E.J. Antoni

It's only a portion, although sometimes it feels like a lot more.

It's a portion of their salary that goes to the federal government in taxes.

But of that portion, there are a lot of other demands on the taxpayer dollar.

And so only a small sliver of the portion of federal dollars is actually going to federal employment.

What I'm getting at here, Vince, is that you're going to need about 80 or so private sector employees, on average at least, in order to finance a single worker in the federal bureaucracy.

And so again, as you said, every time you get rid of one of these federal bureaucrats,

There's a tremendous relief in terms of the strain that you have on the private sector to support all of those public sector workers.

It's a really big deal.

A hundred percent.

It absolutely is.

And, you know, Vince, this is part of the reason why when we look at trends in government spending or if we look at government purchases, as it's called within the GDP report, we've seen really, really good progress in Trump's first term because you are reducing the overall amount of expenditure by the federal government simply by reducing the size of that federal bureaucracy.

So, again, it's great, great progress.

In fact...

If you look at in this last GDP report that we just got, I know people were disappointed by the headline number, but I actually wasn't.

Part of the reason for that is if you look at how GDP is calculated, it includes government purchases, and that's going to include all of this spending at the federal level.

Well, what happened at the federal level, if you just look at non-defense spending specifically, it fell by the fastest pace since 1972.

Now, some of that was because of the shutdown.

So there were certain purchases that are going to get pushed forward into the first quarter of this year.

But it's also because this administration has made such great progress in terms of reducing federal expenditure.

No, I'm happy to report, Vince, that the Hunger Games have not yet started in the United States of America.