Cost of government

[rCoder]

Last year's Cost of Government Day was August 19th, is it going to occur later this year?


From: http://fiscalaccountability.org/?content=cogdteas10

Every year, the Americans for Tax Reform Foundation and the Center for Fiscal Accountability calculate Cost of Government Day. This is the day on which the average American has earned enough gross income to pay off his or her share of the spending and regulatory burdens imposed by government at the federal, state, and local levels. In 2010, Cost of Government Day falls on August 19. Working people must toil 231 days out of the year just to meet all costs imposed by government - 8 days later than last year and a full 32 days longer than 2008.
In other words, in 2010 the cost of government consumes 63.41 percent of national income.

[budman33]

ATR is not about honest reporting. it's GOP platform, has been for years.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...062401080.html

[F-Sharp]

Originally Posted by rCoder

This is the day on which the average American has earned enough gross income to pay off his or her share of the spending and regulatory burdens imposed by government at the federal, state, and local levels.

What exactly are you trying to say? The "average American" makes $40,000 a year and only amounts to 52% of the population. The top 1% of the population who don't actually "work" hold 42% of the wealth in this country. Maybe it's time to consider getting them to pay their fair share of that burden.

[F-Sharp]

I like Norquist just a little bit more now. At least he has the decency and common sense to understand that the Bush tax cuts are nothing more than a corporate welfare deficit spending program. I wish I could say the same for our hastily elected members of Congress.

"Allowing the Bush tax cuts to expire to close the budget deficit would not constitute a tax increase or violate an anti-tax pledge signed by many Republicans", Grover Norquist told the Washington Post’s editorial page. “Not continuing a tax cut is not technically a tax increase”

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0711/59555.html

[greymouse]

Originally Posted by rCoder

In other words, in 2010 the cost of government consumes 63.41 percent of national income.

I have to say something about that assertion: It-Just-Isn't-True. It isn't even Close to being true. Even if you are mostly interested in sex and a good time you might have noticed that ever since a black man was elected President of the United States, the party that is based in former Confederate States but represents the interests of the top 1-2% of the richest people in the country went completely and totally crazy. And since then has made a long series of claims that directly contradict evidence from non-Republican source about what is happening in our country. These claims, made directly or through the Rupert Murdoch media like Fox News and the Wall Street Journal or through the vast numbers of tax-exempt "think tanks" like the Heritage Society or the American Enterprise Institute cannot possibly be true. That is because they are what most people call "Lies".


This is from Felix Salmon's Blog on Reuters at
http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmo...day-u-s-taxes/
It shows tax revenues at about 15% of total US Gross Domestic Product (GDP). Expenditures are higher, which is why there is a deficit. You may remember that the Worst President Ever went out of office during the opening stages of a what various people are calling the Great Recession or the Lesser Depression following the Boy Geniuses of Wall Street blowing up the World Economy with their insanely reckless bets on the housing bubble. They got bailed out by the Worse Ever, an action continued by the Mr. Obama who apparently wants to make a try for that title himself. The unemployment rate remains over 9% since unemployed people do not make large enough campaign contributions to national politicians to get onto the "take calls from" list.

Here is another chart, from another source, showing the same thing:


Here is the Wikipedia entry on "list of countries by tax revenues as a percentage of GDP"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/<br /> ...centage_of_GDP
That is a very long table since it includes every country in the world, alphabetically. Some percentages for 2009:
US (at all levels) 24% per the Organization for Economic Development and Cooperation. Heritage Society puts it at 26.9%
Australia 27.1% (2008)
Japan 28.1 (2008), Heritage puts it at 27.4%, possibly for 2009
Canada 31.1%
Germany 30.7%, Heritage puts it at 40.6%
UK 34.3
Sweden 46.1 %
Denmark 48.2%

The point is the stated 60 plus percent is enormously contradicted by facts. The facts have a well known liberal bias so conservatives feel justified in relying on deeply held, very emotional "beliefs". If you would prefer facts to someone's red-faced shouted beliefs keep this in mind: the way to tell that Republican or Republican apparacthik shouting head is lying is, if his or her lips are moving, they are lying. That is what they are paid to do.

[Asian Ann]

Great post, Greymouse. Knock 'em dead!

Ann

[rCoder]

OK, now we know who hasn't read the report.

Hint: cost of government does not equal federal tax rates.
2nd hint: federal taxes make up just part of the cost of government.
3rd hint: all the nitty, gritty details are in the reports (up to 2010 is available, we have to wait for cost of government day to read this years).

So back to my original question, reworded, do you think the cost of government increased, stayed the same, or decreased this year?

[F-Sharp]

Hint: Cost of government is not indicative of much of anything without context. The cost of government would include inflation and represent increases in population, neither of which rarely go down. As previously stated, the report is also severely flawed in that it's based on what the "average American" makes in terms of salaries, we can only assume the report is using average household income, which is $46,326 last I read. We all know that in the past decade the percentage of wealth held by the "average American" has decreased considerably, hence it's not really a measure of anything other than reflecting that very fact. As Grey listed, GDP is a more useful indicator as to what the "cost of government" really is, as it lays out the amount of money our government is collecting as a percentage of our production output as a nation. This number is at an all-time low, indicating corporations in this country are indeed making record profits and not contributing to our tax base proportionally to those profits. This actually supports your "Cost of government" day post in that the working class "average American" is being forced to contribute more to our revenue streams as corporations are contributing less. Hence thoroughly representing the economic mess we find ourselves in today.

