35 Replies to “The Decline And Fall Of The American Empire”

  1. The people on welfare and ‘working’ in the government are not producing wealth. They are consuming wealth. Wealth is only produced by the private sector.
    Essentially this means that the private sector, which is shrinking under Obama’s policies, has the burden of supporting itself and an ever-increasing ratio of the population.
    This means that the government is borrowing about 40% of its costs to support this dependent sector of the population since its private sector is not producing enough wealth to support the non-wealth consumers.

  3. I get 87.3 million parasites from those numbers. The only way to solve this problem is to take away the right to vote from those on welfare. That way they might have some incentive to get off welfare.
    These numbers are absolutely insane and it’s no wonder that the US is headed for oblivion. I’m sure the welfare recipients who kept on voting for more government assistance will get a rude awakening when their new chicom overlords come by to collect what’s owed to them by the US.
    There’s no easy solution to this problem but I’d suggest that anyone who lives in a large city with high parasite numbers moves out to the country, or a small town where almost everyone works, while they can. The reaction of those who feel entitled to their entitlements is going to be quite ugly when the US goes off the financial cliff. All the sane people in the US have already stocked up on guns and ammo, but it might be wise to buy another shotgun (preferably something short with a pistol grip) and a couple of thousand rounds of shotshells if one hasn’t already done so.

  6. my two sisters and one bro-inlaw are gov’t
    me and other bro-inlaw, private sector
    we all retired in 5-7 yrs.
    question for greenies, “think this sustainable?”

  8. Um, no.
    There are 4.3 million Americans on welfare. They must also be including those on social security, which has 62 million receiving it.
    It would be better to use a term like “social assistance” rather than “welfare”, which refers to a specific program.

  9. While agreeing that there are too many people on welfare, I want to keep a proper perspective:
    Of the population given in the chart (private + government + welfare):
    ~11% of the population work for the government. Presumably this includes policemen and firemen, trash collectors, water department personnel, mayors and city councilmen, state governors, state & federal senators, congressmen and admin personnel for all the above, the military (perhaps including part time military in the National Guard) and who knows who else.
    In other words, first the question of what does it mean in the chart when is says “government employee” (who does it include?) should be clarified. No doubt it is still too many but at least one can then say who could be eliminated.
    ~34% of the population are receiving some type of welfare from the government (not counting government employees). While the stereo typical welfare queen immediately comes to mind in talking about welfare, I note that this includes some people who may also be employed (some receive food stamps or Medicaid while also employed at low paying jobs).
    In short, while the picture painted by the chart is indeed horrid, it may not be as bad as it is appears…. the truth is in the details.

  10. Not to take from the concern but the stats under welfare recipients include individuals working in the private sector and receiving benefits such as Medicaid, CHIP, food stamps etc. The same metric applied to Canadians would equate to 100% by nature of universal health care alone.
    The greens are most responsible for this situation as the US has morphed into an over-regulated phony service-based economy (in stasis) thanks in great part to their successful de-industrialization efforts. Many service jobs at minimum wage don’t pay for health insurance for example, nor do they allow breaching the income threshold for qualifying for food stamps. It also doesn’t help that they are paying for the health care and education of 15% of Mexico’s population who dominate the low skill level job demographic.

  11. 87 million roughly are sucking up the real workers money through taxes, that mostly regulate the earners real lives while the parasites engorge themselves while than make it so they are not subject to the oppression of the freeloaders. Nice Recipe for social chaos.
    Its collapse when the real wokers figure out they are chumps if not slaves to the bums.

  13. Can someone with graphic talents whip one up that shows how many bureaucrats per capita we toil for here?
    How many have-notters?
    How many retired public leeches?
    How many Refugee Industrial Complex newly imported future jihadis?
    And how many kids the productive class forego to have, because they have these endless financial burdens placed on them?
    pee-air turdo’s dream society has indeed come true.

