> 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.
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.