Who Wants Smaller Government?

One sentence of James Freeman’s column in the Wall Street Journal took me aback:

As a reminder, Republican voters are the ones who prefer government to be smaller.

Do they? If Republican voters genuinely prefer smaller government, Congressional Republicans have done a poor job of translating that preference into policy. You certainly can’t tell it from Congress’s actions. Just as one indication here’s the track record of the Reagan Administration:

Notice that spending did not go down from year to year once. In fairness during Reagan’s term spending did decline as a percentage of GDP but that’s not the same thing as “smaller government”. Here’s a comparable chart for President Trump’s first term:

Whatever else “smaller government” may mean, it is difficult to describe a government whose spending rises every year as becoming smaller. So, either what Congressional Republicans are doing is different from what Republican voters want, or the statement is just untrue.

Despite their intraparty differences of opinion there is one thing on which Congressional Republicans tend to agree: taxes should be lower. Indeed, that’s a major source of our problems. Republicans want to pay less and Democrats want to spend more.

What I think is absolutely true is that Republicans and Democrats tend to have different spending priorities.