Well, inflation adjusted isn't really a great measurement for whether federal spending was stable over decades.

Think of it this way, let's come up with a pretend nation called Breadland. This nation has a government which issues a currency that we'll call the Dollar. We'll say in 1920, Breadland had 1,000 citizens, who were each taxed at $1/year. Breadland citizens could buy a loaf of bread on the market for $.25/loaf. The government provided citizens 4 loaves of bread each year.

So, the Breadland government brought in $1,000 in revenue in 1920, and it provided each citizens 5 loaves of bread at market cost, so it spent $1,250.

Now, let's jump ahead to 2020. Over 100 years things have changed a bit. It now costs $1 to buy a loaf of bread, and there are 100,000 citizens.

If the Breadland government simply keep its revenues up with inflation, then it would now bring in $4,000 of revenue in 2020. But it has 100 times as many citizens now. So, maybe it would make more sense to see if the tax an individual pays has kept up with inflation. Now each citizen is only paying $0.04 in taxes! Where if the individual payment amount had kept up with inflation, they would be paying $4.

And similarly, if the spending only keeps up with inflation, you can see that the amount of government services will have cratered. Where before the government bought 5 loaves of bread per citizen, now it buys just 1/20th of a loaf of bread per citizen.

Obviously, this is an extreme example to demonstrate the point, but for a nation's gross revenue and spending "inflation-adjusted" is simply the wrong baseline. You should be comparing to something like "inflation-adjusted per capita" spending and revenue, or something that will wash out similar like comparing the spending/revenue as a percentage of GDP.

An easy place to view spending/revenue as a % of GDP is...the article that this discussion is taking place in the context of: https://lbo-news.com/2025/02/16/no-federal-spending-and-empl....

But, let's take a really simple look at spending in 2010, 2000, and 1990. I'm going to use taxfoundation.org as a source, since they're generally opposed to my viewpoints, hopefully you can trust them as a source. Data is here: https://taxfoundation.org/data/all/federal/federal-tax-reven...

- 2010 Gross Revenue (Millions of dollars): $2,162,706

- 2000 Gross Revenue (Millions of dollars): $2,025,191

- 1990 Gross Revenue (Millions of dollars): $1,031,958

- 1980 Gross Revenue (Millions of dollars): $517,112

Let's first adjust for inflation. I'm going to adjust everything to 2010 dollars, using the BLS calculator here: https://www.bls.gov/data/inflation_calculator.htm#

- 2010 Gross Revenue (Millions of 2010 dollars): $2,162,706

- 2000 Gross Revenue (Millions of 2010 dollars): $2,599,719

- 1990 Gross Revenue (Millions of 2010 dollars): $1,755,195

- 1980 Gross Revenue (Millions of 2010 dollars): $1,440,250

So, we can see the same increase in inflation adjusted dollars. Let's now make it inflation-adjusted per-capita. I'm going to use US census data from here: https://www.census.gov/data/tables/time-series/dec/popchange..., and we'll take the top-line "United States Resident" population.

- 2010 Population 308,745,538

- 2000 Population 281,421,906

- 1990 Population 248,709,873

- 1980 Population 226,545,805

Now we'll simply take the gross revenue, as millions of 2010 dollars, and divide by the population (let's do per-100k instead of literally per-capita, since our revenue figures are in millions of dollars:

- 2010 Gross Revenue Per Capita (Millions of 2010 dollars per 100k people): $700.48

- 2000 Gross Revenue Per Capita (Millions of 2010 dollars per 100k people): $923.78

- 1990 Gross Revenue Per Capita (Millions of 2010 dollars per 100k people): $705.72

- 1980 Gross Revenue Per Capita (Millions of 2010 dollars per 100k people): $635.74

Does that address your question?