[PilotMan]

I thought that this was very interesting considering some of the numbers being bandied about having to do with the size of the government.

PolitiFact | Romney says government has grown from 27 percent to 37 percent of U.S. economy

Here are some highlights:

Fiscal year 1961: 27.4 percent
Fiscal year 1962: 27.8 percent
Fiscal year 1963: 27.7 percent

Fiscal year 2009: 36.5 percent
Fiscal year 2010: 35.0 percent

But the big increases came from two categories: Social Security and Medicare, which more than tripled as a share of GDP, and other federal payments to individuals, which fell slightly short of tripling.

Medicare didn’t exist until 1965, so a big share of the increase Romney pointed to stems from this single program.

While these are undoubtedly government expenditures, one could argue that they are actually pass-throughs of payments from the American public to itself. And it’s worth noting that Social Security and Medicare -- the drivers of government growth -- are among the most popular of all government programs.

The Bureau of Economic Analysis publishes statistics that break down the components of national GDP. If you take the category "government consumption expenditures and gross investment" for all levels of government -- a figure that doesn’t include transfer payments -- and divide it by GDP, government accounted for 22.0 percent of GDP in 1963 and 20.7 percent of GDP in 2010.