Spending Growth Index, 1963–2025: What the Two Measures Show
In 2017, Adam Millsap and Patrick Ishmael published “State and local government spending growth and private sector GSP growth,” which built a simple index for each state: private-sector growth minus government growth, averaged over three years. This Special Project rebuilds that index from the original study window through the latest available data — 1963 to 2025 — on both of the paper's measures.
The full project — report, interactive standings explorer, Excel workbook, state-year panel data, and analysis code — lives at Special Projects: Spending Growth Index.
What the rebuild shows: the paper's core warning holds (in 225 state-level slumps since 1967, states where government had outpaced the private sector retrenched hardest); the long-run rise in government's share of output that framed the 2017 paper has reversed; and state rankings mean-revert — Florida rose from 47th to 1st on the ten-year standings while North Dakota fell from 1st to 50th.
This report was produced by an AI model (Claude automated analysis, 5 October 2026) at Patrick Ishmael's direction. It has not been peer reviewed and has not been checked against the academic literature.
It extends the research idea of Millsap & Ishmael (2017), “State and local government spending growth and private sector GSP growth” — Adam Millsap is the coauthor of that original paper and the originator of the research idea with Patrick.