Hello and welcome to the intelligence from The Economist.

I'm your host, Jason Palmer.

Every weekday, we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world.

Mackenzie Scott is most certainly not acting like your usual billionaire philanthropist.

She's just shoveling money out the door, faster and with fewer strings attached than anyone has before.

We ask what that's meant for the recipients of all that cash.

And in Morocco, officials really do try to enforce a ban on premarital sex,

in part by insisting hotels only rent rooms to married couples.

Like many Moroccans, hard-up hotel owners desperately want the rule changed.

Others simply work around it.

But first... We know big government does not have all the answers.

We know there's not a program for every problem.

In his 1996 state of the union address, American President Bill Clinton pitched his administration's

fiscal restraint.

We know and we have worked to give the American people a smaller, less bureaucratic government

in Washington.

And we have to give the American people one that lives within its means.

The message proved popular, and Mr. Clinton handily won re-election later that year.

The era of big government is over.

But it wasn't over. In every year from 1996 to 2019, government spending grew steadily relative to GDP.

Last year, it jumped.

And this week, President Joe Biden signed into law a trillion-dollar infrastructure bill.

...