If you want to calmly examine the best health care systems in the world, you’ll want to look at Singapore and France, which have two of the best health care systems around. Both systems contain costs by maintaining a private supply system and having consumers of health care be responsible for their own supplemental insurance with the government covering catastrophic costs.
- Economists distinguish government spending from transfer payments. This isn’t a semantic distinction, but steers away from confused thinking, as your use of the phrase “government that consumes” indicates.
As I mentioned upthread, U.S. government spending is now less than 20% of GDP, below what it was in any of the Reagan years, and well below your 25-30% target. (This 20% is the sum of federal, state and local spending.)
- Warren Buffett already pays a lower tax percentage than his secretary. Apparently you think U.S. taxation is still not regressive enough.
I have to admit I do not share your trust of the good will of businesses. I take Adam Smith at his word - businesses act in their own self-interest. Part of that self-interest is telling the public that they can be trusted. But it’s naive to actually buy these claims… It always surprises me when I see somebody who shows a sensible suspicion about what government is doing but completely lacks any similar skepticism about big businesses.
:smack: It’s a very important semantic distinction! What I meant was: “This is not just some nit-picking semantic distinction.”
Mr. Stone’s own post, with "“government that consumes,” demonstrates why the distinction is important. (Surely, even “economic conservatives” don’t argue that government is “consuming” retired people’s Social Security checks.)
Even if they acknowledge the distinction, many conservatives are going to be as opposed to “wealth redistribution” as they are to “big government”.
So by that logic, a government that confiscates all income and then doles it all back out again according to how it sees fit has zero footprint, because hey, it’s all transfer payments.
Instead of saying “Government consumes” I should have said “government spends”. Government spending as a percentage of GDP is a standard metric of government size.
Currently, U.S. government spending as a percentage of GDP is about 42%. During the Reagan years, government spending as a percentage of GDP hovered in the mid-30’s.
What you’re talking about, Little Nemo, is discretionary and military government spending, as opposed to mandatory entitlements. But entitlement spending has to be brought under control as well - especially Medicare, Medicaid, and now Obamacare.
Wrong again. Neither of us is a trained economist, but at least I know how to use Google and Wikipedia:
And, although your immediate slippery leap to “confiscates all income” was amusing, it is precisely because transfers like Social Security do not leave the effective “footprint” you so despise that they are excluded. (Never mind that the more-or-less self-funded SocSec legislated entitlement is a far cry from “according to how it sees fit”. :smack: )
Cite? I realize your “abouts” are very … aboutful, but this number seems way off even for political motivated estimates.
The key phrase being “in National Income Accounting”. This is to avoid double counting when computing GDP numbers. It does not mean that government is not spending the money.
In 2012, the last year there are good numbers, GDP was 16.24 trillion. Federal Spending was 3.5 trillion, state and local spending minus government transfers was 2.6 trillion. Total government spending was 6.15 trillion which is 37.86% of GDP.
The problem is knowing the lean times from the fat times. There was a recession in 2002-2003. Looking back it was a pretty small recession but at the time it worried alot of people. The response was standard Keynes and the deficit went up in 2003 and 2004 and then starting going back down the next three years. Then it went back up after the financial crisis of 2008, and jumped into the stratusphere with the stimulus package and has remained gigantic ever since.
Tax cuts are a form of stimulus. In many models they have higher multipliers than government spending.
What an odd statement. I could see an argument about how competition builds markets - since it lowers costs - but not about how it builds market shares. I worked for a company which had dominant market share - well over 50% - which was due to technology and not the government. We were told to be very careful to not sound monopolistic. It turned out that there was some predatory marketing being done. I never heard anyone doing anything to encourage competition. Perhaps Canadian CEOs are more polite. 
Fear of competition drives a lot more activity than encouragement of competition. The competition was a product line that never could even be remotely a threat. I don’t know if that was the management being devious or just stupid.
it is true that in the long run even monopolies die. That doesn’t help the consumer before this happens.
Do you understand that transfers from workers to retirees through a national pension-like program is not the sort of burdensome regulatory apparatus that right-wingers direct their venom against? Do you realize the recent rising of these transfers is not a result of the darn liberals but is a consequence of simple demographics … and rising healthcare costs, esp. the gifts to drug companies in Bush’s 2003 Medicare Modernization Act (which passed the House with only 9 Democrat votes).
