Lance

That's fine, but how do you decide how much is enough? 30%? 40%? Where do you draw the line? Where do you draw the line between people who really need government help and those who really don't?

Reschovsky's numbers show that government has been growing faster than our economy. Extrapolate that out far enough, and what happens? How much is enough? Government can't spend a dollar without first taking that dollar from someone. That's a dollar that will be spent with less efficiency than a dollar spent by the private market, because government does not have the market disciplines of competition.

I would be perfectly happy to have government spending stay around 20%, if we could keep it from growing further. I would prefer to have government shrink, in relation to the economy. A growing economy will both send more revenue to the government, and will allow more people to live without government help. Note that, if government spending had declined to 13.3% of personal income, as Reschovsky calculated, government spending still would have grown - just not as fast as the economy.