Social Insurance and Public Assistance

736 Series Bf 188–195 Bf SOCIAL INSURANCE AND PUBLIC ASSISTANCE
TABLE Bf 188–195 Public expenditures on social welfare: 1890–1995 Continued
should be treated as rough approximations of the “true” level. The people
at the U.S. Social Security Administration are very careful to try to maintain
consistency in the definitions of the series. However, even the revisions are
subject to measurement error, and year-to-year fluctuations between a revised
statistic for a year ending in 0 or 5 with neighboring years are likely to
be subject to measurement error. The majority of revisions are within 1 or 2
percent of the prior reported estimates.
The footnoted revisions to the table are based on corrections to the information
reported in the sources that arise from cross checking the sums
of series that should add up to totals in that category. In all cases, the corrections
are based on new sums using the most disaggregated data reported
in the source and then recalculating the sums. For example, if there was a
discrepancy between the all government spending in a category and the sum
of state and local plus federal spending in the category, we used the sum
of state and local plus federal spending unless there was an obvious error.
For the data presented here, efforts were made to account for all differences
from 1965 to the present. Differences between the total series and the sums
of the subcategories of $0.1 million in years prior to 1965 were left unaltered
because they might be the result of rounding error.