I Hate "Big Government"

No, not big government. "Big government." The phrase, not the thing. I don't like how people use those words. I may have written this post before, but since Republicans have kept saying, post-State of the Union, that Obama thinks "big government is the answer to everything," it's on my mind again. Basically, the definition of the "size" of government these days is the numerical size of its budget, possibly as a proportion of GDP. This is insane. Here's an example that's pretty minimal in how much it challenges the notion that overall levels of taxing and spending define the bigness or government: tax expenditures. According to a forthcoming Harper's Index, the state of Texas has budget expenditures in tax breaks for corporations equal to 50% of its actual budget. That doesn't show up as either taxing or spending, but it's a use of the tax code to create policy, i.e. to influence people's choices. As Matt Yglesias has been saying occasionally of late, one can also identify places where the alternative to a tax-and-spend program is a kludgy regulatory mandate. For example, single-payer health insurance would add a lot to the government's books, and it would require an increase in tax revenues, but in certain very obvious ways it's a much less invasive policy than the awkward framework of the Affordable Care Act, which involves some government subsidies but also various requirements that private actors either get or provide insurance. That's inefficient policy, and in my opinion, though it's not a particularly severe infringement of people's liberties, it's much worse along that dimension than proper national health insurance, which just doesn't involve liberty interests at all.

The government has the power to tax, and it can spend the dollars it acquires through taxation (or borrowing) in whatever way it pleases. Even the modern progressive income tax only amounts to a rather modest drag on how quickly one can accumulate wealth, unlike the confiscatory 91% taxes of yesteryear (specifically, the 50s, when Republicans were in charge). A government might use that power quantitatively more or less, but that's a pretty trivial shift in how "big" the government is, at least in the sense in which "big government" is supposed to sound kind of spooky and 1984-esque. Warrantless wiretapping, now that's big government, in the "big brother is watching you" sense, literally. Slightly higher Medicare spending? That might be "large government," or something, but it isn't meaningfully big government.