Ultimately, what matters is where Congress and the president end up, not where they start. But defining the starting point and crafting the baseline … - David Meyer Wessel

In the high-volume debate over taxes, facts about basic issues—who pays? how much? who doesn’t?—often get lost, twisted, or distorted. Perhaps the most salient and overlooked fact is this one: for most Americans, federal taxes have not risen over the past couple of decades.

The federal government was smaller—4.3 percent of GDP in 1931—and narrower. About 70 percent of the spending went for three things: Defense, veterans’ benefits, and interest payments on the national debt. “The federal budget was not then, as it later became, a machine constantly generating new programs and expansions of old ones,” Herbert Stein wrote.

Everyone thinks there's a lot, but there's nothing that a majority wants to cut. The average person doesn't want less government. They just want the government to cost less.