Bush Administration Spending (1 in a series)

One of the most frustrating things to me is that partisans will not be consistent. There arguments are frequently opportunistic. For example, do Democrats want Bush to be fiscally responsible, or do they want him to spend more? (Or, do they want both, and believe that this can be achieved by raising marginal tax rates?)

I have been gathering figures on spending on various programs. In this post, I have the figures for Head Start spending. The three columns are Year, enrollment, and appropriations in current $Million.

1965 561,000 96.4
1966 733,000 198.9
1967 681,400 349.2
1968 693,900 316.2
1969 663,600 333.9
1970 477,400 325.7
1971 397,500 360
1972 379,000 376.3
1973 379,000 400.7
1974 352,800 403.9
1975 349,000 403.9
1976 349,000 441
1977 333,000 475
1978 391,400 625
1979 387,500 680
1980 376,300 735
1981 387,300 818.7
1982 395,800 911.7
1983 414,950 912
1984 442,140 995.8
1985 452,080 1075
1986 451,732 1040
1987 446,523 1130.5
1988 448,464 1206.3
1989 450,970 1235
1990 548,470 1552.01
1991 583,471 1951.8
1992 621,078 2201.8
1993 713,903 2776.3
1994 740,493 3325.7
1995 750,696 3534.1
1996 752,077 3569.3
1997 793,809 3980.5
1998 822,316 4347.4
1999 835,365 4658.2
2000 857,664 5266.2
2001 905,235 6199.1
2002 912,345 6536.6


A few points from this:

• Real, per student spending was flat throughout the 70s, decreased slightly through the 80s, but has exploded since then. The apparent reduction in real, per student spending under the mostly-Democrat Congress and Ronnie was due to increasing enrollment and inflationary erosion, not actual cuts.
• The first president Bush began the prolific spending. It subsided slightly at the beginning of the Republican Revolution in 1995/96, but picked up again afterwards.
• The current enrollment and spending levels are higher than they were at the end of the Clinton Administration and nearly twice as high as they were in the first years. Are there really that many more poor children? If so, then the Clinton miracle economy must not have treated children that well. Or is means-testing becoming less popular or less feasible?