Try Your Government On For Size
Eight charts show it’s not entirely clear which direction Washington is going.
I’m so confused.
Source: Streetwise Cycle/Wikimedia Commons
There are lots of different ways to measure the size of the federal government. The most-used is probably federal spending as a share of gross domestic product.
The picture this paints is of a federal government that grew spectacularly during the two World Wars, then settled down afterward at much higher levels than before. The New Deal years certainly show up in the chart, too, although they were dwarfed by what ensued, and there was a spending rise from the mid-1960s through the mid-1980s that was followed by a 15-year decline. In the aftermath of the global financial crisis, spending’s share of GDP jumped to its highest non-wartime level ever, but since then it has settled back to about where it was in the 1980s.