> Government expenditure as a proportion of GDP has been rising steadily for a century and is now approaching 40%
No it hasn't. It rose until about 1980 (mostly until 1970), and it's been about the same for the past 45 years.
And yes, it rose 1925-1980 as we built the modern social services state. With social security, Medicaid, Medicare, and so forth. This was a worldwide phenomenon too, not just the US. People asked for more from their governments. This is a good thing.
It does not look like it's currently trending upward, from your own data.
> No it hasn't. It rose until about 1980 (mostly until 1970), and it's been about the same for the past 45 years.
Yes it has. In 1980 it was 34.25%, in 2022 it was 36.25%.
> And yes, it rose 1925-1980 as we built the modern social services state. With social security, Medicaid, Medicare, and so forth.
US government spending on healthcare is about as most other developed countries yet they are able to provide universal or similar healthcare access. Americans spend that amount again privately on healthcare, and the result is worse outcomes in many objective measures of public health. Just one example since healthcare is one of the biggest expenditures. This is not a good thing.
The idea that "some government good" = "more government better" or "less government worse" is just not a sound argument. At all.
> This was a worldwide phenomenon too, not just the US. People asked for more from their governments. This is a good thing.
Not many Americans I know of asked to pay universal healthcare tier costs without getting universal healthcare. Not many asked to pay for forever-wars and interventions and meddling all over the globe.
> It does not look like it's currently trending upward, from your own data.
It does to me. The linear trend plotted from 1980 to 2022 does have it increasing too.
2% in 45 years is a completely meaningless amount. You are technically and pedantically correct, but in the context of the actual conversation being had it is so little as to be irrelevant.
On the graph they shared earlier, 2020 is 44.82%, exactly on the 1960 - 1992 trendline. The 2022 and 2009 dropoffs coincide with major disruptions (don't know about the late-90s one), which almost seems to hint that's the value we should be looking at: +10.57% in 20 years.
2019 was 35.97, and 2022 was 36.26, but we shouldn't use those, we should use the 2020 number? Come on, the 2020 and 2021 numbers are not representative of the overall trend.
Sure but the 1990s, after Clinton's federal worker bloodbath and other expenditure cuts, is also an outlier and by the same argument you could say it is not representative of the overall trend. You can't just pick and choose your preferred outliers and call the inconvenient ones not representative.
Covid spending was an "outlier" but it is not an uncommon kind of outlier when there is some market crash or trillion dollar wars etc -- there was almost as large a spike, and a broader peak meaning more overall expenditure as a proportion of GDP only 10 years before Covid.
> Sure but the 1990s, after Clinton's federal worker bloodbath and other expenditure cuts, is also an outlier and by the same argument you could say it is not representative of the overall trend. You can't just pick and choose your preferred outliers and call the inconvenient ones not representative.
I think it is perfectly fine to say that the 90s are not representative of the overall trend.
I'm not cherrypicking. I'm not saying it's actually going down. My argument is very simple, that "consistently up" is not a correct description of the situation.
If you look at it a couple years at a time, it's swingy and there's no real pattern at this level. If you look a decade at a time, it went up quickly for quite a while, it went down more slowly for a while, and now it's going back up even more slowly and it's still below the peak. If you zoom out really far, then things are close to flat over the last 40 years.
I didn't see using the word consistently, so it seems like you're attempting an escape hatch with this strawman. I called it steadily upwards over the past 100 years until recently when it's becoming more erratic but still looks to be increasing. Which is the simple truth. I can't understand how so many people in this thread are struggling so badly with that.
And the trend is upwards, in the past 40 years. Run an analysis on it and it's trending upwards. It's not close to flat, it's increasing by a couple of %, i..e., the spending ratio is increasing around 5% in that time. Which is enormous. You can cry foul that's due to covid and the housing bubble spending, but that's reality, that's the money that is getting spent and added to the debt and is what people are concerned about. Even if there was no Clinton cuts outlier going the other way, you still couldn't discount those spikes as outliers and therefore not representative. Because they exactly represent the reality of the situation. This is not a concern about a measurement error or sample that's not represenative of a population, it is the actual money that is being spent. If there weren't these big outliers for wars and stimulus and everything else then sure, things would probably be better. But there are.
> Are consistent and steady not synonyms? You seem to have been arguing consistency, I'm not trying to make a strawman here.
> Are you saying it's steady but inconsistent?
You don't have to ask all these obtuse rhetorical questions, you can just read exactly what I'm "saying".
> Government expenditure as a proportion of GDP has been rising steadily for a century and is now approaching 40%. From IMF: https://www.imf.org/external/datamapper/exp@FPP/USA. The recent trend is shaky due to Covid, housing crash, maybe dot com crash, etc., but it looks like it's probably still trending upward.
