The Real Big Government is in the States

...The Real Big Government is in the states The federal government has about the same number of civilian employees today as it had at the end of World War 11, but the federal budget now is more than nine times what it was then...

...As state em ment grew, so did state employee’s unions (the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees went from 77,000 members in 1947...

...The bulk of this increase came in the 1960s, when the federal government took on a great many new duties-mostly in the areas of health, education, and welfare-but left the states to implement them...

...Soon every state had an “Office of Federal Relations,” with a staff o experienced writers of grant applications...

...In the same period, the federal government’s annual contribution to the states’ revenues has gone from $3.6 billion to $42.2 billion...

...Once state governments woke up to the availability of this new money from Washington, they started to go for a local politicians federal money represented a way to provide their constituents with more services-and their supporters with more jobs-without raising taxes...

...There are a number of reasons why the cost has gone up so much without an increase in employeeshigher salaries, more work contracted out-but perhaps the most important is a tremendous, and largely unremarked upon, growth in the size and expense of state government...

...state employment has grown 182 per cent...

...Federal employment on a per-capita basis has grown only 1.9 per cent in the last 20 years...