Government spending as a % of GDP... Favorite Republican Stat

[Kurt_and_Hunter]

Government spending his sky-rocketed:



Government spending has actually flattened out, growing less in the two years after the economic collapse than the two years before it:



The difference is that the first chart is government spending as a percentage of GDP.

That's a usual metric, but it becomes kind of stupid in an economic crisis when GDP is way down.



Charts and commentary:

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/10/12/special-bulletin-fractions-have-denominators/

[Kurt_and_Hunter]

1. ...

[notesdev]

2. Here's why the % matters

The % matters because the private economy has to support the public one. So if the public sector is spending more, even slightly more, while the private sector craters, the burden on the private sector is magnified.

Anyway, those charts he's using are horribly misleading, ARRA itself represented spending 10% of GDP and I don't see anything close to a 10% jump on the chart, so something is missing. Even if it was broken up over two years we'd see jumps of 5% in one shot and that is not there.

[Kurt_and_Hunter]

3. It is total government spending, I believe

States and localities have pulled back which is why the Federal government has had to pick up the slack.