Big Gov on Big Tax Day

Philip Bump:

With Tax Day only two weeks away (haha, happy Monday morning!), it seems like an appropriate time to entertain a common non-Tax-Day-specific gripe: government is expensive and big and pays for things I don’t want. Very good; complaining about taxes and the size of government is timeless, if recently very much in vogue.

But how big is government, you might wonder? In a post at the liberal blog Daily Kos over the weekend, David Nir cited a 2012 book by Jennifer Lawless, “Becoming A Candidate,” to answer the question. We’re not going to spoil it for you. Instead, we’ll walk through it….

That’s over 500,000 federal, state, and local elected officials, meaning that 0.2 percent of the country holds elected office of some kind. Nir at Daily Kos points out that this doesn’t include other elected positions, like party leadership roles. But you get the point.

Of course, when people complain about the size of government, they’re not really complaining about elected officials — they’re complaining about the federal workforce, at large. If we wanted to show that using our little blue boxes, we would need 10,500 of them, according to the Office of Personnel Management. So instead we’ll use these light red boxes, each of which represents all of the people in the diagrams above.