Western Debt Crisis Is a Revenue Crisis: Opinion
The two charts below not only demonstrate unequivocally that the Western "debt crisis" is a revenue crisis (not a "spending crisis"), but we can clearly see the efforts of the U.S. government statisticians to hide the true nature of the crisis -- by creating phony data to suggest we are experiencing a spending crisis instead.
It is truly unfortunate that we are forced to rely upon U.S. data to illustrate this revenue crisis. The U.S. has devoted a much larger percentage of its government expenditures to military spending (by several multiples) than any other nation in the post-Industrial Revolution era. The Soviet Union tried to match the massive Reagan arms-race of the 1980's -- and was completely bankrupted in the effort. Thus the "curve" of the spending chart is severely distorted by huge (and well-documented) explosions in U.S. military spending.
Looking at the chart below, the green line represents Williams' data (i.e the Truth). We see U.S. government spending surging in the latter half of the 1960's (the Vietnam War). We see it accelerate again in the 1980's (the Reagan arms-race). But note that in the last few years of the Reagan regime -- while military spending was still recklessly accelerating -- that actual spending had topped, and even began to decline slightly.
This marked the beginning of the era of declining government services (and real spending on people). Apart from a tiny up-tick in U.S. government spending in the early 1990's (the first war against Iraq), total U.S. government spending (in real dollars) has been steadily declining since the late 1980's.