bthny: shorterexcerpts: azspot: We Now Have Our Smallest Government in 45 Years And yet this fall, the current president will be called a socialist a minimum of 5,000 times. Welcome to post-truth politics people. What about this graph, how do we feel about this one i do not love it! here’s why. as bthny pointed out, the source of “author’s calculations” the two dotted lines - one time period is a subset of the other, and they’re averages. why? what is this supposed to tell us? they’re not keyed to presidential terms or other political periods. i don’t get it. would really be better to break out federal government employees and state/local government employees, if this is supposed to be making a point about obama and his policies. [edit: and, as kelsium and her rotating user name point out, it would be helpful to know whether and how military personnel are being counted.] and foremost, pet peeve - the axis shows variations in ratios only between 9% and 10% - so these things that look like huge shifts in ratios are really relatively small. it should start at zero, and then you’d see that the ratio has been pretty much stable throughout this whole time period, with relatively small fluctuations up and down.

bthny:

shorterexcerpts:

azspot:

We Now Have Our Smallest Government in 45 Years

And yet this fall, the current president will be called a socialist a minimum of 5,000 times.

Welcome to post-truth politics people.

What about this graph, how do we feel about this one

i do not love it! here’s why.

  1. as bthny pointed out, the source of “author’s calculations”
  2. the two dotted lines - one time period is a subset of the other, and they’re averages. why? what is this supposed to tell us? they’re not keyed to presidential terms or other political periods. i don’t get it.
  3. would really be better to break out federal government employees and state/local government employees, if this is supposed to be making a point about obama and his policies. [edit: and, as kelsium and her rotating user name point out, it would be helpful to know whether and how military personnel are being counted.]
  4. and foremost, pet peeve - the axis shows variations in ratios only between 9% and 10% - so these things that look like huge shifts in ratios are really relatively small. it should start at zero, and then you’d see that the ratio has been pretty much stable throughout this whole time period, with relatively small fluctuations up and down.