What's the best way to measure the size of the government?

Sami , 1 hour ago

Government spending/revenue as percentage of GDP is the common proxy for government size. That said actual empirical evidence doesn’t lead to clear cut conclusions about the relationship between economic growth/outcomes and government spending. It’s very much dependent on the country, quality of government institutions and components of the expenditure.

Intuitively, you can clearly see that if you had 2 identical countries where 50% of gov spending went to building schools, hospitals and roads in one and paying interest on national debt in the other then you would expect very different outcomes with the same government “size”.

For the US, that metric has been close to 30% for the last several decades with spikes during crises like 2008 and 2020 (changes to money supply or “minting” is a component of government size but usually a temporary one). It’s been relatively stable outside of that since the 1970s. tradingeconomics.com/…/government-spending-to-gdp

Relative to the rest of the world’s rich countries it’s on the lower end:

https://lemmy.zip/pictrs/image/1934cb10-cdd3-4296-8a28-53c7b7f1e9aa.webp

In my view, it’s highly dependent on the quality of the government institutions and components of spending. People immediately think of inefficiency and bureaucracy when governments are brought up but there is empirical evidence to show that gov spending on things like education and infrastructure are usually “productive” in additional to contributing to factors that may not be properly captured by measures like GDP growth.

In short, people reducing government spending/regulations as inherently bad/controlling are at least not being completely honest because it’s a very complicated discussion.

Holyginz , 2 hours ago

As someone else stated there’s really no way to answer this without specifying in what way. The federal government is bigger in some ways and greatly lacking in others. And the amount of finances or revenue isn’t going to tell you the size of the government. It just tells you what one of it’s resources is. I would argue that if you aren’t in an area that’s trying to enforce religious rules/laws the average person likely has more freedom in the past. Obviously based on the demographic that might not be true though.

xmunk , 2 hours ago

Who is bigger: Meatloaf, Kareem Abdul Jabbar, or Taylor Swift.

There are a variety of ways to measure the size of things and you’d likely want to use one of the metrics that corresponds to your interest - do you care about the overall budget? Maybe about the number of incarcerated people per thousand?

It really depends what you want to measure.