What Went Wrong

USA Over and Out

Whatever spin U.S. politicians may put on it during this election year, the U.S. as we have known it is gone, a casualty of a half century of bad policy from both Democratic and Republican parties. In this piece, the RCJ plots our timeline toward disintegration of a once-great nation. It will be useful in imagining a new and better way of running a country that, to work in the future, will need to be a complete departure from business as usual.READ MORE...

As context for the RCJ platform for renewal of the U.S., watch "Crips and Bloods: Made in America", which powerfully captures the entire arc of what has gone wrong with the U.S., from glorious promise through pitiless despair.

Basic Errors of Management

Police Force “Bombing” in Iraq

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Anatomy of a Screwing: Status Quo Style

Barring significant changes in the way the U.S. Congress operates, there is next to no chance of any legislative outcomes that would alter the trajectory that the U.S. is on. Actually, "trajectory" is the wrong word, as it implies a certain upward and outward momentum, which doesn't actually exist. The path the U.S. economy is on is more like the gravitational pull on an apple, loosened from the tree it grew on, which is to say "straight down".

Senate Kills Buffet Rule

When Do We Foreclose?

When will the majority population of the U.S. finally rise up and take control?

By RAR

U.S. Senate Republicans have done the expected, laid down their marker, and killed the "Buffet Rule" that would have made changes to a tax code presently under which millionaires pay a lower percentage of income tax than do wage earners. In other words, those who have less, pay more of their total income while those who have much, much more pay far less of their total income.

Here is Arizona Sen. Jon Kyl's math-based logic in countering the measure: 

"You've got the top 10 percent of taxpayers paying 70 percent of all the taxes, earning 45 percent of the income. Those are certainly the wealthy, and they're certainly paying a big share... How about less wealthy? The bottom 95 percent -- in other words, everybody but the top 5 percent -- pays 41.3 percent of income taxes, earns 65 percent of the money, of the income. Is this fair?"

The correct answer would be that Kyl has provided inadequate information to make such a subjective judgment. One would need to include an apriori  value; some variable that would capture the association between Kyl's "fuzzy math" and the actual experience of what it means to live as subsets of those formulations.

Seriously, does anyone other than hardcore Republicans believe in Kyl's "free ride" theory? That is based on the notion that the extremely poor - the unemployed bottom of the income ladder, who don't earn enough to qualify to pay income tax - "...have little direct incentive to care whether the government is spending and taxing too much. Maybe that's why the president has no problem with even more Americans getting a free ride."

House Republicans intend to leverage the momentum of the Senate decision by proposing a tax cut measure. Democrats vow to raise the Buffet Rule again and again leading up to election day, knowing it will not pass, but also knowing that it is the public position.

Though the Buffet Rule wouldn't lower taxes for anyone and would only effect people earning $1 million dollars a year - and then not at the maximum proposed 30 percent rate until incomes reach $2 million - it is supported by 72 percent of those surveyed in a CNN/ORC poll released April 16.

This is a grim future, when in a representative democracy the politics of Washington D.C. and the policy this dysfunction produces are so completely out of alignment with the will of the American people. This is clearly systemic, the output of a thought machine in which the gears have been stripped by conscious choice.

HOW LONG CAN THIS GO ON?

It is hard to see what the Republican Party, to the extent that it remains a monolithic mouthpiece for "conservative" policy, can possibly hope to gain with the weird set of politics they have pursued in this election year. They have launched head-scratcher crusades against women's contraception, government interference in religious freedom, the poor and long-term unemployed, voting rights in general, union labor agreements, and "fairness" provisions in revisions to the tax code. What they have sought to end - labor negotiation rights, government regulations, social safety net programs - far out-number what they have sought to begin, beyond the austerity implied by their focus on deficit reduction, all at the expense of those who need help the most, which in the case of Medicare and Social Security programs - the bulk of domestic spending - are the vast majority of America's citizens.

So how can Republicans hope to win by opposing the will of the majority of the voting public?

