This graph shows the government employees in the US, all levels of government, divided by the population of the US.
http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/graph/fredgraph.png?graph_id=87170 Color me surprised. The government/capita has been 0.0725+/-0.0025 since 1982. Variation in the last digit, 0.0001, represents ~31500 employees in our current population of ~315 million, so there's room for a lot of wiggle there. But it looks like a resource limited growth curve that met its limit 30 years ago and has danced around the limit since then. This graph shows the federal government employees in the US divided by the population of the US. http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/graph/fredgraph.png?graph_id=87182 The federal/capita fell from 0.016 to 0.009 over these 60 years, most steeply under the Clinton administration. The only federal/capita increases in the last 60 years were during Johnson's "Great Society" and Reagan's administration. The most recent federal contraction started under Bush1 in 1988 and has brought us from 0.013 to 0.009 federal employees/capita. Obama's stimulus started to reverse the trend, but he's now running the leanest federal/capita in the last 60 years. The rough constancy overall since 1988 is a crowd sourced result combining decisions made by 50 state and ~87000 local governments while the federal government shrank. So, what's a big government? Are there any other national statistics for comparison? -- rec --
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