A story today should prompt some discussion in how our society is changing as more and more Americans work for the government. For years, there has been a concern that we are becoming an institutionalized society with millions of Americans serving or working in prisons while millions more work for police and government agencies. Now, a report shows that one out of every 100 Americans work for the Defense Department. That is an astonishing figure. That figure balloons further when one considers the number of citizens working in the internal security, police, and intelligence systems.
The Economist magazine shows that the Defense Department employed 3.2 million people, including 700,000 civilians.
We beat out the Chinese Army and even more frightening Wal-Mart (which comes in third after the Red Army). McDonald’s follows in fourth. The remainder in order are the China Petroleum Corporation, the State Grid Corporation of China, National Health Service of England, Indian Railways, China Post Group, and Taiwan’s Hon Hai Precision Industry Company.
Despite such huge numbers, Sen. Jon Kyl announced that he will resign from the Super Committee if the members consider significant cuts in the defense budget.
Source: Washington Post
Great links AY. I wish I could get a 2 per cent tax rate
A Potential Superhero For The Supercommittee
September 13, 2011
A hearing Tuesday before the Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction — dubbed the “supercommittee” — was supposed to be about the history of the current debt crisis. Almost nothing causes more partisan bickering than that. Each party is fervent in its belief about who drove the government into the ditch — namely, the other guys.
On Tuesday, however, Doug Elmendorf, the man who runs the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO), immediately dispensed with the question of blame and laid out the options for the supercommittee.
“Putting the federal budget on a sustainable path will require significant changes in spending policies, significant changes in tax policies, or both,” Elmendorf said.
He said the committee must answer three questions: how much money the government is going to save; how quickly it is going to do it; and what mix of spending reductions or tax increases it is going to use. He refused to allow the committee to lose focus.
At one point, Arizona Republican Sen. Jon Kyl suggested that the government might raise money by tackling Medicare fraud or by selling public lands.
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It may sound like a paradox, he said, but it’s not. Elmendorf said he and his colleagues at the CBO believe lawmakers can stimulate the economy now, with government spending and lower taxes, then rein it all in later, to fix the budget.
http://www.npr.org/2011/09/13/140431010/a-potential-super-hero-for-the-supercommittee
You will just love this….Although Corporations are supposed to be taxed at about 35% and yes that is on the books….Most of the big corporations net tax rate is about 2….
September 10, 2011
The idea that America’s 35 percent corporate tax rate is stifling U.S. economic growth is almost an article of faith among some politicians.
The sound bites from Republican presidential debates to campaign stops are basically interchangeable: “We need to bring that corporate tax rate down.”
But in fact, very few corporations pay taxes on 35 percent of their profits. With the help of complex international tax loopholes, some companies manage to pay almost no corporate tax at all.
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Drucker says the company saved more than $3 billion from 2007-2009 through a winding system of offshore subsidiaries. Google’s not the only company that does this, he says; many other tech giants like Microsoft and Apple have similar structures. But Google’s offshore tax rate — 2.4 percent by Drucker’s count — bests its peers in the technology sector in ways that a retail giant like Wal-Mart could never hope to.
http://www.npr.org/2011/09/10/138867588/corporate-taxes-how-low-can-you-go
An Industrial Militarized Complex comes to mind…..
Not sure what the civilian cooks do – file a complaint?
It used to be one of the additional-duties-as-required part of being in the Army (and the Marines, tho not sure about the Navy and the AF) of “pulling KP.” That is, being sent to the mess hall for a shift to peel potatoes, sweep the floor, and help with tasks not requiring a specialized cook. But not that long ago (I think under GWB), it was decided to replace these guys with civilians. And the specialized cooks, too, for that matter.
I’d be very surprised if that change actually saved any money; would like to see some stats. Also, in case of emergency, the guy on KP had a rifle and cold help repel an attack. Not sure what the civilian cooks do – file a complaint?
is this a bad thing???
at least someone is working….
