I like your graphs. The bar graph would be even more useful if it had expenditures on there and also showed who was president during each year.
The line chart is revealing (although no news to me). The skyrocketing cost of higher ed is downright criminal - and so much of it is due to A) ballooning numbers and salaries of administrators, which has been the subject of numerous articles over the years in the Chronicle, and B) a country club mentality at many schools, including WSU, where fancy dorms, huge rec centers, and other "educational" items swell the cost of tuition and fees. And oh - gotta keep the freshman live on rule to pay for those new dorms!
That said, of course federal revenue is at record levels. The country is bigger, more people are retired, inflation, etc etc. It will rarely go down.
I completely agree that we have a spending problem, and agree that it is due to the elephants - SS and Medicare (but don't forget the military). But it is not "easily" solved. No elected official, D or R, has or is going to touch any of those items. Until we install term limits anyway. SS, by necessity, needs to be at least slowed down. Suspend the COLA's. Reduce payments or steepen the tax for high income individuals. Something.
Medicare in specific and health care in general is a monster. Are you going to vote for cutting/eliminating your parents' health care? Of course not. Should we institute the "Death Panels" the R's used to warn about? Of course not. Or are we? I referred to my (now departed) Dad's doctor as a one woman death panel. Every time Dad was in the hospital, she'd pull out the POLST (spelling?) form and try to get us to pull back farther on medical procedures in case of near-death events. Of course Mom always would check the "full every measure" box. Dad was completely out of it for years, mentally and physically, before finally passing away. I bet Medicare spent $100,000 keeping him alive that last year. How do we fix that?
And it's not just Medicare or health insurance in general. It's healthcare. New and better medicines come out all the time to fix what our fat society is breaking. How about we don't allow any high blood pressure, diabetes, heart or other medication for obese people? Why should my tax dollars pay for your poor health that you caused by being a fatty? Or smoking, or whatever?
Anyway, a cornucopia of issues, for which some mitigating solutions could be found, if a rational and compromising society was in evidence. But it is not.
Finally, your link on the record tax revenues in April, 2018 is clearly from a right-wing publication, as evidenced by the ending line: "We doubt we'll hear Democrats admitting to their flagrant lies and fabrications about the tax cuts. But we do hope that voters hold them to account this fall."
Yeah that comment serves to further the conversation. Pretty sure that "flagrant lies and fabrications" better describe a certain "R" person. Did you know that the Canadians burned down the White House in 1812?
And while I am surprised that April 2018 collections are higher than April 2017, the tax cuts can hardly be the reason. Federal tax revenues are accounted for on basically a cash basis. So the April 2018 revenues include everybody paying their 2017 tax bills, and 1st quarter 2018 estimates, which are usually based upon their 2017 taxes so as to avoid possible underpayment penalties! And while the tax cuts surely had some impact (lower withholding), You can hardly argue that those cuts, in 3 months, caused some incredible surge in hiring and overall income due to the trickle down. Now a nice, non-partisan analysis of those figures, and some additional historical comparison as well, would be very interesting and educational.
