Let’s define our terms. There are several different measures by which we might determine how “big” the federal government is:
The federal budget. Adjusted for inflation, how big is it compared to the budget 10 years ago, or 20, or 30? Also, expressed as a percentage of GDP, how big is it compared to 10 years ago, etc.?
The number of persons directly employed by the federal government, or employed indirectly as private contractors. Adjusted for the growth in general population, is that number higher or lower than it was 10 years ago, etc.?
What the federal government does – how many functions the government performs, how intrusive it is, how many sets of federal regulations are on the books being enforced, and how complicated they are and how difficulat or burdensome it is to comply with them or even to understand them – all of which would be very difficult to estimate with any precision, compared with the straightforward numerical measurements described above; but forming some estimate of these factors still would be very important to understanding the problem, if problem it be, of government’s “size.”
And if I were a Libertarian (which I am not, but I try to understand their thinking), I would add that government is government and it does no good to shrink the size of the federal government if the state and local governments only step in to take up the slack. For each of the above three measures, we might devise an equivalent measure of the total size of the public sector in America: What is the sum of all the budgets of federal, state, local and special-district governments, and how does that compare with figures for earlier periods, adjusted for inflation or expressed as a percentage of GDP? What is the total number of persons employed in or by the public sector, directly as employees or indirectly as private contractors? What is the general – I guess a Libertarian might describe it as a “freedom index” or something – what is the general measure of the extent to which public laws, regulations, ordinances, etc., etc., intrude into personal lives and the life of commerce and industry?
Any politician who is really concerned with “shrinking” government should be prepared to look at the whole picture, and to come up with some practical, defensible answers as to how, and by how much, and above all why, government might be “shrunk” in terms of each of these measurements.
Bush has grown government expenditures to unsustainable levels. This will cause inevitable shrinkage in the recent future. That’s pretty much the long and short of it.
Some discussion and a buncha numbers. The first table shows Dubya’s budgets as a percentage of GDP slightly higher than Clinton’s or the post-WW2 average, but well below his father’s or Reagan’s, the true big spenders. Deficit-per-GDP has similar numbers. Total receipts per GDP are the lowest in the table under Dubya, though his outlays are in line with Clinton and the overal average. In short, he’s had no effect on the rate of growth of government expenditure; he’s cut government receipts and replaced them with increased debt instead.
I make that a net increase of 750,000 under Dubya. It seems you agree that federal jobs are still federal jobs, even if there’s an ostensibly-private middleman company’s name on the paychecks.
Hard to quantify, but there’s a lot of basis for saying that regulations of business practices and of environmental protections have been heavily reduced lately.
True enough, and we especially saw that under Reagan. Under Bush, it’s taken more of the form of reducing state and local aid, forcing tax increases and/or service cuts by governments that, unlike the feds, normally are required to balance their budgets.
!!! They are? News to me. Do most states have balanced-budget clauses in their constitutions? Or do most states require balanced budgets of their county and municipal subsidiaries?