Stephen Moore, in the Wall Street Journal, quotes figures demonstrating just how much government in this country has grown in recent decades while at the same time industrial productivity has declined.
If you want to understand better why so many states—from New York to Wisconsin to California—are teetering on the brink of bankruptcy, consider this depressing statistic: Today in America there are nearly twice as many people working for the government (22.5 million) than in all of manufacturing (11.5 million). This is an almost exact reversal of the situation in 1960, when there were 15 million workers in manufacturing and 8.7 million collecting a paycheck from the government.
It gets worse. More Americans work for the government than work in construction, farming, fishing, forestry, manufacturing, mining and utilities combined. We have moved decisively from a nation of makers to a nation of takers.
Read the whole thing.
SDD
The economic ignorance in this country is truly astonishing at times. Imagine you had two money managers for your retirement portfolio. One produced a 5% average annual return. The other generally produced a negative return. How long would it take you to figure out that taking money from the first manager and giving it to the second depressed your overall performance? Our economy is simply a portfolio of investments and the government is a terrible investor. No matter how well-intentioned he may be and how much he wines and dines you, the more you give him, the more likely you are to wake up one day and discover you no longer have a portfolio that will get you through retirement.
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