I don’t want to descend into semantical fatuity about “government spending” but:
(1) Retirees spend their SocSec checks on personal food, clothing, housing, etc. Is it really sensical to call this “government spending”?
(2) I think you will find most mainstream economists using the standard definition of “government spending.” Please cite where you find the term used to include transfers (outside of Heritage Foundation, etc. with a vested interest in making the number appear bigger).
38% sounds about right when the incorrect definition is used. But I do want to learn how Mr. Stone came up with “about” 42%. Based on his prior history, my guess is he Googled a right-wing site to get 38%, “rounded” it to favor his argument, but by a small enough amount that, when challenged he could accuse the challenger of nitpicking.
I found this list some time ago and saved it. It’s still pretty much a good list. Some things are dated and I have noted as such.
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Slam the border shut. Build the fence, monitor it with electronic surveillance and armed response. Round up and run out the illegals currently in this country.
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A new Constitutional Amendment that will:
a. Repeal the 16th Amendment.
b. Implement the Fair Tax
c. Mandate a balanced budget unless war has been declared by Congress. -
A new Constitutional Amendment to repeal the 17th Amendment.
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Eliminate the Departments of Energy, Agriculture, Housing & Urban Development, Health & Human Services, and Education. Budget savings $379 billion annually, which gets applied to paying down the national debt. The departments all do things which are the province of the states by the 10th Amendment. Massive reorganization of other departments to eliminate waste and redundancy for even more savings. (note - budget savings would be even more now, not to mention the reduction in costs to businesses having to comply with edicts from the various branches.)
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Establish English as the national language. Constitutional Amendment to do this if needed.
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Pull troops out of Libya. Change our stance in Afghanistan and Iraq to a much more aggresive one, actively targeting terrorist training sites and destroying them, as well as H & I bombing in the mountains to collapse the caves they are hiding in.
(note - I think we ought to pull all troops out of the Middle East, period. Let them kill each other off.) -
Phase out the one dollar bill and replace with dollar coins. Change the composition of the penny to an aluminum base; possibly the nickel as well.
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Abolish the Federal Reserve System.
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Eliminate Social Security. My preference is a one-time payout, but it will probably be a phase-out where we state that people under the age of 50 or 55 years (to be determined) will not go on SS. They can build their own private retirement system. As the people currently on SS die off, the cost goes down until eventually there is no one left and the program goes away.
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Eliminate Medicare in the same manner.
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Extend the length of patent protection on drugs from twenty to thirty years. Drug patents are currently twenty years, but 12-15 of those years are pre-clinical trial and approval, so they only have 5-8 years to recover the cost of development. Extending that time will cause the cost of medications to go down greatly, as the recovery costs can be spread out instead of concentrated.
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(added by me) Eliminate Obamacare totally.
“Our merchants and master manufacturers complain much of the bad effects of high wages in raising the price, and thereby lessening the sale of their goods both at home and abroad. They say nothing concerning the bad effects of high profits. They are silent with regard to the pernicious effects of their own gains. They complain only of those of other people.”
“By necessaries I understand not only the commodities which are indispensably necessary for the support of life, but whatever the customs of the country renders it indecent for creditable people, even the lowest order, to be without. A linen shirt, for example, is, strictly speaking, not a necessary of life. The Greeks and Romans lived, I suppose, very comfortably, though they had no linen. But in the present times, through the greater part of Europe, a creditable day-labourer would be ashamed to appear in public without a linen shirt, the want of which would be supposed to denote that disgraceful degree of poverty which, it is presumed, nobody can well fall into, without extreme bad conduct. Custom, in the same manner, has rendered leather shoes a necessary of life in England.”
“The necessaries of life occasion the great expense of the poor. They find it difficult to get food, and the greater part of their little revenue is spent in getting it. The luxuries and vanities of life occasion the principal expense of the rich, and a magnificent house embellishes and sets off to the best advantage all the other luxuries and vanities which they possess … It is not very unreasonable that the rich should contribute to the public expense, not only in proportion to their revenue, but something more than in that proportion.”
