Governments are not going to stop getting bigger
Some factors which drive the process are eternal and some are getting stronger
WHEN, IN 1996, President Bill Clinton announced that “the era of big government is over”, supporters to his left feared that saying so would only serve to make it so. They were wrong. So was Mr Clinton. Between 1996 and 2019 America’s annual government spending grew by one percentage point of GDP. And when, last year, the economy crashed, it rose by another ten (see chart 1). Now President Joe Biden is building on what started as emergency pandemic-related policy, expanding the child-tax credit, creating a universal federally funded child-care system, subsidising paid family leave and expanding Obamacare.
This article appeared in the Briefing section of the print edition under the headline “The great embiggening”
Briefing November 20th 2021
From the November 20th 2021 edition
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