  14. Phil, amazing how you manage to prove our point in your own words. Lets look at one of the groups of parasites you mentioned – teachers. If the teacher is good enough to be employed in a private school, they produce potential future wealth whereas in the public school system they are an endless money sink and produce students who are signficantly less educated than a generation or two before. It would be far better for everyone if teachers in public schools were replaced by minimum wage babysitters as the outcome would be little different. Despite the spending of an order of magnitude more money on public schools, students coming out are far dumber than they were 25-40 years ago.
    Police and firemen are overpaid union jobs. I suspect that far better service could be offered by private firms. Allowing concealed carry and stand ones ground laws would eliminate the need for police who currently just document an unarmed innocent party getting killed in a home invasion. Decriminalizing drugs would lead to huge savings as the police, lawyers and court officials who are there to enforce totalitarian laws suddenly would be out of work. The amount of money in the illegal drug trade is so huge that I doubt we’ll ever see decriminalization as too many people profit from it.
    I won’t leave my own profession out of it as the current socialist medical system is setup to reward the incompetent and penalize the competent. The best paid doctors are the ones who spend 5 minutes with a patient and crank through as many patients as possible during a day doing just enough medicine so they don’t lose their licenses. The worst paid are the ones who take time to figure out what’s wrong with the patient. In a totally private system, the best docs would also be the best paid and the incompetents would be driving cabs. Also, private medicine is considerably cheaper than the bloated bureaucracy that currently exists in this country. Also, if a patient had to spend their own money to pay for their medical care they’d shun the incompetent docs and go for the competent ones. As it is, the government assumes all doctors are the same and, since medicine is “free” in this country, people figure that naturopaths must be better since it costs money to see them.
    Yes, government can produce something of value as aircraft carriers, fighter jets and cruise missiles have value. The military is the one function of government that it should concern itself with. Even there, governments spend far more money on a piece of hardware than is justified. Government can produce wealth but private enterprise does it far cheaper and better. If government was so good at producing wealth, then the countries with the most government control of the economy like N. Korea and Cuba would be the wealthiest countries in the world.

  15. Is Canada in any better shape? We have our Debt and unfunded services,liabilities entitlements and fewer taxpayers very year.
    Even if govt was only 25% in real terms, it takes 4-5 taxpayers to support just 1 civil servant. And most of these minions are a real drag on the efforts of productive people.
    Police and firemen, lets see when seconds count the cops are minutes away at Tims, when you factor the cost of full-time fire crews against what they save , burning might be better for society.
    For those like me, with skill and ability, the barter exchange becomes more attractive every year.
    After all in canada crime pays. I can expect a max of $12000/yr after 45 years working. As a convicted criminal the govt would spend arround $100,000/yr to keep a food over my head.

  16. “Our police, our military, firefighters, our teachers, etc. provide a service that has value.”
    No question that their services have value. But they certainly do not produce or generate wealth. They do PROTECT the value produced by others – fire services can reduce damage to a factory or police can reduce the potential of a jeweler being robbed.
    But it is only the value added goods being produced in the factory or the skills of the artisan producing jewellery that can be sold to others at a higher value than the cost of production that creates an increase in wealth.
    My firefighter friends all claim they contribute financially through their high taxes (based on high wages) just like those in the private sector. They fail to understand that these are ‘flow through’ contributions and not derived from the generation of wealth as are taxes in the private sector.
    The private sector worker contributes to the fire fighters wages through taxes generated as an increase in value of goods produced. The cumulative taxes are received as wages by the fire fighter and then paid by him/her as taxes on their protective services – not as taxes on something actually created, produced and sold as an increase on value.
    Try running a society based solely on gov’t services and see how long the tax system lasts…. oh wait, we’re heading that way now.

  17. Well, Phil, we were starting to go in the right direction in the US until LBJ’s war on poverty. That’s probably the point where the US took a wrong turn from which it’s unlikely to recover.
    There are things that government can build that are too large for any private company – the first nuclear bomb, rocket development, putting a man on the moon and massive particle accelerators. These all required huge quantities of money and only government could come up with those sums. Those are examples of where I think that the money was well spent.
    Still, all of the future development in these areas has been carried out by private companies at a tiny fraction of the amount that governments spent. Look at the amount of funding NASA currently gets and how little it produces in comparison to new private companies that are going to provide the bulk of US launch capabilities in the near future.
    All government programs have a tendency to grow without limit as one can see from the current mess in the US. Every government program produces jobs for bureaucrats and bureaucrats seek to perpetuate their organization or increase its size forever. They are not subject to financial constraints of private companies and hence inefficiencies in government are legion.
    Productivity and cost effectiveness seem to be foreign concepts to governments who assume that if they run out of money they can just print what they need.
    Public education has gone from a laudable program to ensure that everyone was literate to a system which is basically a money grab by the teachers unions. What we need is someone with the balls of Ronald Regan who’d simply fire all the teachers and then totally rethink the concept of public education.

