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The largest government in the universe

iluvatar5150

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3 million directly work for the federal government.
Much of what this guy says is nonsense.

When I was growing up, I was taught that we had a capitalist system and that we had a limited federal government.

If that's the case, then his teachers conflated taught conservative libertarian ideals with actual history.

Of course neither of those things has been true for a very long time.

lol, that may be the one point on which I agree with him.

Today, the United States has the biggest government in the history of the world, and it gets even bigger with each passing year.

That is demonstrably untrue. Federal government employment numbers have held very steady since the late 1960's, and were above their current levels for the decade from 1985-1995:

1706284744088.png


But there is no way that our politicians will ever agree to reduce the size of the federal government to an appropriate size.

When the federal government employee count leveled out at 2.9m in 1968, the population of the US was 195.7 million. Today, the US population is around 394 million, almost exactly double. As a percentage of the population, federal employee count has fallen by half.

ETA: It's more like 340 million. Point still stands.

In fact, the size of the federal deficit in December was 52 percent larger than for the same month a year earlier…

The deficit fluctuates quite a bit month-to-month and it's extremely misleading to imply a trend by comparing a single month to the same month a year prior. Yes, the deficit in Dec 2023 was about 50% bigger than the deficit in Dec 2022, but the deficit in Sep 2022 was 2.5x larger than the deficit in Sep 2023.

1706285360824.png


Most of the rest of the piece is opinion that I won't get in to. If his mastery of basic facts is so flawed, the opinion on which those facts are based is likely flawed as well.
 
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iluvatar5150

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Arcangl86

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3 million directly work for the federal government.
Actually the number is 4 million. If you count all state and local positions it works out to be about 20 million government workers. Which is large, but the vast majority of those are at the local level, and it's worth remembering we are the third largest country in the world. If you look at our public sector as a proportion of our population, we are actually one of the smaller ones.
 
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