Please avoid any political discussion in this thread.
I would like to know what percentage of tax revenues the government returns to the private sector each year. Meaning, the percentage of taxes that eventually are used to pay a company, not government employees like postal workers, police officers, and so forth.
Payment to a company might be in exchange for manufactured goods (police cars, software, guns, coin presses for the mint, steel), or services (construction of a new office building, consulting, independent contractors in Iraq, etc.), or something else that I didn’t mention.
The question is very complicated to answer. The government purchases thousands of goods and services from a host of corporations. There are also a lot of tax breaks and sneaky tweaks that are hard to track. There are mineral rights, logging rights, and grazing rights to government land that are leased to various firms.
Some critics say that some parts of all of these are unduly kind to corporations. The corporations disagree. I da’sn’t say more, here.
Well, it’s going to be over 100% while we’re in deficit mode, less payroll as you alluded to. Yeah, sorry – not very helpful, but you need to establish more precise bounds. For example, the police officer isn’t a federal employee, but some of his salary may come from federal programs. So does he fall under payroll? If a federal government pays money to the State of Michigan for schools, and that school purchases 10,000 Apple computers, does that count as giving money to corporations?
This ought to be a really fun problem to (1) define properly and then (2) dig up the answers for! :0
Okay, drop the percentage of tax revenue part, and substitute “percentage of government spending”.
By government spending I include all money spent by any government agency at any level, not just the federal government. So, money spent paying my local town’s police would not count, while money the local school district pays to Apple would.
If you are talking about the US federal government, then parts of its expenditure are to:
(1) Federal employees (incudlung membvers of the armed services).
(2) Public corporations
(3) Private for-profit corporations
(4) Private non-profit corporations
(5) State governments
(6) Foreign governments
(7) Intergovernmental organizations
(8) Citizens of the US
(9) Non-citizens of the U.S.
and perhaps some other categories as well.
I suspect that an exact breakdown on these lines is very hard to obtain.
I severely doubt that you’re going to get any kind of ballpark figure for contracting by towns, counties, and other political subdivisions. I know of nobody who tracks that sort of stuff – it’s just way too much data to sort though for very little practical benefit.
As far as the Federal government goes, this study claims roughly a quarter of a trillion dollars per year in contracting for goods and services. I have no doubt that that is a very, very substantial understatement.
For the Department of Defense alone, acquisition and service contracting is in the neighborhood of $200 billion per year. See the totals in the pdfs for each military service at the bottom of the page. That is roughly 40% of the miltiary’s yearly budget. Just taking a complete stab, I would guess that the total amount of Federal expendatures that go directly to private companies at least several times that number.
It is important to note that even payments that are not made directly to private companies/corporations are usually no more than one step removed from the private sector. Government employees are paid by Uncle Sam, and they turn that money around and spend it on mortgage payments, groceries, gasoline, etc.
Umm, a 100%? Am I somehow misunderstanding the question? I assume by corporations you mean companies, not just entities registered as a C corporation.
If you want to know what percentage actually goes to C corporations, as opposed to partnerships, proprietorships, etc. then you’ll have to find a stat showing relative segment revenue, but I’m curious as to why would you want to know this?
Okay, I’ll limit it even more. I’m asking how much money the government pays to for-profit organizations (or individuals not in the employ of the government, i.e. independent consultants, lawyers, etc.) in exchange for goods and/or services.
Money paid as subsidies to farmers does not count, nor money paid to non-profit relief organizations. Tax breaks do not count. I don’t really know what the hell Fanny Mae and Freddy Mac do - are they for-profit? Who owns them? Does the government just prop them up, or pay them in exchange for something?
groman, the government spends a significant amount of money paying the salaries of it’s own employees: postal workers, police officers, soldiers, congressmen, hundreds of thousands of bureacrats and functionaries…Not to mention social security and medicare payments…
Note: Medicare payments is an excellent microchasm of the problem in answering the question you posed. Medicare payments are NOT to individuals, as might be inferred from your second to last post. Medicare payments would generally go to health care providers. I’m sure there are statistics for how much Medicare funds go to public university hospitals, private university hospitals, county run hospitals, private for-profit hospitals, private not-for-profit hospitals, and so on, but as I’m sure you understand, that is an incredibly complex thing to track. To expect Medicare’s definition of private vs public to be the same as thousands of other agencies is not realistic.
Hell, even buying things like staplers is complex under this definition: an agency may be allotted so much for office products, but they have discretion over whether to buy staplers from Office Depot or Federal Prison Industries (a “company” that consists exclusively of convict labor that makes things that may only be sold to the government). I’m not entirely sure that Federal managers would bother to keep records of whether that $5 in taxpayer funds was given to Office Depot or FPI.
That being said, here is the best breakdown I’ve seen so far. It’s a large PDF, but check page 22 in particular.
Frankly, I’d be surprised if these is a better answer out there. Government spending is generally tracked along the lines of what it does, not really who it goes to.
Out of curiousity, why are you asking this question?