  18. David in Michigan, yours is a nuanced view of this graphic. I would like to expand on this if I may:
    “~34% of the population are receiving some type of welfare from the government (not counting government employees). While the stereo typical welfare queen immediately comes to mind in talking about welfare, I note that this includes some people who may also be employed (some receive food stamps or Medicaid while also employed at low paying jobs).”
    About 47 million Americans are on food stamps and nearly 24 million (and counting) are unemployed. The government is making work for itself and hoping like hell there is tax revenue to pay for it all.

  20. Pretty soon we won’t have to fly over the Atlantic Ocean to go to Greece; we’ll be able to drive south over the border to get there.

  22. phil at December 3, 2012 11:01 PM
    “Not necessarily. And whose calling for absolute government control of the economy. But to proclaim public100% bad, private 100% good is asinine.”
    Yeah just look at all them crown corporations we got….or such as the TVA in the US….
    Ontario Hydro is a signal example of efficiency (sarc/)

  23. peterj at 11:49 PM
    Excellent link, thank you.
    Still pretty sure we are as hooped here as anyone else in “the west”.
    India looks good, and other interesting stuff at that link.

  24. Utopia will be achieved when everyone relies entirely on government for their income, the Soviet Union is a shining example of that, or Detroit…

  25. And yes, Working for the government and being on welfare are the same thing.
    Maybe so many people wouldn’t be on welfare if the uber rich would create all those new jobs they were going to with the Bush tax cuts.
    Or right. That’s just bs. The middle class is who creates the jobs, and they’re busy being downsized into the welfare class.

  27. ref: government workers.
    When I worked for the feds in Ottawa I had already worked in industry, unlike almost everyone else in government. I got to asking myself “what are we doing today that makes life for the ordinary taxpayer better, safer or easier?” I shortly afterwards left the public service because the answer for myself and everyone I worked with was “NOTHING”
    Only at most 30 percent of civil servants do anything useful.

  29. phil, what you fail to understand is the source of the wealth. The public service uses wealth; it doesn’t make it. The public service is paid by our taxes.
    Wealth is the result of creating goods or services which are then sold on the market. The profit, above the costs of production, is ‘wealth’. The private system ought to take this profit and put it back into production. If the govt takes this profit to pay for its services then, wealth production ceases.

  30. Did I ‘mishear’ the other day. Calipornia has one third of their population either collecting welfare or food stamps. That is way worse than some of the numbers mentioned above.

  31. @Phil: ” The real parasites are the kulaks of this world, slurping at the trough from cradle to grave, truly adding nothing for what they take.”
    Kulaks?? Really!! What exactly does it mean for your political philosophy in using a communist derogatory term associated with the deaths of between 2 and 60 million Ukrainians at Gulags, by state mandated starvation, and just plain execution. (the number has been variously estimated. 10 million deaths seems to be the best estimate). Clarify please!

  32. David, just to clarify. It wasn’t just Ukrainians, even though they were the hardest hit, it was also the similar category of middle farmers throughout Russia that were targeted. The category kept getting ratcheted downward until anybody that might or did object to collectivization was declared a kulak.
    My paternal two great uncles and their sons were also designated as kulaks and sent to labour camps in the Gulags and became part of the statistic. A few were executed with a bullet in the back of the head. Most of the rest were worked to death and only a few returned home broken in health.

  33. So Ken, he was referring to you personally. I obviously did not make the connection….. so it goes.

  34. David, yes, and I’m not sure why he thinks Stalin did not get enough of us, but I also suspect that he would like to continue the policy here.
    He hates farmers.

  35. @ David in Michigan at December 4, 2012 4:53 PM
    In case you are new here and don’t know phil let me enlighten you. Phil hates all farmers and anything to do with farming. He only appears when the subject is farming of any kind. He probably eats things produced by farmers but never without cursing the food first. I don’t think he’s ever had a post without the words welfare bum and freeloader in it. We understand that phil must have had a traumatic experience with a farmer or farming but he wont share. Other than that he seems fairly normal.

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