How much did your vote for Obama cost you?

In this post I determine how much your vote (or someone else's vote) for Obama will cost you throughout your working career to pay for the interest on Obama's massive deficit spending. The results may astound you. I welcome suggestions and attempts to help refine my calculations. But first, just how massive is Obama's deficit spending? This massive:

To do the following calculations, I assumed you are a college student graduating this year (2011), and you will have a 40 year working career ending in 2051. I also made the safe assumption that between now and 2051 the principal on the federal debt will not be touched, but only the interest payments will be made each year. Why did I include only the interest? You can argue all day about the cost vs. benefit of Obama's deficit spending, but one thing is certain: taxpayers get nothing from paying the interest on the national debt.

Sources:

All my budget data came directly from the Office of Management and Budget's 2010 analysis, or the excellent website usgovernmentspending.com, which aggregates the same OMB data into easily downloadable spreadsheet format. My tax calculations used the 2006 IRS tax brackets, FICA rates, and standard deductions (I wanted to pick a pre-recession tax code) -- in other words, I assumed your actual tax rates will NOT go up any time in the next 40 years, which is a very generous assumption. Nationwide average wage/salary data by occupation came from the Bureau of Labor Statistics database. Inflation rates came from inflationdata.com.

Methodology and analysis:

I calculated the average annual interest rate paid on the national debt from 1980-2010 by dividing the yearly federal interest payment by the gross public debt for each year. That average comes to 5.875%. The 2010 interest rate was very low at 2.19%, but OMB projections have interest rates increasing in the coming years, and given historical trends and the S&P's recent downgrading of the U.S. financial outlook, I think 5-6% interest on our national debt is a good estimate for the next 40 years.

Next I needed to estimate total federal spending from 2011-2051. I did this by taking the OMB estimate for federal outlays from 2012-2016 and extrapolating that trend to 2051. I did the same for federal revenues. The OMB projects both revenues and outlays to increase linearly from 2012-2016, and extrapolating those trends, the federal budget will be balanced in 2029, and from 2030 on revenues will exceed spending. By 2051, revenues will have exceeded spending by a total of $815 billion. Looking at the historical spending and revenues trends back to 1980, I think a linear extrapolation is quite reasonable, and is the most fair and politically balanced estimate -- e.g. it does not include any massive increases or cuts to spending or revenues. By this method, total federal spending from 2011-2051 will be $321,845 billion, or $321.8 trillion. This may seem like a huge number (and it is!), but this was arrived at with a linear spending increase each year, and we can project GDP growth will increase by a constant percent each year -- which means GDP grows exponentially instead of linearly. From 1980-2010 the average rate of GDP growth was 5.68%. Assuming this is the average growth rate from 2011-2051, that $321.8 trillion in federal government spending will account for only 16.6% of the total GDP for that period. At the peak of the US economy in 2000, federal spending was 18.0% of GDP (it is 24.9% in 2011). So the financial outlook from these projections is actually pretty favorable, and in fact may be a little too much so.

Now on to the cost of Obama's deficit spending. I calculated the total public debt added by Obama's deficit spending from 2009-2012 using the OMB data (2011 and 2012 are estimated of course). To be as fair as possible, I subracted from each year the 2008 deficit of $459 billion. Even though the 2008 budget was passed by Democrats when Obama served in the Senate, it cannot be ascribed to him. In other words, $459 billion was the annual deficit "baseline", and I included only the 2008-2012 deficits over that amount in determining the cost of Obama's spending. The total debt from 2009-2012 is $5.45 trillion, and Obama's portion of that is $3.62 trillion.

Next, I used the average annual interest rate of 5.875% to calculate the total cost of the interest payments on the $3.62 trillion in Obama debt. From 2011-2051, interest payments on Obama's 2009-2012 deficit spending will total $8.72 trillion. To look at it another way, when Obama sold us his 2009 "Stimulus" bill at a cost of $1 trillion, he failed to mention its true cost to taxpayers is actually $3.4 trillion ($1 trillion principal + $2.4 trillion in interest over 40 years). When the government is running a deficit, any politician's sales pitch for new spending is a bait-and-switch scam so massive it should be illegal.

We now have enough information to calculate the cost of a vote for Obama. The $8.72 trillion in interest payments on Obama's 2009-2012 deficit spending will account for 2.7% of total federal spending from 2011-2051.

Using IRS data, I calculated the total federal taxes (income tax + Social Security and Medicare taxes) paid by heads of household earning incomes between $10,000 and $240,000. I then matched and interpolated these numbers with Bureau of Labor Statistics data to calculate the average total taxes paid during a 40-year working career for each occupation in the BLS database, and adjusted for an annual inflation rate of 4.1%, which is the historical average rate from 1980-2010. Finally, I calculated the fraction of those tax dollars that will go to pay for the interest on Obama's 2009-2012 deficit spending. The results for various occupations are given in the table below. The first entry, average of all college graduates, assumes a lifetime average salary of $45,000 (in 2010 dollars).

