Fox Business's Liz MacDonald made the laughable claim that “the government's spending is now more than the size of the U.S. economy.”

MacDonald appeared on Fox & Friends to interpret newly released economic data. She followed that by claiming that government spending is greater than the U.S. economy.

However, federal government spending is not greater than the size of the U.S. economy. In fact, in 2011, government spending was only about a quarter the size of the U.S. economy.

In 2011 the US government spent $3.6 trillion. The Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) estimated that in 2011 the U.S. Gross Domestic Product (GDP), or “the market value of the nation's output of goods and services,” grew to $15.1 trillion dollars.