Economics Stack Exchange Archive

Re-indexing historical federal budget data: which indexes?

• posted by: nihonjinrxs on 2012-03-21
• tagged: macroeconomics, models, gdp, taxes
• score: 1

I’m interested in looking at different renderings of US government fiscal year budget historical tables. Specifically, I’m looking to re-index the numbers by various methods and compare the resulting data to see the differences in spending and revenue growth. I’ve thought to use some variant of each of the following:

• GDP-based index (GDP deflator?)
• Wage-based index (what’s best? Social Security’s Average Wage Index?)
• Inflation measure (CPI, but which one?)
• Are there others that make sense?
• Some hybrid of these, for example:
  • Wage-based index on wage and contract labor spending
  • Inflation measure on materials spending
  • GDP or some tax-based measure on revenue

Do you have suggestions about what indexes make sense or are commonly accepted? Are the data available and accessible for free? If the measure is some complex combination of data, can you provide a reference for how to calculate it?

Thanks for any help you can provide.

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