U.S. Government shuts down.

[Jester]

Inflation, yes. Demographics, not much. Most of the fed should be scalable.

So, your idea is that as population goes up by 1%, the federal government has to increase its labour force by ... 0%? One can dare to dream, I guess.

For example, EPA, or National Parks... The environment needing protection is a constant, and we're not adding hectares of national park land.

Except that the majority of work on park land (and in environmental protection) is dealing with humans and their behaviour, not dealing with the land itself.

Scale to GDP? Whatever for? It's more likely contrary to GDP.

In almost every country in the world, throughout history, gov't share of GDP has gone up faster than GDP itself. You can argue until you're blue in the face about why this is the case, or whether this is somehow ideal, but it is an empirical fact.

To really do this, we'd need to change the status quo whereby taxes were assessed against the wealthy (high net worth, not just high wage earners), and lowered for those with below average net worth.

Wealth taxes? Bold. But very hard to do, and in the end, not very good at raising revenues. There just isn't that much wealth, compared with income, and once you've taxed it once, that part is not coming back.

-Jester