I think I’ve heard that the USA federal gov is bigger than in the past, as in controlling more of an American’s life than in its history. Is it like government revenue divided by gdp? What about minting?

  • @KellyEnglish
    3•28 days ago

    I think I’ve heard that the USA federal gov is bigger than in the past, as in controlling more of an American’s life than in its history.

    My first thought was that this is really two separate questions but then I realised a stat like this might answer both:

    the number of public sector employees as a percentage of the total workforce.

    1. If we view government’s role as intruding on our freedoms and controlling our lives (I don’t), then the more people they employ the more able they are to assert that control.
    2. Its the ratio of the workforce that have their working hours dictated by government, its hard to be more controlling that that.

    (Its not considering the non-working population, and with variations to lifespan, unemployment, etc that may be relevant … I don’t know.)

    And international comparison is available here:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_public_sector_size

    For a 30 year historical comparison of US data see figure 1.1 here:

    https://www.cbo.gov/publication/60235#_idTextAnchor012

    (My reading of the chart is that while total employment has gone up the state and federal public sectors have been pretty flat over that period. This would mean the public sector is currently a slightly smaller proportion of the total workforce compared to earlier in the chart.)