According to these results, the average college student graduating this year will pay $25,941 just to cover the interest on Obama's deficit spending. Many students will pay much more. If you voted for Obama, that 30-minute trip to the polling station was probably the most expensive 30 minutes of your life.



Table: Scroll down to find your occupation and see how much your vote (or someone else's vote) for Obama cost you.

Your occupation	Your vote for Obama cost you	Days of lost income to pay for it
Average of all college graduates	$25,941	89
College professors	$53,189	97
Kindergarten teachers	$34,038	94
Elementary school teachers	$34,447	94
Middle school teachers	$34,506	95
Secondary school teachers	$34,743	95
Chief executives	$137,415	122
Sales managers	$88,514	114
Engineering managers	$98,317	116
Education administrators	$61,797	108
Social and community service managers	$43,215	100
Financial analysts	$61,585	108
Loan officers	$43,464	100
Tax examiners, collectors, and revenue agents	$34,543	95
Computer programmers	$52,600	105
Mathematicians	$70,379	110
Architects, except landscape and naval	$53,065	105
Aerospace engineers	$70,588	110
Biomedical engineers	$61,320	107
Chemical engineers	$70,180	110
Civil engineers	$61,185	107
Computer hardware engineers	$79,091	112
Electrical engineers	$61,684	108
Environmental engineers	$61,142	107
Materials engineers	$61,626	108
Mechanical engineers	$61,126	107
Microbiologists	$52,300	104
Astronomers	$79,198	112
Physicists	$88,489	114
Chemists	$52,384	104
Economists	$70,592	110
Sociologists	$52,767	105
Anthropologists and archeologists	$35,050	96
Historians	$34,920	95
Political scientists	$79,062	112
Community and social services occupations	$25,648	89
Child, family, and school social workers	$25,751	89
Lawyers	$98,780	116
Paralegals and legal assistants	$33,993	94
Librarians	$34,819	95
Art directors	$70,167	110
Fine artists	$34,075	94
Multi-media artists and animators	$43,413	100
Fashion designers	$52,569	105
Graphic designers	$26,310	90
Interior designers	$34,276	94
Reporters and correspondents	$25,715	89
Broadcast news analysts	$44,069	101
Technical writers	$43,768	101
Writers and authors	$43,635	101
Sound engineering technicians	$34,564	95
Chiropractors	$61,107	107
Dentists, general	$127,700	121
Orthodontists	$180,268	129
Optometrists	$79,538	112
Pharmacists	$79,512	112
Anesthesiologists	$191,092	130
Family and general practitioners	$137,487	122
Obstetricians and gynecologists	$180,178	129
Pediatricians, general	$137,081	122
Psychiatrists	$137,209	122
Surgeons	$191,494	130
Physician assistants	$61,544	108
Podiatrists	$107,960	118
Registered nurses	$43,885	101
Audiologists	$43,925	101
Physical therapists	$52,770	105
Radiation therapists	$52,894	105
Recreational therapists	$25,454	88
Respiratory therapists	$34,602	95
Speech-language pathologists	$44,115	101
Veterinarians	$70,042	110
Dental hygienists	$44,053	101
Radiologic technologists and technicians	$34,599	95
Emergency medical technicians and paramedics	$18,991	86
Pharmacy technicians	$13,698	89
Massage therapists	$20,031	90
Fire fighters	$26,238	90
Police and sheriff's patrol officers	$34,747	95
Private detectives and investigators	$26,220	90
Chefs and head cooks	$25,842	89
Janitors and cleaners	$12,709	84
Hairdressers, hairstylists, and cosmetologists	$13,314	87
Flight attendants	$25,726	89
Sales representatives, technical and scientific products	$61,203	107
Real estate brokers	$53,007	105
Real estate sales agents	$34,440	94
Executive secretaries and administrative assistants	$25,812	89
Legal secretaries	$25,672	89
Carpenters	$25,764	89
Electricians	$34,107	94
Plumbers, pipefitters, and steamfitters	$26,577	91
Structural iron and steel workers	$26,395	90
HVAC mechanics and installers	$25,768	89
Commercial divers	$35,173	96
Airline pilots, copilots, and flight engineers	$88,943	114
Air traffic controllers	$79,541	112
Truck drivers, heavy and tractor-trailer	$19,951	90

Note: my original post contained some errors in the interest and inflation rate calculations, which have been corrected now.