Roco,
I didn’t know conservatives had separate membership cards.
lottakatz:
show me the money.
rafflaw:
“the Right already has privatized many functions in the military.”
those arent my “people”. those are those crazy ass neocon country club gin and tonic sucking Henry Cabot Lodge republicans.
You have to understand that we conservatives dont like those motherf…ers either.
Well said Lotta!
Roco, I call your Wall Street graphic with Death and Taxes 2010: Security eats up way more than 20% if you don’t limit it to DOD. That of course is it public budget, the ‘black’ budget is by its nature unknown. It’s a 50/50 split, the big difference is that no one has the balls to put security on the table, might have something to do with the column Mike S wrote about a couple of days ago.
Poster is scalable.
Roco,
the Right already has privatized many functions in the military. The private retirement account is merely a means by which Wall Street gets their hands on Social Security funds. It is an attempt to rob people who will need this money for their retirement. We already have IRA’s and Roth IRA’s that young people can use to put funds towards retirement by playing the market.
rafflaw:
I dont want to privatize the military, that would be a stupid idea. Now having a private retirment account? That is another thing.
annon, in a hypothetical, idealized, perfectly efficient economic system, you’d probably be right in saying that government employment substantially displaces private sector employment. (Whether that is good, bad or inconsequential is a whole different issue.)
The problem that exists in our reality is that our economy isn’t perfectly efficient: It’s populated by us silly human beings who constantly make irrational decisions and don’t have or use all the information needed to make optimal economic decisions. As a result of our being idiots to some degree, we create a business cycle of bubbles and recessions. During these cycles, consumers, business people and investors over react, leading to inefficiency. (“Scared investors are fleeing the markets and hunkering down!”) During recessions, capital, facilities and workers are idled for no good reason, creating additional inefficiency (workers loose skills and become dejected, facilities rust and deteriorate). The government has the ability to act counter-cyclically, potentially limiting the long term damage from those irrationality-caused inefficiencies.
Particularly during a recession, if the government hires people to do productive work, like building/repairing infrastructure (and picks useful projects…) then those “government jobs” do not merely trade off private sector jobs one-for-one because the frightened private sector isn’t hiring anyway. The fact that equipment, capital and workers are not unnecessarily idled has the potential to reduce the severity of the recession and reduce the damage done to the overall economy by that irrationality.
(Of course, the government needs to have the political will to both pick good projects to work on and it needs to have the political will to raise taxes during boom times to pay off the debt it incurred during the down-swing.)
I’ve never read Keynes, so I’m sure I’m mangling his work. But that doesn’t make what I’m saying not true.
Either way, if we’re looking to eliminate government waste and inefficiency, then this bloated DoD deserves a lot of scrutiny.
And so what if Jon Kyl resigns from the committee? Let him do it and either carry on or replace him. Good riddance.
Gene:
what ignorance of basic statistics?
Roco/anon,
And I appreciate your ignorance of basic statistics.
raff,
Yeah. Those darn facts keep getting in the way.
Oro,
Good post. Another right wing myth has been exposed. Privatizing costs the taxpayer twice as much money so the only reason why the Right is in favor of privatizing military functions, security functions and Social Security etc., is the extra money that big corps like Blackwater can make. All at the expense of the taxpayers.
Gene,
Those fact thingees are funny things. They come back to bite the myth people.
anon:
I applaud your creation of a new branch of economics-Genesian.
I think the fundamental principle is that there is no fundamental principle.
Frankly —
“Oh, also, Having done work under contract for DoD, NSA and NASA my guess is 1% is probably less than half of the number of people drawing a paycheck on the DoDs dime.”
Yep, & according to an article in yesterday’s NYT, the government contracted rate is about twice the number of dimes than if performed by the government —
“Government Pays More in Contracts, Study Finds
By RON NIXON
Published: September 12, 2011
WASHINGTON — Despite a widespread belief that contracting out services to the private sector saves the federal government money, a new study suggests just the opposite — that the government actually pays more when it farms out work.”
Of course gov’t creates jobs, and very good ones; it’s pretty much the only job Rick Perry has ever had and it made him a millionaire.