Whatever your feelings are about single payer healthcare, it’s incredibly disingenuous when politicians debate against it by bringing up the cost of such a system, without comparing it to the current cost of the private system it would replace.
Intuit and HR Block are too small to present that level of opposition.
If a big sector from the S&P sank it would drive an apparent large secular reduction in the overall market, and in particular in the index funds. And opponents would seize upon it and beat the drums.
Most of the financial news is incoherent and lazy — this would be just another example.
1. https://www.imf.org/external/datamapper/exp@FPP/USA/FRA/JPN/...
I don’t get how “big” became a persuasive argument when it comes to the public sector, rather than “ineffective” or “inefficient”. Raw “size” isn’t a good target on its own.
At the end of the day all I care about is that things are done effectively and efficiently, and sometimes maybe we trade those things off so that they can be provided fairly and equitably (such as fire departments, I don’t care if a private sector solution would be more cost effective, I don’t want private companies selectively putting out fires).
It was ~32% pre-pandemic, and excepting for the Great Recession, looked to be stable at ~30%. Considering the governments revenue over that same period, again according to your own source, is also ~30% we're at less than 1/3 of GDP expenditure.
I think that is a reasonable public expenditure for a representative government, especially for the third most populous country on the planet and the largest GDP.
In the US a lot of things are inefficiently pushed into the private sector, health care being a good example. Taxes + private health care costs in the US are a higher percentage of GDP in the US than in any developed nation yet the results are the worst of the same cohort (OECD).
(This isn’t to say that there aren’t things done inefficiently in government that might be better in the private sector. Just saying that single figures are worthless alone).