Can anyone tell me how I can get copies of the Federal Budgets from the years 1776 on?
After we won our independence from England, the government of the brand new United States of America was formed, and began collecting taxes and spending money.
Two hundred and thirty years later, “pork barrel spending” is at an all-time high and so are taxes.
I want to pinpoint the first time that our Federal Government decided to rebate money back to a state.
That is the moment in time that created a door through which all “pork barrel” has subsequently passed.
Thank you! P. F. Bacon
Hi P.F. Bacon. I don’t have an answer to your question, but I do think it’s a pretty interesting one. I don’t know how clearly you can even “pinpoint” a Federal budget in 1776. It took a while for a formal government to develop, especially considering that it took over a decade after 1776 to finally create and (somewhat) agree to The Constitution of the United States. AFAIK the individual states were much more responsible for collecting taxes and spending than anything at the Federal level. I do not think you will get the precise answer you would hope to get from your question. Welcome anyways though.
Moderator’s Note: I don’t know the answer either, but I’ll move this to our “General Questions” forum for you.
There really wasn’t a Federal budget until after the Constituion was adopted. Then you can point to Hamilton’s plan for the Federal government to assume all of the states Revolutionary War debts, which was pretty much the issue that spurred the development of the two party system in the U.S.
You can track down historical spending patterns of the U.S. government from here:
http://www.census.gov/prod/www/abs/statab.html
Remember that the Federal budget was pretty small until World War I. For a long time, there wasn’t much for the Federal government to do. Most of the revenue came from import duties until the income tax was adopted.
Prior to 1789, the Federal government (under the Articles of Confederation) supported the (rather minimal) work it did by grants from the individual states. It had no power to levy taxes of any sort on its own, and it resembled an anachronistic National Association of State Governments with mutual-support subsidiary organizations more than it did the present system.
The government was financed largely through tariffs and excises from 1789 until 1912, except for two brief periods during which an income tax was (unconstitutionally at the time) imposed.
Many major public libraries and large university libraries are designated depositories for federal documents. They’ll be be on microfilm or microfiche to save space, but there will still be hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of government documents of all kinds. The librarians there are specialists and have access to indexes of records so they can pinpoint the records.
Much of this will now be available on the internet, but remember that the federal budget is the size of a fat telephone book so you’re looking at hundreds of thousands of pages over the course of two centuries. You have quite a task ahead of you, especially since I can’t figure out what you mean by “rebate back to a state.”
This Pork barrel - Wikipedia indicates the term dates from the early 1800s, if not sooner.
So we’re gonna have to go back to darn close to the founding of the Republic to get to the root.
As an aside, anyone who thinks that current (last 20 years) US politics are a mess is woefully ignorant of the reality of the US politics of the entire 1800s. I’m not suggesting things are peachy now (far from it). Rather, I’m suggesting that a belief that “the good old days” were actually good is ignorance dressed up in rose-colored glasses.
If you are looking for federal expenditures, you don’t want to look at the budget, but at appropriations bills. The budget merely outlines what spending can occur. Federal appropriations are the bills that actually spend the money. You won’t find any pork barel spending in any budget resolution. You’ll find tons in appropriations bills. However, most of the earmarks are actually contained in the committee reports that accompany the bills and are not in the text of the bills themselves.
Of course, this isn’t the whole story, because mandatory spending is not part of the appropriations process. Spending from the highway trust fund, for example. The reauthorization of the programs covered by this spending is done every six years or so and that also contains a lot of earmarks.
So if you are looking to track down spending, you have a lot of ground to cover. Yearly appropriations bills, bills authorizing mandatory spending, and even a few budget reconciliation bills that affect mandatory spending.
Good luck, because what you are asking for is going to be very hard to track down.
Also, if you are looking for a time when the feds gave money to the states, this starte pretty earlly. There was a lot of pushing for the feds to fund internal improvement projects (such as canals) and this was highly contentious. Look into the career of Henry Clay – he was a leading proponent of this spending, which can easily be called pork barrel spending.
However, Clay was not able to get a lot of his “American System” passed as he tended to be in the opposition much of the time. Such is your fate in life when you piss off Andrew Jackson.
Over time, many of Clay’s ideas were adopted in some form. I’m sure Henry Clay would have loved the Interstate Highway Act.