Like the Taliban in Afghanistan, they intend to wait us out. That is the core strength both share: they are in their comfort zones (all things being relative), and neither need go anywhere. Eventually the enemy (we the people) will become bereft of will and resources and give up the fight and accept things as they are, i.e., awful. It is a win for the empowered if they simply maintain the status quo. When you have the advantage - the Republicans with the support of the powerful financial elite, the Taliban with the support of home turf infrastructure and face-to-face influence - you have already won. Freezing in place is fine.

The question in U.S. public policy is: How long will the majority of the U.S. population put up with income disparity and inequities in those areas that define the quality and potential of their individual lives? And how long will it be before people finally determine that there are no political solutions when the policy machine is hopelessly corrupted by money, which is the leverage the empowered are fighting to maintain, and influence.

The Occupy movement has captured the frustration that is building among politically disenfranchised people who recognize that freezing in place means they have no immediate solution to their employment and income security issues, and certainly no way to chart a personal, reliably-workable long-term solution.

The linchpin of the freeze things in place strategy is the Constitution that, at a high level, defines the system under which we live. It is one of the most over-blown examples of compromise to leveraged forces in all of charter documentation history. It has all the windy and rhetoric that exemplifies the American spirit, and provides the superficial skeletal framework required to let us believe we have a system. But it long ago became obsolete, and this fact alone should checkmate any claim to the contrary:

In the Senate of the United States, one Senator from the state of Wyoming represents roughly 131,000 registered Wyoming voters. One Senator from the state of California represents roughly 8.6 million registered voters. Both Senators cast an equal number of votes - one - on every issue, so in practice the voice of a single Wyoming resident is equal to those of a group of 608 California registered voters.

Dick Cheney's one home district voice - and in Wyoming, this is very possibly an anti-government zealot living with a gun collection - is 608 times louder than any one voice coming out of my home district. And I would lay odds that any one registered voter in my district is more likely to support progressive policy than any one voter in Dick Cheney's Wyoming.

Now consider that neither Wyoming nor California even existed when the U.S. Constitution was drafted, and that this screwed up system of representation isn't even specified for those places, or for any country vaguely resembling present-day United States of America. Far from being some gift from supreme makers, the Constitution has become a weird genetic inheritance, like a cancer that resists solutions.

And big surprise! That's what the Constitution was from the first: a device to protect the status quo of wealthy Virginians while paying lip service to the representational demands of the rest. The only time it has ever really worked to advantage of the majority of the population was after Henry Ford started paying wages that allowed workers to buy things (Fords) and after the economic collapse of the 1930s, after which the U.S. ran economically rough shod over devastated competitors, wealthy were paying income taxes of 90 percent, and wage disparities were a fraction of what they are today.

Calls for amendments to the Constitution, or even a Constitutional Convention, won't fix the system that would sponsor such activities. It would be the equivalent of feeding new files into a computer corrupted by viruses that turn all data against the user.

So what is left? There are a number of action steps that could be taken immediately to address near-term needs. (The RCJ has enumerated these at Fix America Now.) But systemically, we need to somehow break out of an 18th Century model and move to a 21st Century design, which will likely happen through some technological interface that gives more direct voice to citizens in our democracy while preserving those aspects of institutional integrity (sharing of classified information, for example, which should probably be limited to small groups of vetted and trusted professionals) that provide common sense safeguards from threat.

California's disastrous commitment to governing through voter-approved propositions has proven to be an unworkable solution that has tended to produce programs without funding. The public voice, influenced by the systemic inputs of Television advertising, Radio and Internet propaganda, is inconsistently informed and cannot be trusted, in the present environment, with policy decision-making processes. That fact, referencing the California experience and financial disaster that state is in, is really all that needs to be said about the usefulness of continuing the status quo in American politics.

It is not working and it never will, so long as the business of running America is conducted as an auction, with the buyers setting public policy, and we continue to make a sacred cow out of the U.S. Constitution, which will no longer even function as a mechanism for its own repair. - RAR

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PUBLISHED PREVIOUSLY AT WWW.RARWRITER.COM

• Is the War for the Soul of the U.S. Finally Over?

