I didn't see using the word consistently, so it seems like you're attempting an escape hatch with this strawman. I called it steadily upwards over the past 100 years until recently when it's becoming more erratic but still looks to be increasing. Which is the simple truth. I can't understand how so many people in this thread are struggling so badly with that.
And the trend is upwards, in the past 40 years. Run an analysis on it and it's trending upwards. It's not close to flat, it's increasing by a couple of %, i..e., the spending ratio is increasing around 5% in that time. Which is enormous. You can cry foul that's due to covid and the housing bubble spending, but that's reality, that's the money that is getting spent and added to the debt and is what people are concerned about. Even if there was no Clinton cuts outlier going the other way, you still couldn't discount those spikes as outliers and therefore not representative. Because they exactly represent the reality of the situation. This is not a concern about a measurement error or sample that's not represenative of a population, it is the actual money that is being spent. If there weren't these big outliers for wars and stimulus and everything else then sure, things would probably be better. But there are.
> Are consistent and steady not synonyms? You seem to have been arguing consistency, I'm not trying to make a strawman here.
> Are you saying it's steady but inconsistent?
You don't have to ask all these obtuse rhetorical questions, you can just read exactly what I'm "saying".
> Government expenditure as a proportion of GDP has been rising steadily for a century and is now approaching 40%. From IMF: https://www.imf.org/external/datamapper/exp@FPP/USA. The recent trend is shaky due to Covid, housing crash, maybe dot com crash, etc., but it looks like it's probably still trending upward.
Point out what is so wrong about that, and I will point out an insufferable nitpicker who is incapable of having a substantial discussion but they're upset about something so they feel they simply must score internet points with idiotic arguments about semantics (which they are wrong about anyway).
And the trend is upwards, in the past 40 years. Run an analysis on it and it's trending upwards. It's not close to flat, it's increasing by a couple of %, i..e., the spending ratio is increasing around 5% in that time. Which is enormous. You can cry foul that's due to covid and the housing bubble spending, but that's reality, that's the money that is getting spent and added to the debt and is what people are concerned about. Even if there was no Clinton cuts outlier going the other way, you still couldn't discount those spikes as outliers and therefore not representative. Because they exactly represent the reality of the situation. This is not a concern about a measurement error or sample that's not represenative of a population, it is the actual money that is being spent. If there weren't these big outliers for wars and stimulus and everything else then sure, things would probably be better. But there are.