Much better Tom. A legitimate Comparison for a change. However there are some obvious red flags in this "analysis".

"As the finance minister of Sweden, Borg is the chief financial officer of a country long known as a walking billboard for a social welfare state. In Borg's view, the 1970s and 1980s were lost decades for Sweden. Left-leaning politicians pushed government spending, excluding investment outlays, from 22% of gross domestic product in 1970 to 30% in 1980. Real growth fell from an average of 4.4% annually in the 1960s to 2.4% in the 1970s and remained low for the next two decades."

There's a missing decade. According to later paragraph the portion of the GDP is all the way up to 57%. If the cause and effect link they try to make above is correct Sweden should be in even worse shape now. Why aren't recent data included?

Secondly let's take our own data and compare government expendetures as a percent of GDP with annual growth rates. Perhaps this data is not included because several studies have shown that economic growth rates average higher under Democratic administrations.

The whole story is needed not just the portions that fit the government spending is bad mantra. The huge fraction of our GDP mentioned is also misleading due to the huge surge caused by the bailout packages. We've tried no bail-outs before during a major crisis. The result was the great depression.

On the other hand, aside from incomplete and possibly cherry picked data this is exactly the kind of comparison I was talking about earlier. Let's take all the developed countries and chart their median income, growth, and unemployment rates versus government as % of GDP over the last 50 years. According to Tom and SDAI there should be an obvious inverse correlation. I'll bet there's a lot of scatter and a fair amount of plateauing. One thing I'm sure all three of us will agree on is lavish unemployment benefits are a decentive to work and a drag on growth.

Regards,
Mark