Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

That's not exactly the trajectory evidenced by the numbers: http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/RL34424.pdf (Figure 4, p. 17). Discretionary spending as a percentage of GDP has declined dramatically since 1980. Discretionary spending in absolute terms (adjusted for inflation) declined through the 1990's: http://www.heritage.org/multimedia/infographic/2012/10/feder.... Federal civilian employment is at roughly where it was in the late 1960's: http://www.opm.gov/policy-data-oversight/data-analysis-docum..., even though the overall population is 50% larger. Total federal employment, including military, has been smaller over this decade than it was at any time since 1962. About 2 million fewer people worked for the federal government in 2011 as did in 1969.

The narrative of ever-ballooning government is almost entirely driven by entitlement spending (i.e. me writing a check that gets immediately sent out again as a check to grandma). Now it's a somewhat philosophical question, but I don't think it's accurate to call increased Social Security or Medicare expenditures an "expansion of the state." When I think of the "state" I think of layers of bureaucracy, weapons programs, etc. I.e. money the government has discretionary control over. The long-term trend of that is one of decline, not growth.

"Federal civilian employment is at roughly where it was in the late 1960's"

That OPM report is demonstrably misleading. It doesn't include contract employees which have been increasing since the 80's and have ballooned in the past decade. OPM doesn't keep numbers on the number of contractors. It's also been shown that a contract employee gets paid almost double what a civil servant does for doing the same exact job.[0] Some studies estimate that federal government contractors out number civil servant employees 4 to 1.[1]

Politicians love this because it allows them to say they are holding the line on the size of the federal government in terms of federal employees while it is actually increasing in common sense terms.

[0] http://www.pogo.org/our-work/reports/2011/co-gp-20110913.htm...

[1]http://wagner.nyu.edu/performance/files/True_Size.pdf

It's not any more misleading than counting a guy assembling Humvees or a doctor working on an NIH grant as being employed by the government, and then throwing around figures like 5-7 million additional contractor employees.

Moreover, even according to your link the "true size" of government is shrinking relative to the population. Your source estimates the "true size" of government at 12.6 million in 1990 and 14.6 million in 2005. That's a 16% increase, during a period when U.S. population grew 20% (from 250 million to 300 million), and real GDP grew 63%. And that's a number that reflects the peak of the Iraq/Afghanistan wars, and will decrease as we exit those wars.

Finally, at the end of the day, those contractors are paid out of discretionary expenditures, which are on a long-term downward trend as a percentage of GDP. Your source says: "All of the increase in contract employees is due to increased spending at the Department of Defense." This is the chart of defense spending as a percentage of GDP: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a5/US_defens...

"It's not any more misleading than counting a guy assembling Humvees or a doctor working on an NIH grant"

Right which is the problem with all numbers seeking to quantify the size of government by a count of the employees. Since good numbers aren't available on the number of contractors that are de facto civil service employees vs employed by an entity that operates autonomously and provides a product to the government.

I don't dispute your argument in terms of dollar amounts.

The chart you give for discretionary spending goes from 1992 ($803) to 2012 ($1289). It shows an overall 60% increase in discretionary spending in only the last 20 years. Not exactly a trend of decline.

The point of that chart was to show that spending decreased in absolute, not just relative, terms in the 1990's, countering the idea that the trajectory is towards inexorable increase. From 1992 to 2012, real GDP growth slightly outpaced discretionary federal expenditures (63% versus 60%).

Moreover, if you look at the chart on page 30-31 of the PDF in the first link, you can see that non-defense + defense expenditures increased from $761 billion FY2012 dollars in 1977 to ~$1,166 billion in 2012 (adding back ~$123 billion for Iraq and Afghanistan that isn't reflected in that chart),[1] an increase of 53% over 35 years. In that time period, U.S. real GDP grew 152% and the U.S. population grew 43%.

To put it in concrete terms, each person in 1977 bore $3,460 of discretionary expenditures while someone in 2012 bore $3,700 of discretionary expenditures. But in 1977 it was 14.2% per-capita income, while in 2012 it was 8.6% of per-capita income.

[1] Note that 1977 was two years after the end of the Vietnam war.

I agree with social security, as it's simply a direct monetary transfer program, and I personally view these, such as progressive taxation, as vastly preferable to Federal control of services for many reasons.

But, Medicare is a state-owned Insurance company, and if I remember correctly, constitutes around 50% of the country's health spending.

Also, Do your numbers include contractors? My understanding is that there is a trend of using contractors in all areas of the federal government, and I personally consider contractors to be defacto federal employees. They have the advantage of not being able to belong to public unions, which I consider anti-democratic, but the disadvantage of losing the sense of being a patriotic public servant participating in the betterment of the Republic.

The numbers do not include contractors, but including the number of contractors in the tally is difficult. Is an engineering working for Lockheed on the F-22 a federal employee? If you take upper-bounds estimates for the number of federal contractors (7-15 million), then he would be considered an employee. But it's not like the federal government wasn't hiring Lockheed to do the same sort of work in 1965.

There are some estimate suggesting that this broader count increased from 12.6 million in 1990 to 14.6 million in 2006: http://www.politifact.com/virginia/statements/2011/jan/06/ge.... This is a 16% increase, but U.S. population grew 20% in that time, and real GDP grew 62% in that time.

I don't disagree with the general sentiment. I think a focus on reducing the size of government is great, and I think it's great that the government is leaner, relative to population and relative to GDP, than it was 20-30 years ago. But throwing your hands-up and saying the inevitable trajectory of government is unbridled growth actually undermines that. If nothing can convince you that government can shrink, and is shrinking, then it makes no sense to continually push to keep a check on the size of government.

What I mean is nation states in general and over a much longer period than you're talking about.

Okay, let's go back farther. In 1937 (back in history a third of the lifetime of the republic), expenditures as a percentage of GDP were 8.6% (almost all discretionary; SS was nothing back then and there was no Medicare). In 2011, discretionary expenditures as a percentage of GDP were 9%.

Going back further than that paints a misleading picture. The scope of government increases, super-linearly, with the complexity of the society being governed.[1] Growth that is the result of accommodating a more complex society with exponentially more interaction between people as a result of ever finer-grained division of labor is still growth, but not the kind of growth alluded to in your comment. The growth implied by your comment is steady-state growth: government consumes more until it becomes unsustainable. The fact that government, at least the federal government, has been remarkably consistent in size during the modern industrial era cuts against that narrative.

[1] This is essentially a law of nature, applying to everything from business corporations to operating systems.

...then why make the assertion that congress never defunds anything?

Because it doesn't fit their narrative that all government is bad government.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com