Willingness to Pay for Government Services
In 1951, Americans were willing to pay 16% federal taxes in order to obtain federal government services. The federal government collected taxes worth 16.1% of GDP, and those taxes covered 95% of federal spending (16.8% of GDP).
Americans were willing to put up with a federal government which was 16% of GDP. Currently, federal tax receipts are not much higher than 10% of GDP. A naive conclusion from this is that Americans today want less government than Americans in 1951.
While it is true that Americans today feel the pain of Big Government more than Americans of 1951 -- especially in the era of big government cronies attempting a pseudo-Communist 'Great Reset' -- it's more likely that the decline in % GDP is artifactual, resulting from politicians wrecking the economy and using Keynesian methods to artificially inflate values.
An economy which is merely an artificial asset bubble waiting to burst may look rich on paper, even if regular persons are so relatively poor that they cannot even stand for having more federal taxation than about 10% of the artificially-inflated GDP.
The troubling aspect is that federal spending is over twice the sum of all revenue from all federal taxation schemes, so that the government is spending more than twice the money than what the people are willing to pay for.
If the government is spending more than twice what the average American is willing to pay, then you have oligarchy -- a government spending money on what "it" wants, rather than spending money on the general welfare (what the public wants).
To reverse this trend and save America as a nation, 34 states can force an amendments convention through wherein the states focus on shrinking federal government. Because of Article V in the US Constitution, the people and the states have the constitutional authority to force the federal government to downsize.
It's never been more needed than now. There may be only a few years left before peace within our borders becomes an impossibility.