Thursday, February 06, 2003 :::
Kate Malcolm asks,
A more expensive project, mind you, does not mean that it is larger. One fighter jet costs much more than 1000 handouts. Which is "bigger" government?
The fighter jet is, for "shadow government" reasons you give earlier. A proper accounting finds the Boeing employees, and even the steel mill employees (on a pro-rated basis), part of the former program.
Spending is a remarkably good metric of size. If you want to argue that a department with 300 $30,000 employees is bigger than one with 200 $60,000 employees, I'll afford that it's a tenable position (though I think I still disagree, on the basis of the effect on the private economy), but as a measure of size where the President doesn't seem to be gaming the metric — perhaps not the case for Clinton there — it's probably generally as good a simple metric as is available.
Incidentally, many people support smaller (cheaper) government because it allows lower taxes; I support lower taxes because they require smaller (cheaper) government. I'd say a bigger violation of the "cheaper is smaller" rule is regulation that imposes large costs that don't get tallied as government expenditure; that I would count as big government regardless.
::: posted by dWj at 6:07 PM
