The Conspiracy Against the Taxpayers

We were recently alerted to this excellent article about how liberal special interests have been effectively conspiring against taxpayers for many years and are running up state and local government deficits. Here are just a few of the things that this article points out.

"Public-employee unions have so successfully used their political muscle that whereas public-sector compensation once lagged the private sector, now the reverse is true. Astonishingly, the average state and local government employee now collects 46 percent more in total compensation (salary plus benefits) than the average private-sector employee, according to the nonpartisan Employee Benefit Research Institute."

"Unions have also convinced Americans that teachers are underpaid, when they now take home considerably better pay packages on average than professional workers in the private sector. The federal government’s national compensation survey estimates that local public school districts pay teachers an average of $47.97 per hour in total compensation, including $12.39 per hour in benefits—figures that far outstrip not only what private school teachers earn, but also the average of what all professional workers earn in private business, a category that includes engineers, architects, computer scientists, lawyers, and journalists."

"Equally rapacious are the nominally private social-services and health-care providers who have found a way of diverting some of the torrent of government dollars to their own pockets. With so much money available from Medicaid, one of the original War on Poverty programs, health care has become an increasingly government-financed business and has been transformed unrecognizably in the process...

...According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, two-thirds of Medicaid services that states now provide are optional under federal guidelines—from free ambulette rides to doctors’ offices to dental and podiatry services. From 1994 to 2000, when U.S. poverty rates were plunging, spending on Medicaid, originally a program for the poor, grew by 30 percent after accounting for inflation, an American Enterprise Institute study shows."

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The Economy Bomb - Ticking Down Faster (2005)

It's that time of year again. The IRS has published another year's worth of collections data and Action America has updated our annual feature article, The Economy Bomb - Ticking Down Faster, dealing with, among other things, the effects of our tax system on the movement of wealth.

Besides the new IRS collections data, there are a lot of other issues addressed in that article. Among the new information available in this year's installment of Economy Bomb, is data that we have compiled from the Forbes Magazine lists of the 400 Wealthiest Americans and the World's Billionaires. Since 1999, the number of billionaires in the US has grown at a rate that is just slightly larger than can be explained by inflation, while the number of billionaires worldwide has grown at a rate six times greater (22% vs. 132%).

That's just one of many pieces of coroborating information that indicates a rather sizable movement of wealth and the wealthy out of the US. Check out the article, to find out more about the consequences of this shift. Then come back here to discuss it.