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If you have a private firm and you spend a ton of money to pay employees, but what you produce is a flop, there will be no value to GDP. But government spending all gets counted as contributing to economic growth. That's why in the early days of creating these measurements, some people didn't want to count government spending.

If you're looking for a metric that we have to measure, that we have to control, it's government in relation to the size of our economy.

Government on its own is always inefficient.

Productivity - the amount of output delivered per hour of work in the economy - is often viewed as the engine of progress in modern capitalist economies. Output is everything. Time is money. The quest for increased productivity occupies reams of academic literature and haunts the waking hours of C.E.O.s and finance ministers.

There's huge opportunities to continue to improve efficiency in the way the government operates and improve the way government provides services to its citizens.

The private sector is motivated by profit and efficiency and the US government often is not.

There can be economy only where there is efficiency.

The only way to make government more efficient is to make it smaller and to make it more local.

Government has a legitimate function, but the private sector has one too, and it is superior. In other words, people are better than institutions.

When consumers do not take full advantage of efficiency gains, it is because they are weighing other factors that influence their decision making. When the federal government arbitrarily places one of those factors over others, it makes consumers worse off.