I legitimately want to know what the Democrats plan is to do next. They are completely lost. The old relics still cling onto power and the GenX and Millennial democrats are terrified to take it from them. Back in the 90's when Clinton started to do similar cuts, the Republicans birthed the get-in-the-way-and-do-nothing party. That is basically what the Democrats are doing now. Name 1 promising presidential candidate. Not named Kamala Harris.
The United States under Calvin Coolidge or pretty much throughout its history prior to the election of FDR.
Anything modern? Prior to FDR is about 100 years ago, a blimp in time but such a vastly different country, world and life. Save for the time of WW1, you're basically saying about 2-3% gov expenditure as a % of GDP. I don't think a single country exists today within that range. There are countries with smaller government sizes today but in general they are not "developed". Here's a list of countries with sub 20% GDP gov expenditure. IMF doesn't have data for every country, google suggest that Somalia might be at 7% Spoiler Haiti8.29 Lebanon11.25 Venezuela11.99 Yemen12.17 Iran12.27 Ethiopia12.7 Bangladesh13.02 Guinea13.94 Guatemala14.36 Nigeria14.39 Gabon16.21 Equatorial Guinea17.2 Madagascar17.33 Indonesia17.54 Central African Republic17.62 Sudan17.7 Comoros18.16 Tanzania18.3 Dominican Republic18.51 Sri Lanka18.52 Chad18.83 Costa Rica19.43 Uganda19.85 Benin19.86 Pakistan In general these aren't considered thriving places, save for perhaps Costa Rica. Their expenditure is roughly 20% though.
Given that the US is both already developed, and has a vastly higher GDP/person than someplace like Somalia, I wouldn't say comparisons between the two are more valid than comparisons between the US now and the US in 1930. If you eliminate all the things that our government spends money on that aren't authorized by the Constitution (Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, Dept of Ed., welfare spending (individual and corporate), foreign aid, etc.) you would be down in the single digit percentage of GDP range. Social Security and Medicare would need to be phased out over time, as people have paid into those systems, some of them for decades, and should get the benefits they paid for.
“WE ARE AT WAR!”: Democrats Ramp Up Rage Rhetoric as Tensions Mount Across the Country https://jonathanturley.org/2025/02/...hetoric-as-tensions-mount-across-the-country/
Guess I never knew what that saying meant, I thought it meant a small moment or bump/spike of time. But the GDP per capita in 1870-1930 is a lot closer to being that of Somalia today than the USA of today. So it would be fair to say there is no nation in the world today that is a current example or current evidence of success for the type of government model you desire. I think the relationship to government spending and development is interesting, there are notable trends.
Those loser demonic Dems better be careful. If they try to assassinate Musk the way they did Trump, Trump and the DoJ will go after them with everything legally.
@Os Trigonum I was thinking of blip, I don't think I've ever seen the word spelled out and always assumed people we're saying blimp lol
A Freudian slip is when someone misspeaks (or otherwise errs in communication) in a way that reveals a repressed desire (though more colloquially, it has been used to refer to misspeaking in a way that reveals a secret desire, or just in an embarrassing fashion. In terms of raw numbers perhaps, not by any meaningful measure that accounts for the inflation of currency that has happened over the past 150 years. The United States was a major world power during that period and one of the wealthiest countries in the world. Somalia is a failed African state that has no particular global influence beyond some piracy directly off the coastline. They are not at all comparable. There is no nation in the world today that is a current example of the type of government model I desire, successful or otherwise. It is not a model in current use, though it was quite successful for 150 plus years in the United States. There are many, many state that spend plenty at varying levels of development and success. The United States, for example, spend much less than Greece as a percentage of GDP, but is doing much better. Ireland is doing well and is a developed country spending much less than the US. Peace and access to technology seem much more predictive than government spending at determining development and success. No one would say France is doing significantly better than Switzerland, despite the French government spending nearly twice as much as a percentage of GDP compared to the Swiss. Ireland and Angola spend very similar amounts to each other as a percentage of GDP, to not at all similar results. Same for the Republic of Korea and Mexico.
