According to a new Gallup poll, 72 percent of Americans say that big government is a greater threat to the U.S. in the future than big business or big labor, a record high in the half century that Gallup has been asking the question. The previous high for big government was 65 percent in 1999 and 2000:
And this isn’t just Fox News-watching Republicans who think that Obama is a Communist Muslim born in Kenya who is plotting to seize all privately-owned guns and declare martial law.
Wages and salaries as a proportion of GDP in blue, contrasted with government expenditure as a proportion of GDP in red:
Yes; correlation does not prove causation. Yes; there are lots and lots and lots of other factors involved — the end of Bretton Woods, globalisation, deindustrialisation, the birth of the computer and the internet, financialisation, the United States’ growth into a global imperial power and more recently the beginnings of a decline.
But whatever the exact causality this does not make happy reading for those who lean toward the idea that more government involvement in the economy translates to a bigger share of the pie for the working class.
Quite the opposite — while wages have just hit an all-time low, corporate profits have just hit an all-time high:
Is it true that Americans are paying too little tax?
The short answer is no.
Current levels of overall taxation are close to the historical norm. So what’s changed?
Well, far less of the money is coming from corporations, and far more from payroll taxes. That means that a lot of the burden has been switched from corporations to their workers. That puts the power to invest into increasingly fewer hands. The middle classes, who pay the overwhelming majority of payroll taxes are left with less to invest. That means, broadly, that more money gets invested in big business and large corporations and less in small enterprise, who are the greatest job creators in America:
From the Economist:
Research funded by the Kauffman Foundation shows that between 1980 and 2005 all net new private-sector jobs in America were created by companies less than five years old. “Big firms destroy jobs to become more productive. Small firms need people to find opportunities to scale. That is why they create jobs,” says Carl Schramm, the foundation’s president.
So while I agree that the top 1% should be taxed more, and the bottom 99% less, what the above graph reveals is that America right now has is a spending problem, and not a tax problem.
Here’s spending as a percentage of GDP:
It is spending that is climbing well-above its historical norm. The difference really adds up:
The next American President and Congress will face a stark choice as they seek a balanced budget — do they raise taxes or cut spending?
Well, it’s an open question. Other nations spend far more than America, but they also tax more. 52% of French GDP, 37% of Japanese GDP, 47% of British GDP, 18% of Thai GDP, 32% of Swiss GDP, 78% of Cuban GDP, 27% of Indian GDP and 17% of Singaporean GDP is government spending.
Most interesting by far is “communist” China. Only 20% of Chinese GDP is government spending.
That’s quite a wide range. But to spend more you have to tax more, and that will be unpalatable to many Americans.
America is really at a crossroads. Growth would be a panacea. But with the economy in a Japan-style depression, generating sustained growth will be difficult.
With predicaments like this, it’s clear something is going badly wrong.
But what’s worse than wrong?
As Einstein put it:
The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.
Many commentators, including much of the establishment, are advocating the same old solution: take more productive capital out of the economy in the form of taxes for the government to spend. As I pointed out yesterday, total government spending and unemployment are strongly correlated:
This is empirical evidence that increasing government spending does not necessarily decrease unemployment. But there’s something worse going on here.
While Obama might talk a good game on jobs, his record speaks not of job creation, but of massive tax breaks for corporations.
From the Daily Mail:
General Electric paid no tax at all in America last year and even managed to get a $3.2billion ‘rebate’ from the government.
The utilities giant allocated just 7.4 per cent of its $5.1billion U.S. profits in tax – around a third of what others companies its size are paying.
But through a complex series of measures GE, which is America’s largest company, will not even have to hand that over.
So where are all the jobs that these tax breaks were supposed to create?
Corporate profits have recovered from 2008 under Obama:
So in spite of all his pro-jobs rhetoric, all of that stimulus and all of that quantitative easing just hasn’t sparked a recovery for jobs.
Why?
As I wrote a few weeks ago:
The most annoying thing about the establishment’s ongoing obsession with maintaining the status quo, and supporting and bailing out older and larger companies?
Dinosaurs don’t create jobs.
According to the Economist, research funded by the Kauffman Foundation shows that between 1980 and 2005 all net new private-sector jobs in America were created by companies less than five years old. “Big firms destroy jobs to become more productive. Small firms need people to find opportunities to scale. That is why they create jobs,” says Carl Schramm, the foundation’s president.
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