Noah Sparks
Professor Conkling
Principles of Macroeconomics
November 1, 2019
Big Government and Why it is Bad
The Federal government of the US is too large in my opinion and needs to be cut down in
their reach/ power and their spending for multiple reasons including but not limited to the
massive federal debt, laws and regulations that are unconstitutional, and not acting as
representatives to the people of the U.S. like their job entails. There are multiple ways that we
could cut the size of the government down for the betterment of the country without losing any
major programs or important funding, but I will only discuss one of them here.
The federal government employs over 9 million people according to New York
University Professor Paul Light’s calculations as of 2019 and spent 4.529 trillion dollars
according to the Office of Management and Budget. When compared to the 3.438 trillion dollars
they brought in, that shows a deficit of 1.092 trillion dollars, forcing the national debt even
higher to a little over 23 trillion dollars, according to the national debt clock, at the time of
writing this. To put this number into perspective, that means that each citizen in the us would
have to pay just under 70k dollars to pay that back but that’s including children and other nontaxpayers. If we bring that up to only per taxpayer, each person would have to pay around 186k
dollars to pay back the national debt. This debt is ever growing at an alarming rate especially
when you compare it to other countries like china who has over 4 times our population with a
national debt of only 9.7 trillion dollars.
The government has too much power not in the fact that they are not bound enough by
the constitution but because they are not following the constitution as it was intended. Glossing
over the hot debates of gun control and abortions that will only start arguments, the next best
example of this is their passing of laws that do not represent the wishes of the people like
creating laws that apply to themselves but not the rest of the population or voting themselves a
pay raise when they already make around 174k dollars a year with benefits. A good example of
creating laws that affect others and not themselves is that they originally exempted themselves
from paying into the Social Security Trust Fund since they had their own program.
The major problem with the government is their spending and with that comes taxes. A
good majority of the current presidential candidates for the 2020 election want to raise taxes in
order to pay for more social programs like universal healthcare and free college but the current
taxes are already high enough in my opinion and with the amount of employees and money
moving in and out of the government, there is bound to be some leaks and people ‘skimming
some off the top’ and I believe that before we ever even consider raising taxes even further, we
need to take an internal look into the government and tie up all the loose ends where money is
being wasted or straight up stolen. This includes firing the ‘public servants’ who are creating
these problems and putting laws in place to keep in check those cheating the American people of
their hard-earned money. I know that running the government exactly like a business isn’t the
best idea since that means it is ran for profit and that saying puts a bad taste in peoples mouths
but using some basic principles of running a business like removing waste and cutting cost
would save the American people a lot of money and in turn create more money to be spent
elsewhere on the things that the people of this country actually want.