 Nobody is talking about the fact that U.S. in the United States, the so-called bastion of freedom, bastion of capitalism, the U.S. government in all its various forms is going to spend over $7 trillion next year. Now the entire U.S. economy is measured by, I guess, GDP, which is one GDP, one gross domestic product, which is one measure of kind of the amount of production that happens. It's not a very good measure, but we're going to put that aside. It's $18.57 trillion. $7 trillion is what? It's close to 40%. The government is spending. Government spending constitutes 40%. Or you could say government theft, or government taking of our stuff, and government wasting of our money is about 40% of the size of the economy. This is the so-called bastion of capitalism. This is the so-called free country. No, we're socialists like the rest of the world. That's socialism numbers. 40% of the economy being constituting government is not that far from Scandinavia, from the so-called heavenly places that Bernie Sanders described, his ideal society, 18, $7 trillion, 40%. You know how much money the federal government today spends about 20%, right? But what did the federal government spend 120%, 130%, in a heyday of American capitalism when almost nothing, as a percent of GDP, under 5%, something around between 3% to 4%. Today we spend 20%, 21% of our production by the federal government alone. In other words, you could shrink the federal government by 80%, 75%, 80%. And we'd have the federal government we had at the beginning of the 20th century when we were the fastest growing economy in the world, where we were absorbing millions and millions of immigrants, where we were establishing the greatest businesses and the greatest industries in the history of mankind, where we were becoming rich, we were creating a middle class, and yet the federal government spent almost nothing, almost nothing. If you do a graph of federal government spending over the last 150 years, it looks like because it's exaggerated towards the last 50 years, it looks like before that we didn't spend anything because you can barely see the line. You know, because of the scale. And nobody talks about that. Zero. Zero, nobody cares. But this is what's hurting us. This is what lowest standard of living, because every dollar the government takes out of the private economy is a dollar that is not being used for investment. It's a dollar that's not being used to increase productivity. It's a dollar that does not go to increasing wages. It's a dollar that is not increasing somebody's wealth. These are dollars that go into a black hole bureaucracy and get wasted, redistributed. They pay for a whole government organization that restricts trade, that restricts production, that restricts industry through regulations, controls and everything else. And the shocking part of it is nobody cares. Nobody's talking about it. It doesn't appear anywhere on the national landscape. Nobody, nobody, nobody cares. You know, and if you look at it, of this four trillion that the federal government spends, one trillion goes to, one trillion goes to welfare, various forms of welfare. 22% of all the money spent by government in the United States, 22% of the seven trillion goes to healthcare, healthcare. 22%. That is more than Social Security. It's more than education. It's much more than defense, almost double what we spend on defense. It's, you know, it's, I don't know, four times what we spend on welfare. 22% goes to healthcare. And yet, so many people claim that we have a free market in healthcare when the government is spending 22% of seven trillion dollars. That's over a trillion, almost one and a half trillion dollars. It is one and a half trillion dollars. At the state, federal, local level on healthcare. We don't have a free market in healthcare. We have a government controlled, government subsidized, government manipulated healthcare market. Why are we spending one and a half trillion dollars in healthcare? Now, most of that, a lot of that is Medicare and Medicaid. Do we really need Medicare and Medicaid? Private, private markets can't take care of any of that. All right, we're going to have to take a break here. If you want to, if you want in on this conversation, 888-900-3393, 888-900-3390. What do you think about government spending? And what is the role of government? What should government be spending on? And is any of this stuff part of what government should be spending on? 19% on pensions, 22% on healthcare, 15% on education, 6% on welfare, 12% on defense. What are those? Should the government actually be spending money on? And how do we decide? What's the principle by which we decide? Yes, that's an appropriate government's expenditure. No, that is inappropriate. 888-900-3393, you're listening to your Runbrook show on the Blaze radio network. We'll be right back. You're listening to the Runbrook show. Hi, everybody. All right, we're talking about government spending and the nuttiness, the insanity of the level of government spending, the amount of taxes that they take from us, the amount of borrowing that they do. You know, the government debt now is $20 trillion, if you thought 7 was a big enough, $20 million million, $20 million million. That's the amount of debt that somebody's going to have to pay back sometime, somewhere. How are we going to do that? Raise taxes on our kids and grandkids. Who cares about our kids and grandkids? And of course, $20 trillion is right now, but we're accumulating at least half a trillion a year. Under Obama it was more initially, less later on. Now it's up to half a trillion again. Trump is doing nothing to stop that, nothing zero. So it's going to grow beyond half a trillion. Debt is just going to accelerate over the next few years. So we're looking at $30 trillion at some point. Remember, US GDP is only $18.57 trillion. So our debt now is greater than our GDP. At some point, at some point, this is not sustainable. Don't ask me when, because I don't know. I don't predict these things. It's impossible to do. But at some point people say, well, wait a minute, maybe these pieces of paper that they keep promising, they'll pay back, they won't be able to. You know, right now, 6% of total government spending is on interest. 6%. But imagine what happens if interest rates go up. Right now, they're nothing. 2%, 2.5%, 1.5%. But imagine if they go to 5%, 6%. That 6% of government spending could go to 30%, which would blow up the deficit, which would blow up government spending. Nobody cares. Nobody talks about it. It's not about that. Let's cut taxes. Republicans are all about cutting taxes. Let's cut taxes. Unless you cut spending, what difference does it make? You're going to have to pay for it somehow. Oh, but we'll get economic growth. And economic growth will compensate for all of it. Really? Really? Does anybody really run the numbers? I mean, yeah, economic growth is great. And economic growth will do wonders. And it's great. But it doesn't. Economic growth does not reduce the amount of money the government is spending. Economic growth will not reduce the deficit. It might raise revenue a little bit. It might reduce the deficit a little bit. But won't reduce the total debt. Nobody is projecting a balanced budget because of economic growth given government spending. And we'll talk about the tax plan. Is the tax plan really going to generate economic growth long term? We'll talk about that. The way to generate economic growth long term. If you know anything about economics, which most economists don't. Most people who talk about economics know nothing about economics. But the way to generate economic growth is cut spending. Get the government out of the business of consuming, wasting, throwing away our hard-earned dollars so that we can invest and save and consume, God forbid, for ourselves.