> Are you saying it's steady but inconsistent?
You don't have to ask all these obtuse rhetorical questions, you can just read exactly what I'm "saying".
> Government expenditure as a proportion of GDP has been rising steadily for a century and is now approaching 40%. From IMF: https://www.imf.org/external/datamapper/exp@FPP/USA. The recent trend is shaky due to Covid, housing crash, maybe dot com crash, etc., but it looks like it's probably still trending upward.
Point out what is so wrong about that, and I will point out an insufferable nitpicker who is incapable of having a substantial discussion but they're upset about something so they feel they simply must score internet points with idiotic arguments about semantics (which they are wrong about anyway).
Are consistent and steady not synonyms? You seem to have been arguing consistency, I'm not trying to make a strawman here.
Are you saying it's steady but inconsistent?
> Run an analysis on it and it's trending upwards.
Pretending everything can be coerced into a straight line is statistics abuse 101.
It also forces any data set ever to be "steady".
2022 is lower than 1982. That's also overly simplified, but it helps show that trying to cram things into a single number is not correct here.
> you still couldn't discount those spikes as outliers and therefore not representative
I wasn't discounting any spikes other than covid. The 2008 spike spent most of its time below the early 90s.