Go Back 100 Years?

It was quite interesting to see how Illinois has more government jobs than manufacturing jobs. Maybe that is because Illinois is the state with the most total local governments with 54 local governments per 100,000 residents. Looking into it I found that some people had more than a dozen governments where they resided. Having this much government is very extreme. However, manufacturing has become a lot more automated than in the past, and it is plausible to suggest that even many services can be automated such as accounting. For the other article, the short periods that appeared to be selectively chosen to show average annual spending growth with the change of deficit or government as fraction of GDP, which means that data could have been rigged. Still, what the article showed appeared to be common sense because, obviously, debt decreased with lower annual spending growth. I do agree that the debt problem should be figured out, and that the government has grown very large. I do not necessarily agree that the government should be the same size it was a hundred years ago because society has changed very significantly since then. I do not think that we could spend the same that was spent when there were fewer roads, bridges, colleges, and other social spending programs that we take for granted.