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LETTER: Is cheap government an option?

Posted on August 2, 2012 by Staff

Congressional Republicans and Mitt Romney have espoused “cut-government-with-no-increase-in-taxes” as their debt-reduction and recession-relieving strategy. Question: Is our government bloated much beyond actual need?

I drew a graph that tracked federal government expenditures per person every year from 1974-2008 using government data. I was astonished to find a nearly smooth upward trend, a higher rate of increase under Republican presidents than under Clinton. Still, under every administration we spent more per person every single year. Recessions, boom times, wars and elections came and went. The upward trend showed few fluctuations. Why?

Could government oversight of an increasingly complex world explain this relentless rise in costs? Every year more non-natural foods, medicinal products and procedures, military hardware, financial products of bewildering complexity and sophisticated drugs hit the market. Fire, flood and foreign disasters increase; species disappear. You get the picture.

The accumulating Code of U.S. laws might be an indication of complexity. According to the “Political Calculation” blog, the Code in 1939 was 504 pages. After that it increased an average of 3.28 percent a year and by 2006 was over 200,000 pages long. Steady growth? Yup. Maybe cutting government is something that Republicans had better explain in more detail rather than their vague “government is the problem” stance.

Robert Merriam
Chapel Hill

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