• Insanity

• Sleep, Narcissus, Sleep - Obama's Lack of Engagement

• Lost - What the hell is wrong with us?

• Robert Reich and the Anti-Stimulus

• President Barack Obama's Freshman Year Report Card

• America In Transition - From the Jetsons to the Flintstones

• Bizarre Arguments File

• How Do You Know?

• Would That Be Proper?

• Are We Bailing Out and Incenting the Right People?

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Posted June 2, 2010

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Posted September 30, 2009

BIZARRE ARGUMENTS FILE

Just occasionally, here in the Bizarro World, one will hear someone stake out a position with an argument so bizarre that it just calls out for special recognition. Here at RARWRITER.com, we will honor these strange testimonies to human ingenuity-in-denial by adding them to the "Bizarre Arguments File".

We Can't Tamper With Health Care Because It Is One-Sixth of Our Economy

That health care is one-sixth of our economy is exactly the reason we should tamper with health care. It shouldn't be more than 10 percent of our economy (against Gross Domestic Product), as it is in every other country in the world (except East Timor), but it is 16 percent in the U.S. and growing at a rate 4 times that of our ability to pay for it.

Ben Stein Says Save, But Not Too Much

The curmudgeon actor-economist and Republican activist Ben Stein was on CNN recently talking about the importance of buying stuff you want, rather than investing for a rainy day. He told about spending $15,000 many years ago on a boat, when he could have purchased stock in Berkshire-Hathaway that today is valued at over $100,000. Stein says he has gotten so much pleasure out of that boat that he would spend his money that same way again "in a heartbeat". This probably explains why Stein is more actor than economist: he didn't bet that he'd live to a future date, when he could have had that boat plus another $85K.

The Second Amendment Guarantees the Right of U.S. Citizens to Bear Arms

The founding fathers of the United States were so smart, they crafted language for the Second Amendment to the Constitution that is so staggeringly awful that 230 years later its meaning is still interpreted in accordance with every reader's personal politics. In 2008 a 5-to-4 vote in the Supreme Court - right along party lines in a court that was imagined, by those same founding fathers mentioned earlier (the ones who couldn't write a simple, declarative sentence) - determined that Americans have a right to own guns for self-defense and hunting, based on that baffling Second Amendment language. The Second Amendment was crafted at a time when less than 1 percent of the 4 million or so people living in the U.S. actually owned a weapon. The French imported weapons to the U.S. so the Revolutionary warriors would have muskets to fight the British with, but by 1806 there were still only 370,000 "guns" in the country. Washington's army had a hard time arming new enlistments because when departing soldiers returned to their homes they typically took their government-issued weapons with them.

Switzerland Was Spared Nazi Occupation in WWII Because the Swiss Were Armed

Hitler's Nazi Army rolled over Europe in the late 1930s like a tsunami, whole nations falling before their might within days or weeks of the arrival of their Blitzkreig. Not Switzerland, though. Pro-gun advocates love to point out that the Nazi's feared the mountainous terrain and the fact that every Swiss household owned a rifle. Supposedly some German strategist described the Swiss defense plan as simply "fire two shots and go home", anticipating such a hail of bullets coming down on Nazi forces, trapped among the rocks and the trees amid all of these heavily armed Swiss, that it would be fool-hardy to attempt to take the country. On another front, they apparently had no similar concerns regarding the Russian army.

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Posted September 16, 2009

The Racism "Non-Starter"

It is hardly surprising, with Barack Obama in the White House, that the word "racism" is uttered frequently these days. It is one of the most popular of condemnations in any season, but the election of the nation's "first Black president" just makes it a natural now in everyday conversation. While Obama was running for the office, Obama supporters tended to brand anyone who asked tough questions about their candidate as "racist", which I think is in part responsible for why the national media handled Obama the candidate with kid gloves. On the other hand, former President Jimmy Carter sees racism in the anti-Obama rhetoric accompanying the health care debate, and still others, like Rush Limbaugh, believes that Obama is himself a racist.

