It’s Not About Ownership, It’s about CONTROL
Since it appears to be “Spank Markadelphia” week here at TSM, I’d like to point out one of his sillier “gotcha!” points, one he is so proud of:
Currently, 20+ trillion dollars is in the hands of private organizations in this country. That’s 99.77 percent of our nation’s wealth. The other .23 percent is owned by the government.
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Most bankds(sic) have paid back their loans and the government owns .23 percent of our wealth. The rest is in private hands. So…who has the power again?
I think he got his information from The Atlantic, since he used a graph from there in a post of his own, but that piece says 0.21%. I believe he’s mentioned this number here in other places, but my Google-fu is weak this evening.
So, for Markadelphia, possession of wealth is apparently the only marker of power that matters.
No wonder he apparently hates people with three vacation homes.
I found an interesting piece today from the Center for Fiscal Responsibility, which declared that yesterday, August 12, was “Cost of Government Day” – the day on which working people stopped earning money that would go to Federal, State, and Local governments, and finally start going into their pockets. It was the latest date this has ever happened. Per the piece, the date shift is almost entirely due to the recent massive increases in Federal spending – Bush’s TARP and Obama’s American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, noting “. . . these spending bills set taxpayers up for a year when federal spending has reached a record 28.5 percent of GDP.
The GDP for the US, according to the CIA World Factbook was $14.33 trillion in 2008. As many are now aware, our annual expenditure for health care in 2007 was estimated at $2.4 trillion, about 1/7th of our GDP.
And now the government wants to control a bigger – much bigger – chunk of that.
So the Federal government controls about 28.5% of our GDP – that is, about $4.8 trillion dollars annually. To that they want to add a significant portion of an additional $2.4 trillion – and, if you happen to believe (as I do) that the plan is to eventually control it all, and with “normal government efficiency” that means more than the $2.4 trillion we spend now, while we get less for it.
The control of $4,800,000,000,000 annually isn’t power?
Then there’s this:
The ability to print money isn’t power?
And, finally, the Federal Government outright owns an estimated 28.8% of all land in the United States, and with the Kelo v. New London Supreme Court decision of 2005, pretty much any government entity can take any property they want for pretty much any reason. In addition, as of 2004, the Federal government outright owned a bit over 411,000 buildings, about 17.5% of which (and 20% of the square footage) provide housing to American citizens. (Source: GSA’s FEDERAL REAL PROPERTY PROFILE 2004 – PDF)
THIS isn’t POWER?
By comparison, at his peak Bill Gates was worth only $101 billion.
So, who has the power again?
Oh, and just who is it that controls the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines, Coast Guard, FBI, NSA, CIA, Secret Service . . .