The Whole Pie (2 of 6)

Yesterday, I gave you the following pie chart to consider:

Which is its own puzzler.  Today I have a second pie chart to show you:

Which is the gross summary of how the Federal Government spent its money in 2011.  So the first thing is this: the Economic Census is out of date by 5 years, and wel'' be pleased to get a new one when it comes around.  The flip-side of the coin is that the size of our economy in 2011was, nor or less, exactly the same as it was in 2007.  Real GDP in 2007 was 13.33 trillion; Real GDP in 2011 was 13.34 trillion -- a difference for the accountants of only 0.07%.  So for the sake of the kind of comparison we're going to do, this is definitely the same ball-park.

Here's the thing:

Just as a side-by-side comparison, the Federal expenditures tally up to more than 75% of all wages to non-farm, non-government employees -- which, for the record, includes all CEO wages, all owner wages, all wages paid to the percent which makes the evil excessive wages as opposed to your wages.

That is: if we taxes all wages at 75%, we could pay for the current net expenditures of the US Federal Government.  This doesn't include your local taxes, mind you: this is just to  run the stuff at the Federal level. It means that everybody has to work all day Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and until about 2 PM on Thursday just to pay for what the Federal Government right now says cannot be done without.  To tax our way out of the problem, everyone need to pay a 75% income tax rate.

"Yeah, well, wait a minute, Cent," says the somewhat-informed person reading this post, "That's one comparison of the money, but the GDP for the US is $15 trillion.  You have left out a lot of stuff here to get to your calculation -- like corporate income and farm income.  You are making this out to be a lot worse than it really is."

That's an interesting point, and we will deal with it tomorrow.