[greymouse]

The role of rapidly rising inequality in our economic crisis is further highlighted in this piece:
http://robertreich.org/post/7940507194

In which former US Secretary of Labor, former Trustee of the Social Security Trust Fund and current Professor at UC Berkeley Robert Reich points out that the Alan Greenspan-headed Social Security Commission in 1983 made changes that were supposed to fix the Social Security pension system for good. However, it made an assumption that raising the ceiling on wages to which Social Security payroll taxes apply to track inflation would keep 90% of all wages covered, which was, in turn enough to cover projected cost as the baby boom generation aged out. However, now in 2011 the wage ceiling, currently $106,800, only covers 84% of total wage income. In a 14 thousand billion dollar economy six percentage points equals a very large amount of money.

“It went from 90 percent to 84 percent because a larger and larger portion of total income has gone to the top. In 1983, the richest 1 percent of Americans got 11.6 percent of total income. Today the top 1 percent takes in more than 20 percent.

If we want to go back to 90 percent, the ceiling on income subject to the Social Security tax would need to be raised to $180,000.

Presto. Social Security’s long-term (beyond 26 years from now) problem would be solved.”

This is one of the surprising interconnections between rising inequality, rising disfunction in our political system where economic inequality funds inequality of political power and a gathering crisis in our economy as the real (inflation adjusted) incomes of most people are flat or declining as they struggle to “deleverage” by reducing the excess debt that the bursting of the real estate boom left them with.

Another surprising connection is that large government deficits contribute to inequality since interest on the national debt is collected from all tax payers but paid out to only a very tiny percentage of the very richest tax payers who buy Treasury Bonds. Government deficits leaped upward when the Worst President Ever cut the top tax rates on his largest campaign contributors while starting two wars. So did inequality, partly from the reduced tax rates on the tiny number of ultra-rich and partly from the regressive (rich get richer) effect of the way the deficit is financed.
see, for example:
www.erf.org.eg/CMS/getFile.php?id=1851

[theaustinescorts]

Federal spending has been at about 20% of GDP since the 1950s, but has been higher, around 22% in the last three years ONLY BECAUSE OF THE CURRENT RECESSION.

Federal revenue has been less than spending over the years, but dropped precipitously in the last ten years due to the Bush tax cuts, which were inacted only as a temporary "supply-side" stimulus but which the Republicans insist must be kept in place indefinitely.

Social Security, Medicare, and the pension/medical portion of the Defense Budget will balloon and become problemmatic in the future, but for now we shouldn't be having any trouble paying for Federal spending AS LONG AS WE RETURN TO THE TAX STRUCTURE WE HAD IN THE BOOM TIMES. The Right needs to explain why it is that tax cuts always seem to bring high deficits and recession, as in 1981-1982, etc.
Their nostrum that the rich need every penny they can get just to keep the rest of us employed is of course total nonesense - and no rich person believes it - only non-rich Republicans who wish they were rich.

I do think taxes are too high, but not Federal taxes, and never have been.

IMHO the real tax gougers are the cities, counties, and school districts with their insane property taxes, huge jails for non-violent offenders, colossal "criminal justice" centers, classrooms with only 20 students in them when they could be holding 40, gold-plated library buildings only used by the homeless as places to crash, etc., etc...

[F-Sharp]

Originally Posted by theaustinescorts

Federal spending has been at about 20% of GDP since the 1950s, but has been higher, around 22% in the last three years ONLY BECAUSE OF THE CURRENT RECESSION.

Federal revenue has been less than spending over the years, but dropped precipitously in the last ten years due to the Bush tax cuts, which were inacted only as a temporary "supply-side" stimulus but which the Republicans insist must be kept in place indefinitely.

Social Security, Medicare, and the pension/medical portion of the Defense Budget will balloon and become problemmatic in the future, but for now we shouldn't be having any trouble paying for Federal spending AS LONG AS WE RETURN TO THE TAX STRUCTURE WE HAD IN THE BOOM TIMES. The Right needs to explain why it is that tax cuts always seem to bring high deficits and recession, as in 1981-1982, etc.
Their nostrum that the rich need every penny they can get just to keep the rest of us employed is of course total nonesense - and no rich person believes it - only non-rich Republicans who wish they were rich.

I do think taxes are too high, but not Federal taxes, and never have been.

IMHO the real tax gougers are the cities, counties, and school districts with their insane property taxes, huge jails for non-violent offenders, colossal "criminal justice" centers, classrooms with only 20 students in them when they could be holding 40, gold-plated library buildings only used by the homeless as places to crash, etc., etc...

[theaustinescorts]

The total share of the economy taken up by government has ballooned from 27% in the 1960s to 37% presently.*

It's this 37% that's got everyone rightly dismayed.

However the share of FEDERAL spending has stayed about the same, at around 20% from 1957 to 2008.

The other 10% that's increased since the 1960s is COUNTY, CITY, AND STATE spending.

A lot of this is accounted for my Federally-mandated state-run programs like Medicaid, BUT this is offset by the Federal aid dollars sent to the states for them to pay for everything from local police to libraries.

IT'S THE STATES, COUNTIES AND CITIES THAT ARE RESPONSIBLE FOR THE EXPLOSION IN GOVERNMENT SPENDING.

THE REPUBLICAN'S CASE THAT FEDERAL SPENDING HAS GROWN IS A LIE.

*When Kennedy became President in 1961 the Federal share was less than 20% until he increased defense spending, taking the share of the economy devoted to defense to a whopping 10% of GDP.....exactly what Eisenhower refused to do, and which was the basis of his warning farewell address about the "military/congressional industrial complex."