the federal government, however, as the nation continues to pile on debt by spending billions more than it collects in taxes year after year.
And because the government spends, taxes and borrows by the hundreds of billions and trillions, it’s hard to grasp just how out of sync its budget is every year. To put this into perspective, Heritage’s 2015 Federal Budget in Pictures shows what it would be like if a single household treated its finances like the government does.
If the average family had the spending habits of the federal government, it would spend $61,000 a year, despite only earning $52,000 in income. This would be like racking up a $9,000 credit card bill on top of an outstanding $311,000 of debt—like paying a mortgage but without the house.
The solution is clear: The family would need to limit its spending so that it is more closely aligned with its earnings. Clearly for the government, this has been a problem. Chronic annual deficits—and the debt they build upon—are symptoms of excessive spending. The main problem that Congress faces is that most of the spending growth comes from entitlement spending, which grows on autopilot year after year. Without reform, spending from these programs and paying interest on the nation’s debt will consume 100 percent of tax revenue, leaving none of the government’s income for anything else.
If the average family had the spending habits of the federal government, it would spend $61,000 a year, despite only earning $52,000 in income.
To curb such excessive spending, the federal government must realign its priorities, eliminate wasteful and inappropriate programs, end corporate welfare whenever possible, and make structural reforms to programs that are contributing the most to increases in spending, such as Social Security, Medicaid, Medicare and Obamacare.
Families understand that they have to stick to their budget. Congress should as well. To find out more about how the government spends more than it takes in, visit our charts in Heritage’s 2015 Federal Budget in Pictures.