The latest video from Dan Mitchell from the Center for Freedom and Prosperity talks about government spending as a share of GDP during the Reagan and Clinton years. Watch and learn!

It’s striking to see the difference in the sheer level of numbers we’re talking about now under President Obama — the levels we’re looking at for the 1980s and 1990s are simply unthinkable in 2010. Spending cuts to get back to that level of GDP would take far more than a “meat cleaver” approach, as Congressman Peter Welch has chided — it’d take a combination of a chainsaw to government pork, a massive modernization of entitlement policies, and a rediscovery of pro-prosperity tax reform which provides for economic growth and higher employment.