“We rarely hear, it has been said, of the combinations of masters, though frequently of those of workmen. But whoever imagines, upon this account, that masters rarely combine, is as ignorant of the world as of the subject. Masters are always and everywhere in a sort of tacit, but constant and uniform, combination, not to raise the wages of labour above their actual rate … Masters, too, sometimes enter into particular combinations to sink the wages of labour even below this rate.”
“People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.”
“The violence and injustice of the rulers of mankind is an ancient evil, for which, I am afraid, the nature of human affairs can scarce admit of a remedy. But the mean rapacity, the monopolizing spirit of merchants and manufacturers, who neither are, nor ought to be, the rulers of mankind, though it cannot perhaps be corrected may very easily be prevented from disturbing the tranquility of anybody but themselves.”
– Adam Smith
- Soldier, teachers, farmers, etc, all spend their government paychecks on personal food and other items. It makes sense of call it government spending because it is being spent by the government.
- Here is wikipedia labeling Social Security as a government expenditure. Hereis the CBO. Hereis statement by 10 former chairman of the CEA about entitlement spending.
42% is from a 2009 report by the OECD, not a right wing website. I used the OMB numbers which are a little different because they were easier to find. Sam Stone is a canadian and probably trusts the OECD a little more.
What do 1, 3, 5, 6 and 7 have to do with economic conservatism?
I make no boast to have read this entire thread, but I have scanned (I’m quite good at scanning) a lot of it.
Clearly medical matters are pre-eminent in many people’s minds just now. Excessive government - both in itself and budgetary, and too much military are also a common theme. I confess some surprise at the ‘solutions’ offered, as many of them seem to be pretty much what we already have over here.
Excessive government is a problem across the civilised world. I suppose a benevolent dictator might work, but who would we trust to do it? The US is a big wealthy country but clearly there are far too many people whose wages come from the taxpayer’s pocket. The same thing applies in the UK, and in spite of many promises, we have yet to find a solution. Government employees get fired, and then re-employed as contractors.
Someone suggested doing away with the multitude of healthcare insurance companies and creating a universal healthcare system, of course individuals could pay more for a premium service, and take insurance to cover it. Why not call it a National Health Service? The funding would come from taxation, and all those snake oil (sorry - insurance) salesmen would have to find other work.
Th military are much the same. I have been a long time advocate of merging the RAF and the Navy, but the Air Vice Marshals and Admirals are a strong lobby. In fact, the advances in equipment are ever reducing the number of boots and bums-on-seats that either the US or the UK need. Just make sure that we don’t end up with more chiefs than indians. (Sorry - Native Americans).
The funny thing is that the UK government is seen as pretty pink, if not downright red, bu the Tea Party, but many of the things we do here seem to be pretty similar to those advocated by conservative Americans
[QUOTE=Sam Stone]
Currently, U.S. government spending as a percentage of GDP is about 42%.
[/QUOTE]
I see the problem. “Currently” means “whichever recent year serves my argument”, in this case one with giant TARP and rescue spending. This is 2014 now, no?
I’m quite sure you don’t.
Perhaps you could come up with figures for 2014, then. That right after you finish explaining how government spending isn’t spending if the recipients cash the checks.
Regards,
Shodan
I know that the discussion has gone on, but I wanted to comment on this.
Usually bridge repair would be paid for by a bridge repair program that is part of a larger transportation budget. Often the program then determines how much funding will be available in each state. Qualifying organizations (cities, counties, etc.) apply to the program and their projects compete for funds.
Applications are reviewed and projects are scored and rated and a prioritized list is created. Projects are allocated funding down the list until the funding limit is reached (with a bit held back for inevitable scope increases). So if there were an increase in revenue, either the Bridge Program would see an increase, say from $350 million to $420 million, or the overarching Transportation Act would see the increase and be able to apportion the increase as stipulated previoiusly in the national budget.
No individual bridge project would suddenly have more money to spend. The Bridge Program would notify the states of their portion of the increase and the states would contact the next cities and counties on their priority list to notify them that additional funds were available and to ask if they still needed funds and if they were prepared to accept funding and begin their projects.
For the increase above, larger states would see an increase of about $2.5 million, which would add one or two medium sized projects to the program, or a larger number of smaller projects. Smaller states would get less.
Building a new bridge would be part of a different program. New bridges would probably be competing with new lengths of freeway, new interchanges, new overpasses, etc. in some program category. It should be easy to keep individual projects from becoming gold plated.