Friday, July 27, 2012

Guns vs. Butter

The following chart shows defense spending as a percentage of wages and personal current transfer receipts as a percentage of wages.


Click to enlarge.

Although guns are well above the long-term exponential decay trend, butter is the clear winner here.

100% butter by 2060! Or bust!

Hey, it's just a t-shirt idea. We'll hit 100% butter in 2059 if the exponential trend miraculously continues. These exponential trends do have a way of eventually failing though. Go figure.

This post inspired by US defense spending since end of WW II at Wasatch Economics.

Source Data:
St. Louis Fed: Custom Chart
at

2 comments:

  1. ScottJuly 29, 2012 at 7:38 PM

    Thank you! Of course it was these exact terms that were bandied about in the sixties leading up to dumping the gold standard so that we could pretend to get both. Which of course led to galloping inflation.

    I guess the "guns vs butter" has been replaced by the "deficits don't matter" meme since we switched to fiat currency.

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  2. Stagflationary MarkJuly 29, 2012 at 8:01 PM

    Scott,

    I have an uneasy feeling, as a former programmer, that this may be the catch phrase of the future.

    NOT (Guns OR Butter)

    It would be the ultimate in anti-prosperity. Sigh.

    ReplyDelete