MICHAEL BARONE: “What's the proper size of government? Here's an article from American Enterprise Institute's The American website citing a study by Canadian economist Livio De Matteo of the free-market Fraser Institute. The bottom line: The optimal government size of maximizing economic growth is 26 percent of gross domestic product. Below that, you miss out on useful services; above that, you start to plunder the private sector economy. The bad news: The current share in the United States, counting state and local as well as federal spending, is 40 percent. The good news: You can ratchet back spending quite sharply, as Canada did in the mid-1990s.”