Government spending and receipts: a dynamic equilibrium?

I was messing around with FRED data and noticed that the ratio of government expenditures to government receipts seems to show a dynamic equilibrium that matches up with the unemployment rate. Note this is government spending and income at all levels (federal + state + local). So I ran it through the model [1] and sure enough it works out:

Basically, the ratio of expenditures to receipts goes up during a recession (i.e. deficits increase at a faster rate) and down in the dynamic equilibrium outside of recessions (i.e. deficits increase at a slower rate or even fall). The dates of the shocks to this dynamic equilibrium match pretty closely with the dates for the shocks to unemployment (arrows).
This isn't saying anything ground-breaking: recessions lower receipts and increase use of social services (so expenditures over receipts will go up). It is interesting however that the (relative) rate of improvement towards budget balance is fairly constant from the 1960s to the present date ... independent of major fiscal policy changes. You might think that all the disparate changes in state and local spending is washing out the big federal spending changes, but in fact the federal component is the larger component so it is dominating the graph above. In fact, the data looks almost the same with the just the federal component (see result below). So we can strengthen the conclusion: the (relative) rate of improvement towards federal budget balance is fairly constant from the 1960s to the present date ... independent of major federal fiscal policy changes.

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Footnotes:

[1] The underlying information equilibrium model is GE ⇄ GR (expenditures are in information equilibrium with receipts, except during shocks).