Nemo doesn’t appear to read German very carefully:
Heck, Malkin’s attitude is like that of someone who has argued that women’s suffrage leads to higher government expenditures, but won’t look at, or even address, a study that shows that women’s suffrage in Switzerland produced a decline in government expenditure, even after it is linked or pointed out to them multiple times.
Nice try. The problem is that you missed a very significant change in Switzerland which strongly supports my theory, namely, the transition from decentralized cantonal spending to centralized federal spending. So, women began to vote and there’s a corresponding increase in central power, imagine that. Cantonal spending did go down, but only because federal spending increased even faster. That paper only addressed cantonal spending and I’m wondering if you even read it since all of the charts were missing from both PDFs I downloaded.
Meanwhile, the CIA World Factbook reports:
2001
251.9 billion: GDP
140.4 billion: government expenditures (55.7% of GDP)
1989
171.2 billion: GDP
016.1 billion: government expenditures (9.4% of GDP)
That does seem like an insane increase, however, which makes me somewhat dubious as to how trustworthy those numbers really are. I’d be interested in seeing the government expenditures for 1970, but I could only find the GDP figure of 21.9 billion. I’ll also see if I can dig up the combined cantonal spending compared to federal for the corresponding years, which should settle the matter nicely.