We were talking about “blimp in time” which I was confusing for “blip” Relative Status wise yes 100% not comparable, gdp per capita inflation adjusted I think the GDP per capita would have been around 2-5k which is closer to Somalia today or that of a low development country in comparison to where the US/highly developed nations are today was what I was saying. Just to point out how different the time/development is. On the last paragraph, yes I would say Switzerland is the flagship example modern model for as evidence of success for the smallest government footprint amongst highly developed countries. Ireland on paper is lower but they have a severe gdp distortion and I don’t know what an accurate number would be for them. I suspect Swiss is lower. Switzerland is right there amongst the best in the world as a successful nation and government model. But you can’t point to much below that, and certainly not under say 15%. Under 15% is a marker of severe poverty. Meanwhile from low 30s to mid 50s you see all of the developed world. With some very nice places in Sweden/Finland/Denmark being in the high 40’s and low 50s depending on the year. If government involvement was a key indicator or distinction of disfunction in a society you wouldn’t expect to have these trends.
https://www.wsj.com/opinion/democra...1?st=upN3XD&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink Democrats Stand Up for the Bureaucrats Whose idea was it to have Chuck Schumer lead a protest against DOGE outside the Treasury? By Gerard Baker Feb. 10, 2025 at 11:41 am ET You couldn’t invent a scene that better explains our current politics than the one last week outside the Treasury in Washington. Some genius in the Democratic Party evidently thought it a good idea to put some of the party’s most prominent faces, most notably Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, in front of the cameras to protest Elon Musk’s efforts to get inside the books of the federal government in his presidentially mandated campaign to root out inefficiency. Picture it: The Democrats, onetime tribunes of the people, fiercely defending government employees from the taxpayers; the party of the oppressed putting it all on the line to protect federal bureaucrats from the people they’re supposed to serve. It was a tableau for the ages, one example of the many strange battle lines the Democratic Party has chosen to defend these past few years: illegal migrants over citizens, teachers unions over parents and children, criminals over victims, men-turned-women over girls. Good luck with that, Democrats. You might want to fire your pollsters. Choosing to die on the hill of the right of permanent government officials to spend money without hindrance from the president’s delegates is an especially odd decision. I’m trying to picture the voter who is currently sitting at home rooting for the employees of the U.S. Agency for International Development or the Internal Revenue Service. Expecting to make the government efficient is a tall order for anyone, even an abrasive tech billionaire, but like all the best entrepreneurial activities, it may be outcomes other than the principal objective that end up the best justification for Mr. Musk’s endeavors. So far at least, the Department of Government Efficiency looks like something of a misnomer. It’s early days but it seems less DOGE and more DOGA, a Department of Government Accountability. Since that acronym doesn’t really work, perhaps it could be called Making American Government Accountable—and you could even save a few hundred thousand dollars by repurposing some red hats. The savings we were promised don’t add up to much so far. It’s all very satisfying denying government employees the insight to be had from a Politico Pro subscription, or depriving the people of Colombia the opportunity to have their awareness of transgender representation raised through opera, but in a total federal budget of $6.75 trillion, these add up to small ball. Even some of the apparently big-money scandals haven’t turned out to be all that scandalous. Be honest, who among us didn’t get a little shiver of excitement up the leg when we learned that the DOGEniks had identified and then snipped off the supply of $50 million worth of taxpayer-financed condoms to Gaza, adding to the inconveniences the Hamasniks have had to endure these past 16 months. But it turned out that no such funding had been approved and that the prophylactics might actually have been for another Gaza, a province in Mozambique that benefits from U.S. support for AIDS prevention. It’s early, and it’s still possible that Mr. Musk and his band of teenage budget-slashers will hit paydirt somewhere in the $800 billion defense or $1.8 trillion health and human services budget. But even if they ultimately fall a few trillion short in the pursuit of savings that will eliminate our vast budget deficit, the work they are doing represents a vital contribution to the reform of government. (A word about those teenagers: Funny how the left is so outraged about kids barely out of college marching into buildings along Constitution Avenue to investigate the misuse of government budgets. They cheered as hordes of little Maoists straight out of Ivy League schools took over tech companies, media organizations and the entire marketing departments of corporate America in the past decade to subject the rest of us to the iron ruleof woke ideology.) Whether or not it succeeds in dramatically reducing the size of government, the paramount virtue of this exercise is the exposure of the hegemony in our system of a political class that sees itself as immune from popular accountability. Government is supposed to exist for the people, but the DOGE process has laid bare what we have long suspected—that at scale, it exists first and foremost to further the interests of the permanent bureaucracy and their like-minded friends who dominate almost all our major institutions. That’s why Democrats are so upset about the exercise: It is the most serious challenge to the control their people have long exercised, irrespective of election results and the popular will. Whether in the ideologically driven distribution of foreign aid or the convergence of education policies with the interests of public-sector unions, too much of government has been unresponsive either to actual results or the public will. The accountability DOGE can bring needs to be emulated in other areas of public life where these interests have long dominated, immune from responsibility: radicalized higher education, failing city governments, intellectually corrupt media and entertainment companies. Even Elon Musk can’t do all that. But the rest of us can start.
