Telling Numbers

From Reason:

"...Some of the other metrics you probably already know: E.g., nearly half of Americans pay no federal income income taxes. There are reasons for this, but those reasons do not change the fact. Nor do they change the fact that that the share of Americans paying no federal income tax has been growing. According to the Tax Foundation: “In 1990, only about 21 percent of [federal] returns had no tax liability.”

On the other hand, roughly 165 million Americans—more than half—depend on the government for income or support. The figure includes welfare and Medicare recipients, members of the armed forces, judges, and so on.

That figure helps explain why another halfway mark is disappearing in the rearview mirror. “In 1960, according to the Office of Management and budget, social-welfare spending accounted for less than a third of the federal budget,” writes Nicholas Eberstadt in The Wall Street Journal. Today it accounts for nearly two-thirds of the (now vastly larger) budget.

In a recent piece for National Review, William Voegeli—author of the excellent Never Enough: America’s Limitless Welfare State—draws attention to another unsettling trend. In 2010, he notes, “all government spending in Sweden equaled 53 percent of GDP. The same figure was 55 percent in Finland, 56 percent in France, and 58 percent in Denmark.” In the U.S., government now consumes 42 percent of GDP—up from 34 percent just 12 years ago.

Despite President Obama’s rhetoric—in his inaugural speech two weeks ago he said, presumably with a straight face, that “we must make the hard choices to reduce the cost of health care and the size of the deficit”—U.S. debt has grown like fungus in a high-school locker room. In 2008, the national debt as a percentage of GDP stood at 40.5 percent. Within three years, it had grown to almost 68 percent. (Those figures include only debt held by the public; add intragovernmental debt, such as the I.O.U.s for the money Congress borrowed from the Social Security trust fund, and total government debt exceeds 100 percent of GDP.)..."

Say Kayfabe.