This largely valueless word's universal facility for putting people of every color on the defensive is almost without equal. (There may be equally powerful and dexterous words, but they don't race to mind.). The visceral source of its power must lie among the nexus of concepts like fear and guilt, but Merriam-Webster Dictionary provides this literal guidance on the word:

Main Entry: rac·ism
Pronunciation: \ˈrā-ˌsi-zəm also -ˌshi-\
Function: noun
Date: 1933
1 : a belief that race is the primary determinant of human traits and capacities and that racial differences produce an inherent superiority of a particular race
2 : racial prejudice or discrimination

— rac·ist \-sist also -shist\ noun or adjective

I think that is an obsolete definition, but we are weighted by "recent" history.  Its derivation goes back to related, but now "biologically extinct", words like "racialism". The word "racism" became common in the 1930s as a favorite concept in Nazi literature and in their ideas about Saxon superiority. As we still have people living among us who experienced the wrath of Nazi racial intolerance, that word still carries the stink of what such thinking wrought.

On the other hand, it's a Black thing. In the U.S., when we think of "racists" we think of white supremacists subjugating Blacks, unless you are Rush Limbaugh and feel the pain of being discriminated against by Blacks. Latinos feel racially discriminated against, and I have heard Filipinos speak openly about it, as in "Is he a racist?"

My guess is that one's "respect" for the word is like a Voodoo thing, that if you believe in Voodoo it works, and if you believe you are subject to racial discrimination, that too works. Your capacity to withstand such a destructive force is no doubt tied to the extent to which you are subjugated in your daily life. As a White guy, I feel the unreasoned discriminations of other people, but it doesn't have much impact. Were I of another color I would no doubt feel differently, though I will never know exactly what that might mean. One cannot avoid one's own race.

I don't think it matters.

I think people, as a whole, are largely past interacting with other people based on considerations of their races. Cultural tendencies aside, along with a natural human tendency to mimic the communication patterns of others, I think what people respond to in others is the quality of their interaction. That has nothing to do with race. If an interaction with another person is pleasant, rational, logical, friendly and supportive, or almost any one of those, nobody has any problems with anyone, regardless of color.

What people hate is "stupid people" who display none of those qualities, i.e., people who are unpleasant, irrational, illogical, unfriendly and unsupportive. There is no color a person can have that can somehow overcome any of those behaviors or characteristics. Or, conversely, no color that can justify same.

Getting rid of this "Nazi word", used way too frequently and never to any positive effect, wouldn't get rid of people who feel inherently superior. On the other hand, we should all self monitor its use out of existence, because presently it is empowered so as to be an immediate non-starter, a charge that renders all subsequent conversation unlikely.- RAR

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From March 1, 2009

And What Is "Knowing"?

How Do You Know?

That is what the banks and financial institutions are saying to critics of the bailouts, who doubt that the money is doing any good. "How do you know," they ask, "that things wouldn't now be much worse had we not have had those packages?"

How do we know?

Usually we know only what we are shown and what we are told, but in this new stimulation age big bail-out beneficiaries like the American Insurance Group (AIG) aren't telling us where the taxpayer-provided funding they have received thus far has gone. It has been disbursed among "counterparties" who have benefited from triggers in AIG's contracts that guarantee cash collateral if the value of AIG shares fall to lower than certain threshold levels. And who are these "counterparties"? AIG won't divulge this, to the government they have accepted $180 Billion from, because they need to protect their "confidential transactions."

The government accepts this baloney because there are all kinds of things it prefers never to divulge, usually using equally vague "national security" arguments, and besides, with AIG there is the Trade Secrets Act, which gives cover to confidential transactions.

It sort of makes you wonder what the order of things is, doesn't it? What is the "chain of command"?

In fact, Bill Moyers Journal recently did a show that explored whether or not the government has any power over the financial community, and who is actually in charge of whom. It appears that big business has simply taken over the country, using government institutions as mere support functions. But, we just don't know and can only speculate.

