Washington Post (8/26/13)
The front page of the Washington Post on August 25 had a rather unusual piece that attempted to show the problem of Big Government by…well, showing that the government was kind of getting smaller.
It wasn’t hard to tell what David Fahrenthold was trying to show readers: Politicians talk about shrinking the size of the government, but lo and behold, as the subhead indicates, “Government’s size largely the same.”
The problem is that Fahrenthold gives us some strong evidence to the contrary, if you fill in some of the blanks.
He starts by telling readers the government will spend “$3.455 trillion,” which “is down from 2010,” but despite the Tea Party movement and Republican takeover of Congress that “is not down by that much. Back then, the government spent a whopping $3.457 trillion.”
Pocket change, right? But as Dean Baker writes (Beat the Press, 8/25/13), those numbers by themselves tell you next to nothing—but understood in the proper context, they tell us the opposite of what the story is trying to argue:
Incredibly, the article does not even adjust this spending amount for inflation. (The piece does briefly note later that this is a 5 percent decline adjusted for inflation.) Of course, a serious analysis would have expressed spending as a share of GDP, which shows that spending dropped from 24.1 percent of GDP in 2010 to 21.5 percent of GDP in 2013. This decline in spending of 2.6 percentage points of GDP would be the equivalent of roughly $420 billion in today’s economy.
The Post story moves on to another number:
Measured another way—not in dollars, but in people—the government has about 4.1 million employees today, military and civilian. That’s more than the populations of 24 states.
Back in 2010, it had 4.3 million employees. More than the populations of 24 states.
So the size of federal workforce is shrinking slightly. But as Jonathan Chait (New York, 8/26/13) argued:
Another way to put that fact would be that the federal workforce has declined by 4.65 percent over three years. Still another way to put it would be that, over the last several years, the federal workforce as a percentage of the population has continued its historic decline.
So the government is spending less money and employing fewer people—at a time when, as Chait points out, many economists would reasonably favor the opposite approach.
David Fahrenthold
The Post goes on, but Fahrenthold’s evidence seems to get weaker: The federal government spends “a vast amount of money”; there are “big-ticket programs” that evidently should be cut. And there are still more of these curious comparisons. The book of federal regulations is “now as long as 95 King James Bibles”—what would the right number of Bibles be, exactly?—and the government owns a lot of buildings (“enough space to cover the District of Columbia twice over with cubicles,” in case that helps anyone make sense of anything).
The point of all of this is that things need to be cut. Fahrenthold signals this when he tells readers the government
is still so big primarily because Congress and Obama have largely failed to deal with programs such as Medicare, Social Security and food stamps.
Of course, anyone who follows how media coverage budget debates knows what “deal with” means. Those programs must be cut. Only then will government demonstrate that it is “serious” about reining in spending that is, well, already being reined in.
I wonder how many cubicles the blood and treasure spilled by bombing Syria would fill?
Saying that government is “too big” is as pointless as saying that government should be “better”. It is a sentiment that people might generally agree with but it is so vague that you cannot act on it. It would be more informative to argue about parts of government you want to do away with, or some other specific proposal that can be debated and acted on.
Obvious cherry picking here. Why compare to 2010 Peter? What’s the significance to 2010 other than it’s one of the only years you can compare the 2012 budget to that shows a decline in federal spending (the others would be, in constant dollars, 2009 and 2011…whoopeee!). I don’t know Fehrentold author or the piece, but if this is the best you can do to try and argue the government is “the right size” or “getting smaller” it’s a lame attempt. In constant (inflation adjusted) dollars the Federal Government spent almost 50% more in 2012 than it did in 2000! That isn’t a shocking increase to you Peter? I agree with Mirza in the sense that these generalized terms of “too big” or “better” are pretty useless. The point is that the money the government has “spent”, first of all, does not match the tax money it has brought in for a long time so people without representation “the unborn) are being taxed in the future under some half-baked idea of nirvana being generated by a government system that relies all violence ((and the threat of violence) to collect it’s “revenues” to buy votes and approval from the living at the expense of those who are young and unborn…and completely without representation. That’s not debatable. And that’s not moral.
The real question is whether government has become too intrusive…and if so (as I would hope most people would agree it has over the last decade), who has benefited from it? It does appear federal employees have gone down…but yet our “leaders” are spending more of future American’s money. So where’s it going? And what for? And does it really matter in the end because to argue the government should be this big is to argue that the government should be making all these decisions about your life…monitoring your life regularly…taking money from you that you might want to give to charity and give it to their preferred charities instead…etc. etc.
Why so many people choose to ignore the fact that government is by definition only able to enforce laws through the use of violence is beyond me…it’s some utopian delusion that I think provides people with reasons not to be critical of power. This is a cororatist state by definition…and you want it to manipulate society MORE? You think it has YOUR interests at heart? Really? The only radical position at this point is to reduce government down as far as possible until it is able to be under control by the people it is supposed to serve. Than a discussion on it doing anything new can start again…otherwise most people are getting what they deserve because they keep voting for these corporatist carnival barkers. But when will I get the government I deserve? I haven’t voted for a one of these liars, killers and thieves since the first time I could vote (Clinton’s first election after which, like the epiphany Bill Hicks later professed regarding himself, I realized what this all really was and decided not to be a chump anymore).
Jack, I was under the impression that year 2010 did not come from Peter Hart but from David, the guy whom Peter is critiquing.
Debt itself is not necessarily a bad thing. It may be ok that your debt is increasing as long as your wealth is increasing even faster. In order to do that you need to invest in projects with return greater than the interest on your debt. In theory, our kids would then be better of by us borrowing now for a greater growth.
How would you balance the federal budget?
Doubtless Fahrenthold suggested several “big-ticket programs” at the Pentagon that should be cut before picking on poor people (or the middle class that can’t afford health care).
Peter, why did you leave out his suggestions for military cuts?
Both authors are sharpening their ideological preconceptions on the same stone of bad statistics and faulty political economics. Government is best measured by value per inflation adjusted dollar although multiple measures of value and cost need to be employed. With increased productivity we should expect rising value per dollar. But as a coercive institution, government will remain a necessary evil.
Lets make this simple for the Liberally impaired.A shell game being played with figures that shows that the government has actually shrunk by 2-3 % is a spurious, laughable,twisted argument.Although even the government has suffered a retraction in some ways due to the collapsing economy lets never believe it is shrinking.The scope of the fed is growing everyday in every way like a mushroom cloud.But let me explain what we in the tea party want.Sounds like folks here have not got our pamphlets(ha ha).Shrink the government by half.Then by half again.That would be a good start.But only a start.Under the constitution the Fed has only a few jobs.Do them, and do them well…..and leave the rest to us.We the people.