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