So.... to get this thread back on topic, if
Uncle Sam's income is surging by 39%, what about the rest of the country?
Is our national income growing commensurately? I mean, I wouldn't object so much to Uncle Sam getting the same (proportionate) slice of the pie, as long as everyone else is getting theirs too.
The relevant period we are looking at is the first 7 months of the current fiscal year. That is, from October 1, 2021 to April 30, 2022.
We can get a rough idea of the answer if we look at
how much US nominal GDP grew in the first 6 months of FY 2022, since that data is available. For those of you (like WTF) who either never studied economics or flunked out miserably, nominal GDP means current-dollar or non-inflation-adjusted Gross Domestic Product. We need to look at those numbers (rather than real or inflation-adjusted GDP) because taxes are reported in nominal terms, and we want to make an apples-to-apples comparison.
A wee bit of research on my part reveals that US nominal GDP totaled $12.095 trillion in the first two quarters of this fiscal year, up from $10.88 trillion in the corresponding period of FY 2021. That's
an increase of 11.2%. Here's a link to the St. Louis Federal Reserve data series for anyone who would care to check my calculations. Please note their figures are quarterly annualized.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/GDP
So what's my point? Well, during a period when our national income in nominal terms expanded at an 11.2% rate, the federal government saw its own income explode by 39%. That's roughly 3-1/2 times as fast as the overall economy!!
Bottom line - The
DC swamp is sucking in a hugely disproportionate share of the fruits of our labor. For every marginal dollar of income we the people are generating, the feds are expanding their slice of the pie over three times faster! This is just another reason why so many Americans feel they are on a treadmill going backwards, not forward. The only sure way to get rich is to move to the DC swamp!