Chart of the Day
Posted at 10:15 a.m. on Nov. 26, 2012
– Paul Krugman charts the level of government welfare spending without Medicare and Medicaid as a percentage of GDP, noting that claims that “we have become a nation of takers… is all about health care.”
“Nicholas Eberstadt of the American Enterprise Institute is one of the unsung heroes of the recent election. His work claiming that we have become a nation of takers, reliant on the government to take care of us, helped define the tone and language with which Republicans talk to each other… as I read it, this number shoots up in recessions and their aftermath, then declines again, hitting a low during the later Clinton years; but there’s really no trend since the early 70s.”
