What's the best way to measure the size of the government? - eviltoast

I think I’ve heard that the USA federal gov is bigger than in the past, as in controlling more of an American’s life than in its history. Is it like government revenue divided by gdp? What about minting?

  • nothacking@discuss.tchncs.de
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    3 months ago

    I guess you could look at governmental budget or number of employees, but raw size is quite a bad metric for overreach. The knowledge that one year a lot of money was spent inforcing laws tells you very little about the effects that has on the population as a whole.

    To do that you’d need a good definition of what exactly overreach is, and you’d probably have to do a lot of work because I doubt anyone else had the exactl same definition.