Fair enough, but we can only analyze what we can see. It'll almost certainly be biased data and we can try to think about how after doing the breakdown.

There's always a fair amount of art to doing empirical social science.

Undisciplined

econ

Government Spending By Ideology

antic

Ah! Agreed.

But I'm thinking like this: if I were a sneaky statist that needs to spend money, would I make that part of a visible budget? Or would I just `print baby print` off the books? If accounts like [Legacy of Ashes](https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/970488) have a grain of truth, probably the latter?

Therefore we could as ourselves questions like: if China's military expense according to public data is #1 by a long shot, then what are they hiding?