These 2 charts will show you just how big the government is

These 2 charts will show you just how big the government is
(Image credit: Washington Post)

Congress and the president may provide the visible faces of Washington, but a set of charts from The Washington Post shows just how tiny a proportion of our government they actually represent. Most of the data comes from a 2012 book called Becoming a Candidate, which calculates that there are more than 500,000 elected officials at all levels of government nationwide:

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Bonnie Kristian

Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.