Thanks to Obama spending, private sector pay is now the smallest part of personal income in U.S. history

Well, you won't need that splash of cold water on your face to wake up this morning. Read this:

Paychecks from private business shrank to their smallest share of personal income in U.S. history during the first quarter of this year.

Now read it again:

Paychecks from private business shrank to their smallest share of personal income in U.S. history during the first quarter of this year.

That from a fascinating analysis of economic data by USA Today's Dennis Cauchon over here.

What that means is, that gnawing thought about big government getting even bigger that's also been growing in the back of your mind since late January of 2009 is dead-on. Confirmed by the numbers. And ominous.

More people are getting more money from more government programs than ever before. The role of private business, once the nation's economic bulwark and major job generator, is shrinking as a percentage of the whole. And the new healthcare legislation hasn't even kicked in yet.

In other words, after a while, the doling out of $787 billion here and $5 billion there and a trillion over there all add up, especially when added to the loss of 8 million jobs to the recession.

Cauchon reports that at an annualized rate Americans received $12.2 trillion in wages, food stamps, investments and so forth during the first three months of this year.

Of that amount, only 41.9% came from salaries and wages, a record low, and down from 44.6% before the recession.

A whopping 27.7% came from government programs or all government wages. A record high. And an unsustainable imbalance, experts said.

Or as Tennessee Republican Sen. Lamar Alexander put it Tuesday after meeting with President Obama:

We simply have a large difference of opinion – which [is] not likely to be settled until November – about taxes, spending, debt, and whether we ought to be focusing on government jobs or creating an environment in which we can have more private sector jobs.

Last month's federal jobs report showed government was by far the country's largest hirer, putting one more worker on the government payroll about every 40 seconds. That would be roughly two new government paychecks since you started reading this. Around the clock. Even when you're sleeping. Or the president is golfing.

Since the government funds all this spending from something called taxes paid by working Americans, you'll never guess what the Democratic president's deficit commission is going to recommend to him AFTER the Nov. 2 midterm elections.

Related Item:

Obama's deficit commission has a deficit in transparency too

-- Andrew Malcolm

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Photo: U.S. Mint; Mandel Ngan / AFP / Getty Images.

Comments

[Burch]

Right, like the private sectors way of producing individual wealth is not built on exploiting groups of other individuals, right… the political right keeps telling Americans that they know all about, how to create jobs, right … and what kind of jobs would those be, those where the job creators get wealthy, while the jobs themselves pay minimum wage. Yes that’s just what America needs, more of narcissism’s avarice obsession with profit. Like what is being demonstrated in the Gulf of Mexico. The time of personal greed is running out.

[Siegmund Wagner]

The word, liberal, once meant freedom from authority. It has been subverted into meaning authority over those wanting freedom. This places the modern liberal in the same camp with the authortarians of previous centuries, and places true classical liberals who would be free from authority into a Never-never-land in which the words possible to describe them are employed as pejoratives against them to bolster the growth of authority. To say that the modern liberal seeks freedom is now demonstrably a lie; the modern liberal is a toady of authority for money and power. How sad that the coming revolution will surprise so many, because history has taught that greater authortarianism is accompanied by fiscal collapse and the attack by authority on its own people followed by a blowback -- as always.

[smokehouse]

Thirty to forty percent of Democrats today are hard left liberals and would vote for ANYONE with a D after their name. They have no flexibility, no sense, no moral direction, hate God and Jesus, hate the constitution, want to kill babies by the millions, hate our military and hate America as it once was and what the founders like Jefferson and Madison wanted. And we are supposed to take their insane posts that are coming on this comment page seriously? No Thanks. They are irrelevant without the other fifteen to twenty percent of real American democrats. You remember the old democratic party don't you? The party of Scoop Jackson, JFK, Harry Truman and Sam Nunn. You remember them. Honest opposition, not the liberal drones that infect your party today.

[Seni]

Fellow Americans

In this Great America of ours would you say,
that President Obama is doing a good job today,
Could he be a king with his many task to do,
he could be but his accomplishments are too few.

What is it about Obama that some like so well,
What are the myth of him some tell,
Obama is very radical, you can see he's not good,
he would destroy all of America with his policies if he could.

He offers no kindness to Republicans, dislikes the constitution too,
this hate belongs to Obama, don't let it belong to you.

Some think Obama is great, and his vision is bright,
but he's too far to the left, not enough to the right. He's not proud of America, nor loyal, nor true.
This is Barack Hussein Obama, don't let this be you.

RF: Lincoln.

[Randy Newell]

Yes, this is correct; under his leadership the private sector pay has gone down as with so much of the American dream. He has too much of a socialist agenda with attacks on Wall Street and private wealth in this nation.