Читать книгу American Democracy in Context - Joseph A. Pika - Страница 32

We put the discussion of government functions in the previous sections in order according to how much public consensus exists for government action in each. Few dispute that the government should maintain social and economic order, though of course there are often lively disputes over how the government does this. (No one disputes the need for police forces, for instance, but people often disagree about how the policing should be done.) Certain public goods, such as national defense and diplomacy, are similarly uncontroversial, at least in the sense that people agree that the government should provide these public goods. There is a good deal of consensus around the need for government to provide for infrastructure as well—especially for elements such as education and highways. However, as we go down the list of functions, there is less consensus for a government-regulated economy.

Furthermore, within any of the areas of government function, people often disagree about how active the government should be, even if they generally concur that the government should be involved to some extent. How much is the right amount to spend on national defense? And what about environmental protection? Although considered a public good, it is surrounded by controversy: Should the government take actions to reduce human contributions to the warming of the earth’s atmosphere? And of course, in areas such as redistribution of income or regulation of behaviors, the extent and nature of government activity is also often quite controversial, leading to questions such as whether the government should eliminate the tax on inherited wealth (the estate tax or “death tax”).

Governments around the world differ in how active they are. In general, the United States government provides fewer goods and services, and spends less on them, than most other wealthy countries. National and local governments accounted for 37 percent of all expenditures in the United States in 2015—evidence of a large and active government, it is true. But governments in the United Kingdom (also often called Great Britain) and Sweden account for more of their countries’ expenditures—42 percent and 50 percent respectively.¹²

We see in Figure 1.2 that the United States, the United Kingdom, and Sweden all had relatively small government presences at the beginning of the twentieth century, but that their governments grew as a result of the two World Wars and the Depression in the first half of the twentieth century. In 1936, for instance, government spending in the United States accounted for only 16 percent of expenditures. The United States continues to have a smaller presence of government than the other two countries, however, despite its growth over several decades.

Description

Figure 1.2 Growth of Governmental Activity in the U.S., the United Kingdom, and Sweden

Government’s expenditures as a percentage of all economic activity grew in all three countries, but less in the United States than in Sweden or Great Britain.

Sources: Vito Tanzi and Ludger Schuknecht, Public Spending in the 20th Century: A Global Perspective (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 6; “General Government Spending,” Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), 2018, https://data.oecd.org/gga/general-government-spending.htm

Governments also differ in how active they are in the different areas of government functioning. Although the United States spends more on national defense than most other wealthy countries, many of these other countries spend much more than the United States on social services and on protecting the vulnerable. For instance, in 2016, only 2 percent of all government spending in Germany went to national defense, compared with 61 percent for social programs and health; the figures were very different for the United States: 8 percent for defense and only 46 percent for social programs and health.¹³

The proper scope of government and the choices it should make are always controversial. Differences in the size of the government’s presence and in what sorts of functions and policies the government emphasizes are due largely to differences in what the people of the country value. We explore Americans’ values in the next section.