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Comment by robocat | Hacker News Reader

46% of the US GDP is government spending. Not so far from a majority that you can cast aspersions at other countries? Then again, my socialist New Zealand is trying to catch up with 42% ;). The figure given for Russia was 38%, which feels out of whack: who can trust GDP numbers eh?

https://wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_government_s...

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Can someone explain the significance of this statistic in context? Seems there are many successfully economies with a government spend of higher % of GDP than the US. Not sure how this fits into a broader picture of a country’s financial health.

Also- based on my cursory reading here, it seems disingenuous to claim 46% of GDP is government spending- the stat is that government spending is comparable to 46% of the GDP of that year. Government spend doesn’t comprise 46% of the GDP, rather we are using GDP as a measuring stick to evaluate the sanity of government spending amounts.

It means 46% of GDP is government spending. Actually.

Defense spending. Government workers. Infrastructure projects various governments partially or fully pay for. Subsidies. And so on.

Interesting- in that case these are some eye popping numbers.

However, I’m struggling to square that fact with the observation that the Wikipedia table shows a number of entries >100%. How could government spending ever exceed 100% of GDP given it is counting toward GDP?

2020/21 are the dumbest years to look at any government spending

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