We aren't sure that we are gaining ground on this current economic miasma. Barack Obama tells us we are in the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression of the 1930s, and that the only way to stem the flow of red ink is to spend borrowed money, first by propping up the banks. But yesterday several banks started returning the stimulus money saying they don't need it and they don't want the government to be making decisions along with them, which they say renders every business decision a "political" one. The Obama administration is supposedly preparing a new round of stimulus, but House Leader Nancy Pelosi and Senate Leader Harry Reid, both of Obama's party, are saying there will be no more stimulus programs, at least not as it appears now.

This trend of "not knowing" things really took hold with the G.W. Bush administration, and its bizarre calculation that the 9-11 attacks could be used to justify an invasion of Iraq, even though it would mean phonying up some additional justifications, like Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, which turned out not to exist. We aren't sure now if we are winning the war in Iraq, and though we have a plan for extricating troops, we have experts who imagine us having a major presence in Iraq in 2025. We are pretty certain we are not winning in Afghanistan - no invading army ever has - but we are sending more troops there, though we doubt that it will be enough. One military report that came out this week suggests that it could take as many as 600,000 troops on the ground to secure Afghanistan, but then the war has already bled over into Pakistan, so who knows what that means?

We aren't sure about the Pakistan government, who has just ceded the Swat Valley to the Taliban. We aren't sure what would happen if the Pakistani government were to fail, or what the effects of a power struggle in that nuclear-armed nation, hostile to neighboring India, might mean.

We don't know how stable North Korea is, amid rumors of a power struggle in that desperate country as the health of the dubious Kim Jong-Il comes under doubt.

Closer to home, we don't know that Mexico isn't about to become a failed state, plowed under by powerful drug cartels that some reports say have driven the government to the brink of collapse. In fact, we don't know that we shouldn't be positioning our distracted military on our southern borders, rather than halfway around the globe in Asia Minor.

Barack Obama promised to bring change to Washington D.C., but so far he appears only to have staffed his administration with people from "the old Washington", particularly from the Clinton years. It is unclear what that means. Obama promised to watch the budgets coming out of Congress to cut unnecessary spending, but in passing the biggest budget in the history of the world, he declined a watchdog role saying this budget is "last year's business" and that in the future things will be done differently. But how do we know?

How do we know that the stimulus money will have any effect before the economy rebounds and renders parts of the $2 Trillion budget "unnecessary spending"?

How do we know that ear marks don't produce stimulative effects?

Berkshire Hathaway, under the direction of the "Oracle of Omaha", Warren Buffet, lost 62 percent of its value in the last year. The Oracle apparently just didn't know that some of what they were doing with their portfolios would turn out to be wrong. On CNBC and the Comedy Channel - now there is a pairing for our times - financial advisor Jim Cramer is feuding with The Daily Show host/comedian Jon Stewart, who called him on his advice to buy Bear Stearns just weeks before the company collapsed. Cramer didn't know what was going to happen, he just offered advice.

We all grew up, I think, with this sense that the world, or at least the U.S. part of it, would always be fine because it was run by mature, educated adults who had a handle on complexities the rest of us lacked the educational backgrounds to fathom, but it didn't matter because certain people at the top knew what they were doing. That optimistic, youthful sense of reality fades in all people as they gain age and experience, and it is probably why people tend to become more conservative and more "Republican" as they get older. I don't know that we ever thought the day would come when we would simply not know what to do with ourselves and our institutions, or even what is real and really going on.

But, that day has come.

