Our Growing Government

The Taxpayer Frog In the IRS Pot

This is interesting. There is too much to post it all here, so be sure to read through it.

In 1900 federal spending was $0.5B. In 2000 it was $1,789B . Those amounts translated to 2.5% of GDP in 1900 and 21% in 2000. Government spending at all levels in the U.S. was 36.5% of GDP in 2006. That 2.5% of GDP that could sustain the entire federal government in 1900 is not even enough to cover the Medicare program today.

Here's another example:

There were few enough federal regulations in 1900 that the government did not do anything special to keep track of them. That changed in the middle of the New Deal. The Federal Register, the master list of federal regulations, came into existence in 1936. In that year it had 2,620 pages of regulations. The next year it had 3,450. In the year 2000, it had 83,294 pages.

Last one:

At the beginning of last century, communism was considered so bad by our liberal and Democratic President Woodrow Wilson and the Democratic Congress at time that they passed the Espionage and Sedition Acts and authorized Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer to conduct the "Palmer raids" to fight it - the original "Red Scare". I would say that was equivalent to frogs jumping out of the water because they felt the heat immediately.

But the heat has been turned up slowly so that today communism is not even feared. In fact it is taught in our best universities by communists. By the end of the 20th century, a third of the voting age population in the U.S. thought the phrase "to each according to his needs, from each according to his abilities" was in the U.S. Constitution, and another third were not sure. (The phrase came from Karl Marx, author of The Communist Manifesto.) The Communist Party USA openly advocates to "defeat McCain and strengthen Democratic majorities in Congress" and to elect either Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton in 2008.

Feel the heat.