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As for the size of the federal government, the number of federal workers has been more or less static for the last 40+ years I love how you twisted the previou

• rayiner 14y ago
  > Them's weasel words right there. We all know that the important factor of size is the budget, which has grown by any measure you care to discuss. It's not clear that, in economic terms, the size of the budget is the most important factor. Transfer payments, which go directly back into the private economy, do not have the same effect as other kinds of government expenditures. This is especially true for transfer payments like social security. Consider: young people would be taking care of old people even without social security. Social Security, in a sense, just brings those transfer payments onto the federal ledger. Is $10 billion of social security transfer payments, most of which would have happened anyway, the same in terms of economic impact as spending $10 billion to hire TSA employees or spending $10 billion to make bombs?
  • crusso 14y ago
    Consider: young people would be taking care of old people even without social security Every time you remove individual choice from making decisions about how to spend money and in its place substitute aggregate government spending, the efficiency of the system plummets. That's because the higher you move up the hierarchy, the less decision makers care about spending other peoples' money. It's the reason why markets tend to be efficient and government programs tend to be wasteful. So you can't just say, "since citizens would spend money on x, we might as well create a government program that spends money on x". The size of the budget is what's important. A government's ability to spend money is a government's power. Far from being a wash, transfer payments are government exercising its control.
    • rayiner 14y ago
      I'm not saying it's a wash. I'm saying that the economic impact of each dollar of federal spending isn't the same, hence looking at simply the size of the budget isn't a good criterion. E.g. I'd much rather have a government with a $3.8 trillion budget, $2 trillion are transfer payments, then one with a $3 trillion budget, where only $500 billion are transfer payments. For the last 40 years (leaving aside the spike caused by the response to the repression), federal expenditures as a percentage of GDP have been around 20% of GDP: http://stats.areppim.com/stats/stats_usxoutlaysxgdp.htm http://stats.areppim.com/stats/stats_usxoutlaysxgdp.htm. During that period, discretionary spending as a percentage of GDP has fallen. That's not consistent with a narrative that the government has kept growing this whole time.
  • AnthonyMouse 14y ago
    >Consider: young people would be taking care of old people even without social security. Social Security, in a sense, just brings those transfer payments onto the federal ledger. It does more than that. It makes the payments unconditional and divorced from family. If someone's children are paying for their retirement, they're more likely to stay in close contact because of the continuing dependency. The grandparents are more likely to live in closer proximity to their children and grandchildren and impart their wisdom rather than moving to Florida to play shuffleboard on cruise ships. Parents who know they'll have to depend on their children in their retirement have a greater incentive to care about the success of their progeny, etc. And that's assuming the payments go to the same people as they would under a state program or with voluntary individual action. Social security is very poorly implemented: The richest taxpayers pay the lowest percentage of their salaries in social security tax and then receive the highest benefits. Millionaires living in mansions receive larger social security checks than retired Walmart greeters living in hovels. Moving things to the state level gives us an opportunity to rethink all this. Stop sending Warren Buffet a social security check and instead have him pay to subsidize living expenses for the retired working poor based on need. Let middle class families with successful middle class children handle their own affairs internally rather than having the government use force to take from the son to give to the father. And let me ask this: If transfer payments did nothing and had no economic effect, what would be the argument for keeping them? If they have no effect then keeping them is just wasting resources on government bureaucracy to redistribute the money pursuant to the broken window fallacy.
    • rayiner 14y ago
      You're bringing unrelated issues into the discussion. The point isn't that transfer payments have zero impact. The point is that transfer payments have less of an economic impact than than, say, using the money to blow up things in Iraq. So just looking at federal spending as a whole isn't a great way to measure the economic impact of government--you have to dig down and see where the money is going. Another way to look at it is: consider two governments, both spend 30% of GDP. The first spends 25% on bureaucracy and the military, and 5% on transfer payments, while the second spends 10% of bureaucracy and the military, and 15% of transfer payments. Which government probably has a lower economic impact? Which government probably has more "fat" to trim?