Paul Light is correct that the employment figures don't tell the whole story. We can follow the money. Today, as has been the case for the past half century, roughly one dollar in five in the American economy passes through federal coffers. The world's largest commercial firm is not one-tenth this size. In 1998, the figure was 20.1 percent.
Spending appears to be up.
But look more closely. In the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, federal government spending climbed steadily, rising to a peak of 23.6 percent of GDP in 1983. Since then, over the past 15 years, the federal claim on the nation's economic resources has proportionally declined. At 20.1 percent of GDP, federal spending today is down 3.5 percent of GDP from the mid-1980s peak. It encompasses everything the Defense Department does, along with the Coast Guard, the Federal Aviation Administration, the Environmental Protection Agency, the IRS and the FBI, national parks and forests, the National Institutes of Health, housing assistance, grants to states for environmental programs, education, mass transit and so on.