I wonder if anyone ever thinks about how big the federal government has become.

Unless you live in Washington DC, for most of us the Federal government is kind of abstract. We all think about it when we fill out our tax forms and if you are retired you have interaction with the Social Security department and Medicare but day to day I don’t think most of us are thinking about the government. Heck, when it was shut down during the budget impasse a few years ago, a majority of Americans would not have even noticed if it were not for the hysterical media.

How big is the Federal government? Well it’s the biggest employer in the country with almost 3 million employees (1) counting the postal service. With an annual budget of over three trillion dollars in 2010 it is almost 22% of the country’s GDP (3).

Now it makes sense that the federal government would always be getting bigger. The country’s population and economy is growing so the government would have to expand to perform the same function for a larger economy. To make some sense of it, we must compare the size of the government with something else in order to get a feel for how much the government really is expanding. As I said, federal spending is equal to almost 22% of GDP and if we look back to say, 1913, we see that Federal spending was just 2.5% of GDP.

Another way we can look at federal spending is to compare it to the population. In 1960 the population was 180 million people and 2010 it is about 300 million, an increase of about 60%. Federal spending in 1960 (numbers converted to 2005 dollars) was $628 billion and in 2010 $3300 billion so an increase of over 400%. Yes you read that correctly 3300 billion dollars!!! A 400% increase!!!! (2)

“But wait” my liberal friends tell me, “think of all the good the government does”. We don’t have space in one blog to look at the total federal budget, so let’s take a quick look at just one department to see “how much good they do”.

The Department of Education was founded in 1979. Going back to my first blog it is hard to figure out how education can ever be thought of as a “Federal responsibility”. It would appear to be the whole thing is absolutely unconstitutional. But liberals don’t really worry about that, so let’s just concentrate on what the department is really doing.

To think about this historically, the United States put men on the moon without a department of education, we won two world wars without a department of education, we created the largest most productive economy in the world…without a department of education. Today the Department of education has a work force of 4200 and not one of them is a teacher. The budget for this department is 63.7 billion. My liberal friends tell me this department provides vital dollars to help the states pay for education, but where do those dollars come from in the first place? FROM THE STATES!!

So here is how it works. The federal government takes tax money from the citizens of a state, it uses most of that money to pay for the payroll, benefits, insurance, office, desks, chairs and bottled water for the 4200 employees in Washington and then it sends some of the same money back to each state and acts like it is doing you a favor! Here is a thought, if we just left that 63 billion dollars in the states and let them use it to hire teachers how many teachers could we get? That might be close to an extra 1 million teachers.

So what do you really think would do the most for education, an extra 1 million teachers or 4200 federal employees sitting in an office building in DC?

1)http://www.opm.gov/feddata/HistoricalTables/TotalGovernmentSince1962.asp


2) http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/BUDGET-2011-TAB/pdf/BUDGET-2011-TAB.pdf

3) GDP is a measure of the “gross domestic product” of our country. GDP is basically a number that includes all economic activity that happens in the U.S. If my company hires a new worker for $40,000 that adds $40,000 added to the GDP, if that employee then helps produce product that we sell for $10 that adds $10 to the GDP.