In business, companies typically look at profits and losses in terms of percentage of revenue as opposed to absolute dollars. Joe's Plumbing may only make a $2000 profit in a given month, but if Joe's revenues are $4000, that's a 50% profit margin, which most companies could never dream of having. At the same time IBM could have a bad year and only profit $10000, a miniscule percentage when compared to their revenues. Wouldn't you rather be Joe than the CEO of IBM?

Why isn't the economy judged in the same manner. People from all parts of the political spectrum, including myself, castigate Bush for being a big spender, but when you look at spending as a percentage of our GDP, Bush is about equal to Clinton and far better than Reagan. Considering our economy is a lot bigger than when Reagan was in office, doesn't it make sense that we also spend a lot more money? Sure, the debt is getting up to numbers that sound more like something a kid would make up (900 gazillion, for instance), but our GDP is far larger than that. Bush is holding steady at 16-17% GDP, whereas Reagan was more like 19%, and I imagine that FDR was off the charts by this measure. I also often hear things like "Our children will owe XXXX dollars per person to pay off the national debt," but the population is bigger than it used to be, so what was the per person back in the 80's? Of course that's not a fair question. Our economy has become very efficient, with technology raising our productivity per citizen to levels never before dreamed of, so the GDP/population ratio would be very different than it was in the 80's, making the debt/people metric not very accurate.

I often hear people say that they wish the government was run more like a business, with more efficiency, so it's only fair that we measure the government like a business as well, isn't it?