Interviewing data – U.S. Federal budget from 2000 – 2016; NASA

Introducing the Dataset

The Congressional Budget Office’s data on US Federal Budget from 2000-2016 shows the U.S. federal government’s revenue source, and where it spends its money. All the data are numerical and are chronological.

Major finding

Social security seems to be having funding trouble

Surplus on of social security has been declining since 2008, while its mandatory outlay is steadily growing and remains the biggest expenditure amongst mandatory outlays. With an aging population, the outlay will further increase while the surplus will not significantly increase. The trend is corroborated by CBO’s report saying that the Social Security Trust Fund could be insolvent at 2029 if it pays out at the current rate, and when that happens, benefits would have to take a 29 percent cut in 2030 to keep it from going.

Social Security surplus has seen a steadily declining trend since 2008

Public debt rises consistently despite ups and downs in total deficit

While the federal deficit has been through ups and downs before the financial crisis, took a plunge during the crisis and has since slowly recovered, the amount of debt being held by the public seemed to have largely ignored the economic cycle.

Debt held by the public makes up 77 percent of GDP now, more than double from the 35.3 percent in 2007. It could be a reflection of government stimulus measures (issuing lots of government bonds) after the crisis, and it also raises the question of how the government is going to pay back all this debt.

Corporate tax income has increased since crisis, and while payroll taxes is gaining weight as a revenue source, individual income tax remains the largest revenue source.

Link to the dataset and the charts is here

The dataset is a slice of Congressional Budget Office’s latest historical budget data

Interviewing the dataset of Aerospace Technical Facility Inventory

The dataset from NASA shows information of technical facilities as distributed in different geolocations around the country belonging to different departments.

The pivot table shows that NASA, unsurprisingly, owns the most of these facilities (397 out of 439), followed by Intelstat (17) and the Department of Energy (12)

The state that has the most number of facilities is Alabama (136), where NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center is, followed by California (83), Virginia (60), Ohio (35) and Maryland (32). There are two facilities in Washington, DC.

In terms of cities, apart from Marshall Space Flight Center, Virginia’s Hampton has the most facilities (50), followed by California’s Pasadena (39), Maryland’s Greenbelt (32) and Ohio’s Cleveland (31) .

Pivot tables used to reveal these findings are here

Original dataset is here