The Center for Freedom and Prosperity Foundation features CATO’s Dan Mitchell in this video on how and why government spending diminishes economic performance:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mo192DJqvYc[/youtube]

Carpe Diem adds this chart from the Joint Economic Committee:

govgdp
Professor Perry explains:

The graph shows that as the size of government (share of GDP) increases for OECD countries, economic growth (real GDP) suffers. Economic growth is more than 4 times greater (6.6% vs. 1.6%) in the countries with the lowest government spending (<>60%).