U.S. Government shuts down.

[Jester]

I re-read your previous post. We can agree on about 30% as a average. You need to factor in though, that the bottom quintile pay virtually zero except for consumption taxes. And... if you are truly poor, you're taxes returned is larger than your taxes paid.

On the other end, there are a small minority of citizens (1%) that pay for 37% of the governments cost. The top 10% (those with incomes over $112,000) received 43% of all income and paid 71% of all federal income taxes. My issue with that is not that the top 10% pay taxes, or even that they pay relatively high taxes, it is that a mere $112,000 household income puts one in the top 10%. It shows that most "opportunities" are subsistence, or slightly better.

Let's not exaggerate. Subsistence is, to a close approximation, $400 inflation-adjusted dollars a year per person. A family of three at subsistence would be earning $1,200 a year. Your "slightly better than subsistence" is in fact earning a full one hundred times more than they need to survive, in global perspective. The 90th percentile in the US is doing very well indeed by any standard - although in relative terms, they are downright impoverished compared with the wealth of the 1%, the 0.1%, and the 0.01%.

TL;DR: The super rich make tons of money. They should be taxed accordingly.

I'm sure there are many things wrong with Hong Kong, and NYC. I'm looking at the things they are doing right.

You can't scale things arbitrarily. This is as fallacious when far-left anthropology hippies tell me we can establish an egalitarian utopia because that's how they do it in small Congolese, Amazonian or Micronesian bands of 50-100 people, as when libertarians tell me we can all just copy Hong Kong or Singapore. Scale matters.

Are we providing vastly more services than 30 years ago? Are we serving vastly more population than 30 years ago? If so, then it might justify the 500% rise in the cost of government.

1980 we spent $590.9 billion for 226,545,805 people, and in 2013 we spent about 3,803.4 billion for 315,091,138. The cost of government has increased by 543%, while the population has increased by 39%. Even accounting for some inflation, you'd think that we'd see some impact of technology on the productivity of government.

Let's break this down.

The easy step first: pull out raw inflation. Please do this yourself before posting headline numbers, because the alternative biases your figures towards your conclusion. A 1980 dollar is worth $2.83 today, so $591 billion is $1,673 billion today.

The next step is also easy: adjust for raw population. That 1980 budget, scaled for population, is $2,325 billion. Now we're down to an increase of 64%. Now, 64% is nothing to sneeze at. But let's dig further.

The median age in 1980 was about 30. Today, it's 37. In 1980, the baby boomers were coming up on the hump of their careers. Today, they're retiring. That means incomes were earned then, and saved for now - including via social security and medicare. Those costs are not profligacy, they are simple demographics.

Alongside that, we need to account for the composition of government spending. What government buys, these days, is mostly medical care, and the cost of medical care has been going up faster than inflation.

And to reiterate: your method of analysis is defining productivity out of existence. You are not measuring the services provided, either in price, quality, or quantity. You are merely comparing spending to spending, which would show that any growing industry is becoming less productive, and any shrinking one, more. What we need to know is whether government has become better at what they do, and for that, we need an actual output variable, which are notoriously difficult to construct for services. But that's not an excuse for just assuming it's flatlined.

For a different (though perhaps equally flawed) perspective, how about we look at the numbers of workers needed to manage the expenditures?

http://www.opm.gov/policy-data-oversight...ince-1962/

Yes, that's right, the number of federal non-military personel has ... not changed in thirty years. In absolute numbers. That means, the amount of government spending per worker has gone up. Fewer workers are managing more resources. Fewer workers are serving more people.

Is that not productivity increase? It sure looks like it.

-Jester