Читать книгу Northern Light: Lessons for America from Canada's Fiscal Fix - Robert P. Murphy - Страница 27

The figure shows that federal spending exploded during the two World Wars, but that these bulges were temporary. Laid on top of these wartime surges, however, has been a secular growth in federal spending from the pre-Depression era, even under the Hoover Administration. (This may surprise some readers, who have been taught that Herbert Hoover was a “do-nothing” president. On the contrary, he oversaw what was at the time an unprecedented peacetime expansion of federal government in reaction to the Great Depression.) Not until the Bill Clinton years in the 1990s do we see a noticeable slowdown in the growth of spending, a deceleration reversed under first the presidency of George W. Bush and then that of Barack Obama, culminating in a staggering $3.6 trillion expenditure in FY 2011.

Nominal spending figures can be somewhat misleading, however, because of changes in the price level, growth in population, and general economic growth. A much more telling statistic is federal spending as a share of the economy, shown in figure 1.2.

Figure 1.2 US federal government spending, as a share of nominal GDP, FY 1930–2011