Annual Deficits and the National Debt

With all the talk about deficits and the debt, I got curious about the relationship between the two.  Currently the US Debt is about $13,528 Billion through 2010 ($14,193 Billion currently).  Thinking this was the sum of the annual deficits, I decided to add up all the annual deficits since 1862, and got only $8,010!  So where did the other $5,518 Billion come from??

Supplemental appropriations began in earnest in about 1950, in response to several natural disasters where the federal government stepped in to support the states who had typically covered the costs of these events.  The federal government was now in the insurance business, spending non-budgeted money in support of the states recovering from these disasters.  Now supplemental appropriations regularly come up outside the regular budget process. Most supplemental appropriations fall into two categories: defense supplementals, needed to fund the costs of military actions, and non-defense supplementals, almost all of which go to the cost of emergency response to national disasters like hurricanes and floods.  Below is a recent graph of the Sum of Deficits along with the Sum of Supplementals from 1950 to 2010.

As you can see, this is becoming a very large contributor to the National Debt and is done outside the normal budget process.  Then I got curious to see how the size of the supplementals compared to the defecit each year.  Below is a graph of the supplementals as a percent of the deficit from 1960 to 2010.  There are some negative numbers in those years when there was a budget surplus. 

In the years from 1975 to 1996, the supplementals were 38% of the deficit.  But in 2002 to 2010, supplementals now are almost equal to the deficit at 95% !  To note, in the years 1997 to 2001 (the white space between the two graph areas), the total deficit was $-536B and the total supplementals were $1,124B, for a net add to the National Debt during these 5 years of $588B.  So much for the "balanced budget" years of Clinton.

Seems to me that we should be hearing some talk about the Federal budget process including ALL of the defense spending, probably requiring a war reserve, and also getting out of the disaster insurance business.  Keeping all this spending as part of the budget process would put more pressure on Congress to fix the big debt creators rather than just pushing them outside the budget.