My Country ‘Tis Of This
Economic statistics can be very confusing, but they can also tell us a lot about the country we live in if they are presented in digestible chunks. Here is our America according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics:
312 million people live here
154 million of us want to work
141 million of us do work
109 million of us work in the private sector
18 million of produce goods
2 million of us produce food
Most people are stunned to learn that only 20 million Americans (6.4%) make, mine, build, or grow things. And even that is a bit inflated, as many of the jobs in those companies that make things are administrative positions which exist only to provide information to government agencies and assure compliance with regulations. I can assure you it has been years since I did anything but type, read, and talk, as our welders, assemblers, and machinists will attest.
While the unemployment rate can be, and is, manipulated by adjustments and assumptions, the better ratio that really matters in assessing the health of our economy is private sector (wealth producing) employment as a percentage of total population. As we begin 2012, only 34.9% of Americans create the wealth that sustains us all. And not just us, but a goodly part of the rest of the world, too.
That is an already dangerously low number that is dropping as baby-boomers retire in record numbers while jobs move offshore and new business creation stagnates for reasons that both halves of our politicians will blame on the other half.
Those of us above a certain age must constantly remind ourselves that the country we live in today is not the one we grew up in. The mines are closed, the plants are idle, the farms are mechanized, data is not punch cards, the Constitution is ignored, the Savings & Loans have given way to Payday Loans, most moms work, and the wars don’t seem to end.
In John F. Kennedy’s Camelot of 1962, government spending on dependency programs – i.e. the safety net – was 28% of the federal budget; last year, it was 70.5%, according to Congressional Budget Office. And he did not have two wars pushing up on the denominator back then.
An entire lifetime of government social programs intended to lift up Americans has more than doubled the rate of entrapment. And not only has the number of people who receive benefits from government grown dramatically in recent decades, but the number of people who pay for them has dropped precipitously:
312 million people live in the United States
151 million of us pay no federal income tax
67 million of us are in federal dependency programs
29 million of us work for the government
1.2 million serve in the armed forces
67 million plus 31 million makes 98 million of us (less overlap) who depend on taxpayers for some or all of their income. At 151 million (49.5% of households), the number of us who don’t pay taxes is essentially equal to those who do. A pretty good answer if your question is why we don’t get along as well as we used to. At the halftime of my life-to-date (1983), only 14.5% of us paid nothing.
In the 1960’s, two taxpayers could have a civil disagreement about whether or not the safety net should be increased from 28.5% of federal spending. We are the old coots who keep wondering what happened to the civility.
Today, a non-taxpayer calls a taxpayer heartless for balking at adding trillions more to the 70.5% that only the latter pays. The latter calling the former “deadbeat” (guilty as charged) does not help the situation any either. And we wonder why the family reunion has become a dreaded event.
How much is enough? In constant dollars (adjusted for inflation), government spending per household has risen 162% since 1964. Federal spending per household is now $29,401 according to Heritage Foundation, and is projected to rise to over $35,000 in less than 10 years. With a median income of $49,000, that level of federal spending is simply unsustainable. It is not a political problem; it is math.
We can’t tax that much, and we can’t borrow that much; the only option left is to inflate the currency and then to hyper-inflate it when inflating it doesn’t work. Our median income will still be $49,000 but the cost of everything will double and triple and our savings will be eaten up. Inflating money is the same as stealing it and that’s the plan.
42 cents of every dollar spent by the federal government is now borrowed. Congressman Paul Ryan’s “extreme right-wing” budget plan does not bring the budget into balance for another 40 years – 40 years! Newt Gingrich called that reckless social engineering; opportunist Debbie Wasserman-Shultz assured old people that they would die if it passed.
The International Monetary Fund lists the United States as the second-worst country in terms of fiscal trajectory – i.e. the amount of current debt plus the rate at which future debt will be accumulated under current fiscal policies. The world has no blueprint for the implosion of an economy too-big-to-fail. When the Roman Empire cratered it ushered in a millennium known as the Dark Ages. A millennium is incomprehensible to a society who can’t make it a half-hour without checking Facebook. This is not going to be pretty. It is not too late to fix it, but you can see too-late from here.
I hope that you found this informative. Now go back to following the campaigns of those who think they deserve to be your President and see if any of them appear to know as much as you now do. And if you find one, then support him like our future depends on it…because it does.
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