Point out what is so wrong about that, and I will point out an insufferable nitpicker who is incapable of having a substantial discussion but they're upset about something so they feel they simply must score internet points with idiotic arguments about semantics (which they are wrong about anyway).
Honest question, do expect people to actually believe you're a serious person interested in rational debate with that kind of response?
What Trump / DOGE has proposed or claimed to have cut amounts to far less than $500 billion / year from the budget. Like 1/10th that amount. Yet people are seriously concerned about those cuts. Clearly it's not a reasonable amount, as you would understand if you had any idea of the context of this conversation.
What DOGE has claimed to have cut is a similarly meaningless amount (and likely significantly overinflated), and what's worse, the value we were getting from those expenditures likely greatly exceeds what we were paying for them.
$500bn/yr would be about 15% of the annual budget. That number doesn't even pass a basic sniff test.
2% of US GDP is 500 billion. I don't know what you're confused about. I'm taking numbers linked from the IMF so perhaps you know better? Also it's obviously not a 2% increase over 45 years, it's a nearly 6% increase, so not sure if numbers are your strong suit here. At least you did admit I was correct though, so I don't know what you're really continuing to try argue about. What I wrote originally stands.
Rising steadily is what you said. It's really not doing that.
It's funny that you latched onto the mention of the year 1980, because if you used 1982 (or 1983, 1984, 1985...) you'd see that it has gone down. The most recent measurement is lower than it was in the years around 1990, and the measurements before covid hit were also lower than those years.
And I just realized. If you actually want to go back 40 years from the most recent data point, the year to use is... 1982.
> It was dropping for most of the 1990s, and most of the 2010s.
It was dropping in the 90s because of Clinton's enormous budget cuts and firing half a million federal employees which is clearly an outlier and something that now seems to be far more partisan and difficult to achieve. And in 2010s it was dropping relative to enormous stimulus spending and corporate bailouts aimed at helping the economy after the housing crisis.
> So it's been rising steadily over the past 45 years...except for about two decades of that time? This isn't what most people call a steady rise.
You can quote me correctly instead of making up a weak strawman. The entire thread is here for everybody to read, you're not going to be able to fabricate some "gotcha". I said it has been rising steadily for a century, and that recent trend is more shaky but probably still trending upward.
The comment I replied to which is easy to find is this:
> 1. There are claims that federal spending is out of control. How do you square that with the fact that spending as a percentage of GDP is only slightly elevated compared to the historical average going back to at least the 1970s, with the main deviation in the past few years coming from the after-effects of the pandemic? [1]
Most certainly since 1970 the trend (using a linear regression) has been very significantly upwards, which contradicts that claim.
Since the 1980 the trend has been upwards.
Since 1990 the trend has been upwards.
Since 2000 the trend has been upwards.
Since 2010 the trend has been upwards.
Now just give it a rest for god's sake. Don't keep doing the reddit internet arguing thing.
If the list of data points was 10 98 times, then a 50, then another 10, it would give you the same results with those linear regressions. You'd see a "trend" going up when you measure from anywhere in the past to the present. But that trend would not represent anything real about the first 98 years. That is not the correct test to use.
> Excuse me, I didn't latch onto 1980, crazygringgo nominated that date.
I said "latched onto" specifically because someone else said it first. Though they said "about 1980".
> Sure unless you choose a different end point, right?
It's only different if you choose the two covid years. There are several years before and one year after that are all lower than the 1990-ish zone.
> A linear regression from 1990 to 2022 has it trending upward too.
Because of 2020 and 2021. Unless you expect another anomaly like that to happen in the next handful of years, it's obscuring the real trend.
The numbers are slowly climbing over the last decade, but after a big period of decline in the first part of the last 40 years, and we're still below where it used to be.
> I said "latched onto" specifically because someone else said it first. Though they said "about 1980".
Wrong, try actually comprehending the thread. I was being generous, they said "mostly until 1970". 1980 is higher than most of the 70s. I could have taken an average of every year in the 70s, and 1980 is 1.5% higher than that. So if I did that it would have shown nearly 2x the rise.
> It's only different if you choose the two covid years. There are several years before and one year after that are all lower than the 1990-ish zone.
So it's different if you choose something different as you did which is okay, but apparently if I do it it's wrong.
> Because of 2020 and 2021. Unless you expect another anomaly like that to happen in the next handful of years, it's obscuring the real trend.
And the 90s were low because of Clinton's historic expenditure reduction, which is an outlier too. You want me to remove my outlier so your outlier can look better by comparison?
> The numbers are slowly climbing over the last decade, but after a big period of decline in the first part of the last 40 years, and we're still below where it used to be.
The numbers have steadily been increasing over a century, and even in the past 45 years, certainly from the 1970s, they have been rising. Exactly as I said in my original post.
They were going down for an entire decade. You can't remove an entire decade and then say "steadily rising" even if you have good evidence it was an outlier.
