Yeah, just looked at the actual report to find out what it's really about and basically it looks at correlations in equality and growth across many countries and policies. They've improved in the usual problem that there isn't a uniform measure to compare, so you have to basically extrapolate the available data in order to have some degree of transferability.
They seem to be doing a pretty good job, which isn't surprising; I don't know what you guys do in econ classes, but if it were up to me I'll have the students review a recent research paper. I mean it's important to learn the basic tools and models, but at the end of the day there's gotta be a reality check on what the students have actually learned, can they use those tools, can they even comprehend the matter...

Anyways, this talking point about 'small government' is just a bad model - it is obviously wrong because it implies that 'no government' is best and as we know from history there is no successful society without a government. I think the problem on that one is that the republican party went for the short term benefits of a lie because it's much easier to 'win'.
The real question is what is the appropriate role of government, but that's hard because it involves making rational arguments and thinking. Some years ago they decided to swing towards hard populism and anti-intellectualism and that's where it went wrong. It's easy to make slogans about founding fathers, amendments to the constitution, etc. and pays well at least in the short term.

The thing though is that at the end of the day being smart pays much better than being dumb. Sooner or later all those people who are voting for the politician with the easiest to repeat slogan will end up much poorer than they started and that ain't no fun.