What is Small Government?

What does small government mean? Those calling for massive cuts say we've got big government and they just want us to get back to small government. They say that whoever disagrees with them wants "big government."

Like pretty much all of my fellow Americans, I want govt to stick to its appropriate role. I want a government that does only what we need it to do. But what if that's what we've got now?

Comparing against other modern, industrialized nations would be one way to put it into perspective. In 2009 we had larger than normal expenditures from stimulus and lower than normal GDP from the Great Recession. That year, we had a GDP of roughly $14,258 billion and total Federal spending of $3,518 billion. That's 24.7%. In the same year, the U.K. central government spent around 32.6% of their GDP. Looking back to the more normal levels of a year that doesn't include stimulus spending, in 2007 our Federal spending was 19.38% of our GDP. That same year, the U.K. central government spent 28.44% of their GDP. That's how the general trend goes. Between 1995 and 2010, the our national govt spending undershot their national govt spending by 8.7% on average.

National govt spending as a share of GDP in the US and UK

The U.K. is far from alone among the other industrialized nations in dwarfing our national govt spending.

Expense (% of GDP) in 2004 from data.worldbank.org

By and large -- though some other countries often run budgets proportionally similar to ours -- we have a relatively small government compared to the other industrialized nations.

Perhaps one could argue that maybe the general trend in the other industrialized nations is to maintain giant governments that dwarf our so-called big government. If that's the case, we should easily be able to find vast, expensive programs that we don't really have any use for in our society ... that few of us would want government to do. Where are those programs?

Shall we cut infrastructure spending and let our already crumbling roads and bridges decay further, making it harder for our businesses to transport products? Shall we dismantle Social Security and allow elderly citizens to starve in the streets? Should we stop investing in the medical research that has helped make our biomedical industry such a large contributor to our GDP? Shall we stop funding education and fail to foster skills needed to compete in the modern global economy? Shall we stop monitoring our food supply so that producers can get away with cutting corners and contamination runs unchecked? Shall we cut billions by stopping payments for police, fire-protection, and border security?

These things are all quite necessary from the government. A modern society doesn't function as well without any of that. When you look at charts showing a much smaller government hundreds of years back in our history, keep in mind that we had an entirely different economy back then. We didn't have the transportation system that we have today. We didn't have a social safety net to make it so an elderly miner could retire rather than just working till he died nor workplace regulations to make it less likely for him to die of black lung. We didn't have such a thriving biomedical industry both making our health better and enriching our nation. We didn't have a workforce capable of designing high-tech products to sell to the rest of the world. We didn't have most of the great things about our modern economy that require government programs to work smoothly and in many cases to function at all. One can't expect the economy of the 21st century to operate with the government spending levels of the 18th or 19th centuries. When we had significantly smaller government, we also drove horse-drawn carts, used outhouses, suffered polio, and couldn't reasonably expect to have a chance of ever retiring. Should we really be basing our idea of appropriate government spending on a time to which we wouldn't want to go back in any other way?