High levels of social spending is indeed a hallmark of social democracy.
The creation of major new social welfare programs, like Medicare, Medicaid, SNAP, and TANF, since 1960, corresponds with a massive increase in the share of economic output expropriated by the state for the purpose of expending it on social programs.
Claiming Western states did not experience a transition to a more social democratic economic model, amidst the creation of major social welfare programs, and a massive increase in social welfare spending, is insane gaslighting.
>>a single figure
What an incredibly disingenuous way to characterize the share of GDP spent on government social welfare programs.
This is an all-encompassing figure that encapsulates every major type of social democratic spending.
Claiming that me using this extremely revealing macro-economic statistic, as evidence of the rise of social democracy, as:
"peddling this obvious bullshit based on a single figure stretched all the way to the moon"
is a desperate attempt to gaslight the public to hide reality from it.
>>non-free-market think-tank
Any think tank worth its salt is pro-free-market. Non-free-market think tanks are ideologically-motivated crank organizations, and usually on the payroll of the direct beneficiaries of social democracy - public sector unions.
Whether social democracy ideologues/apologists will admit that Western states experienced a massive transition to a more social democratic economic model over the last 60 years, doesn't change what the evidence, and any remotely sane analysis of it, shows.