Inflation itself is a fact. The exact amount of inflation in any given time period is subject to differing points of view.
The choice of "which inflation measure" can be viewed as a political choice because it could be carefully chosen to tell the story you prefer. (choice A might yield "Look how much worse measure X was during party Y's tenure" which choice B could tell an even-handed or even opposing story)
We have had and do have independent agencies to measure inflation. But if you wish, we also measure GDP which is an absolute number. Here is the budget with respect to GDP:
We start out with outlays at under 16% GDP in 1970, and go all the way up to 20% in 2014, with a spike up to 24% during the last crisis. Not surprising, shocking, or daramatic at all. This is better than even the inflation adjusted numbers; e.g.
Well, W2, we spent a lot of money then, but even still, federal spending by 2000 was 8X that of spending in 1940. Why is that? Well, population growth obviously, higher expectations as another.
By going with ABSOLUTE numbers with no context on population, inflation, and GDP...that's very biased.
Edit: the charts are still useful, if you look at them only for relatively distribution of spending. They don't convey how spending compares to the overall economy, however.
> But if you wish, we also measure GDP which is an absolute number.
Of course, using GDP rather than inflation is also a political choice because GDP has on average increased more than inflation.
Also, comparing the government budget with GDP will never show more than a modest increase because a "large" increase (e.g. quadrupling the government budget as a percentage of GDP) would require the government to be consuming in excess of 100% of GDP.
On the other hand, if compared with inflation there is an exponential increase in the federal budget over time. For example, the 1962 budget of $107B would be $884B in 2014 dollars (using CPI) but the 2014 budget is $3650B, which exceeds the real 1962 GDP.
It definitely does show large increases during the depression (when the economy shrank) and during WII, when we went all out into war. Fluctuations since then have been quite boring.
The standard choice is the CPI or core CPI data compiled by the BLS. You can also use the billion price index for the more conspiracy oriented but they give you essentially the same number. I don't know of any measures of inflation that are wildly off the standard official estimates of CPI or core CPI. Choosing to not index has just as many political ramification as choosing to index it.
