It's smaller than you're being led to believe.
You know how conservatives love to bemoan big, bloated government? How they talk about how the Affordable Care Act will increase the size of the leviathan federal apparatus even more and cause it to intrude further into our daily lives? It would be a great narrative, were it not for the
facts on the ground. From PoliticalWire:
The September jobs report found that the federal government employs 2,723,000 civilian workers, which Floyd Norris points out ”is the lowest figure since 1966.”
“Now, the federal government employs exactly 2 percent of the people with jobs in this country. In 1966, the figure was more than twice that, 4.3 percent.”
So, despite the fact that the U.S. population is
172 percent larger as of the 2010 census compared to that of 1960, we still have roughly the same number of workers in the federal government to provide services now as we did then. Just one more way in which conservative truthiness falls victim to factual reality.