Over at Downsizing the Federal Government, we focused on the following issues this past week:

• Over the last decade, annual average military wages rose 6.6 percent, federal civilian wages rose 5.0 percent, and private sector wages rose 3.0 percent.
• A rule-of-thumb to remember is that total federal spending is 3 to 4 percentage points of GDP larger than usually reported by officials.
• Imagining that more federal infrastructure spending will be a panacea for the economy is a liberal fairy tale, detached from the actual experience of most federal agencies over the last century.
• We’ve nearly tripled the cost of sending a child all the way through the K-12 system, while performance near the end of high school has been stagnant (reading and math) or even declining (science).
• Small Business Administration to close? Unfortunately, no.

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