[rayiner]

> What's really scary these days is how many people think we'll solve all our problems if we just make government smaller and smaller.

And what’s really really scary is how many people, at least in the US, worry about government being too small when in reality it has been almost monotonically growing since the 1960s. Non defense federal spending as a share of GDP is bigger than the 1960s. And state and local government spending has grown twice as fast as GDP since 1960.

I think people confuse Reagan’s rhetoric with the reality that Democrats controlled the House, and thus spending bills, his entire presidency. The Reagan era was a period of government retrenchment in the same sense as Biden is the second coming of FDR.