The numbers also went down 6 years in a row in the wake of the 2008 spike.
And if you don't treat covid as an outlier, then the numbers went down massively from 2021 to 2022! Treating 2020-2021 as normal years works against your argument more than it works against mine.
> They were going down for an entire decade. You can't remove an entire decade and then say "steadily rising".
I certainly can, over a century.
> The numbers also went down 5 years in a row in the wake of the 2008 spike.
Yes, that's how long it took to reduce spending and it still didn't bottom out at pre-2008 levels. This all contributes to the trend of increasing expenditure relative to GDP.
> And if you don't treat covid as an outlier, then the numbers went down massively from 2021 to 2022! Treating 2020-2021 as normal years works against your argument more than it works against mine.
No it doesn't. It still didn't drop to pre-covid levels.
> Government expenditure as a proportion of GDP has been rising steadily for a century and is now approaching 40%. From IMF: https://www.imf.org/external/datamapper/exp@FPP/USA. The recent trend is shaky due to Covid, housing crash, maybe dot com crash, etc., but it looks like it's probably still trending upward.
Is true.
> The two long series of dropping values make up more than a third of the last 40 years.
The trend over the past 40 years is rising.
> Good thing nobody claimed that.
You tried to because you disingenuously tried to say that the drop would "disprove" my argument. You don't even understand what my argument is, and fixating on nitpicking the definition of "steadily" is just hilariously insane. Like, we can see WWI and WWII in those figures, I'm not trying some weasel word sleight of hand to fool people into believing I meant monotonically increasing, as though the actual increase doesn't prove my point in substance.
The point I replied to said this:
> 1. There are claims that federal spending is out of control. How do you square that with the fact that spending as a percentage of GDP is only slightly elevated compared to the historical average going back to at least the 1970s, with the main deviation in the past few years coming from the after-effects of the pandemic?
At least the 1970s. Every one of the full 4 decades after the 1970s was substantially higher than the 1970s, taken as an average (which is slightly weird but it'll do). And not just slightly elevated, the next lowest decade is more than 6.25% above the 70s, and the rest are 10-11% above.
Getting angry about the numbers is really just clutching at straws because you don't seem to like the conclusion. Try arguing with some facts you actually have on your side if you don't like it so much.
> You tried to because you disingenuously tried to say that the drop would "disprove" my argument.
"It went down 19%" disproves your argument if you don't treat it as an outlier.
It doesn't matter how that compares to 2019 in particular.
I don't understand why you think there's anything disingenuous about that.
> Like, we can see WWI and WWII in those figures, I'm not trying some weasel word sleight of hand to fool people into believing I meant monotonically increasing, as though the actual increase doesn't prove my point in substance.
I assumed we were treating those as outliers. Hence my confusion at not treating covid as an outlier.
> Every one of the full 4 decades after the 1970s was substantially higher than the 1970s, taken as an average (which is slightly weird but it'll do). And not just slightly elevated, the next lowest decade is more than 6.25% above the 70s, and the rest are 10-11% above.
But a lot of the interesting points don't align well with decades.
If we offset by exactly half a decade, to get a different view but in the least cherry-picky way possible, 1975-1984 is 34.6 average, 1985-1994 is 37.3 average, and 1995-2004 is 34.6 again.
Then 2005-2014 goes up again, but only to 36.8, less than the peak.
Seems to me, the person is claiming that a linear trendline increasing causes "steadily" to be an appropriate proxy for "values went up and down some, but overall went up".
If we can agree that the trendline is linear and that it goes up, then yes, we can agree on "steadily".
However, if we observe that the actual data goes both up and down over a specified period, then no, the data cannot be characterised as "steady".
For those interested, perhaps I could suggest drawing a process capability chart? The sigma variation lines would seem to clearly demarc outliers.
There’s no reason we have to be spending so much on healthcare. I’m convinced if Joe Lieberman didn’t block the public option in 2009, or if the Democrats had a spine and actually bypassed the filibuster to make sure the bill was as good as it could be, we’d have universal health care today. Instead, we decided to bail out insurance companies, to the benefit of nobody but insurance companies.
We still could have single payer, but that’s not going to happen with the current group in charge.
Right. Healthcare expenditure just looks incredibly wasteful. Even if it is (as its defenders would say) buying more for the money, it just seems to be costing way too much when you look at others. And it's not as though those other developed countries' healthcare systems are paragons of efficiency themselves.
That people are so flabbergasted and astounded that voters should be concerned by government spending and waste is actually the incredible thing to me.
No it hasn't. It rose until about 1980 (mostly until 1970), and it's been about the same for the past 45 years.
And yes, it rose 1925-1980 as we built the modern social services state. With social security, Medicaid, Medicare, and so forth. This was a worldwide phenomenon too, not just the US. People asked for more from their governments. This is a good thing.
It does not look like it's currently trending upward, from your own data.