We have been swept along by technological change until our world has become complex beyond the capacities of mere human comprehension. (In some quarters, this is known as having reached "Singularity". Our machines have taken over and who knows what will happen next?). We surrendered years ago to some notion that people in power were there because they were smarter than us and the best we could do was trust that they knew what they were doing. We could enjoy the benefits of their wheelings and dealings, which brought us improvements in production techniques and business models, and big box stores like Walmart and low prices on consumer items, and electronic gadgets that expanded the neural numbness that had first set in with the television age. As wages stagnated for working people (beginning in the early '70s) "we the people" - the uneducated, or those of us educated only to the liberal arts, as became the trend at universities in that period - got stupider and stupider. And while that was happening the smart guys on Wall Street got more and more devious in their deceptions. They got the Glass-Steagall Act overturned, which threw the doors of financial institutions wide open to creative corruption, and they ultimately worked in collusion to create financial products so convoluted that other business analysts could only speculate as to how they must work.

Did they work? Who knows?

Who knows how "bad" things are? General Motors was on the brink of bankruptcy last week, and this week offered that they don't need the bail-out money that had been promised to keep them afloat for just a while longer. There are Republican states in the south that are declining Obama's stimulus monies out of philosophical choice. Don't they need the money when things are as dire as the Obama administration assures us they are? I mean, these are southern states, always poor and always in need of help! Now during the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression they are able to say "No thanks"? Does that make sense? We just don't know?

Where has all the money gone? How about all those billions of dollars Bernie Madoff bilked people out of? Where is it?

There was a part of me that suspected that Bush's initial bailout - the Paulson Plan - was really just the Bushies looting the treasury on their way out of town. I'm still not sure that isn't what is happening, except now the Democrats in control of Congress are grabbing the same opportunity to fund programs they have wanted to fund for years but could not previously get support to do. And Obama, the most highly compromised candidate of the Wall Street cabal in U.S. history, just keeps talking and talking, playing the role he assumed years ago, as a really young dude, narcissistic enough to be able to keep repeating what lands on my ears as nauseating bullshit.

But who knows? Obama and Geithner and Summers and Orszag and Romer may be on to something. I wonder what it will be? - RAR

Would That Be Proper?

Economics writer Robert Kaiser believes he knows, somewhat precisely, when it happened: when our elected leaders, at the national level, sold "America" to the big campaign donors. Kaiser was on Moyer's PBS show on February 20, 2009, and identified 1982 as the "crossover" year. I sense it happened far earlier than that, probably around the time the Romans established their Senate, when moneyed interests began shoveling cash into the pockets of political leaders. That all took place behind the scenes, however, residing in the realm of things we suspected were happening but didn't know about for certain. The change that Kaiser refers to is the moment that politicians and their advisors decided that there was no staying on the down low any longer, because the need was for money to buy that most public of all things, campaign advertising. The "corruption" of the system was going Prime Time, putting the onus on spin-meisters and talking heads to sell a blanket of obfuscating fog so the public wouldn't find it that easy to understand what was happening. To Kaiser, it all began with the final corruption of the already spiritually corrupted Senator John Stennis (D-Miss). Here is how Kaiser described it to Moyers, from the transcript of the February 28 Bill Moyers' Journal:

ROBERT KAISER: The falling away of taboos, the changing standards in Washington. The "everybody does it" syndrome, which has taken control there. I think has made moral judgments really difficult in our nation's capital. People shy away from saying, "That's just wrong." There's a wonderful story here from John Stennis. It's a real signal of what was happening. It's from the '80s, '82. John Stennis is running for the seventh term in the Senate. He's never spent more than $5,000 on a campaign before. You knew Stennis, a lot of your viewers don't remember him. He was a vicious racist from Mississippi, a bad guy on the race issue. But on other things, a very serious, very smart man. And interestingly, the first chairman of an Ethics Committee in the Senate, believed in ethics. He was in trouble, because a young guy called Haley Barbour, then 34 years old, I think, was going to run against him. First time he had a serious opponent.

And his friends in the Senate were scared. Russell Long of Louisiana and Lloyd Bentsen of Texas, particularly. They literally hired a political consultant for Stennis, which he never would have dreamed of, I don't think, sent this guy down to Mississippi to check out the situation. It's a charming Southerner named Ray Strother. Anyway, he comes back and explains to Stennis that it's going to be an ugly campaign. That this Barbour is going to make a lot of TV commercials, which is just becoming the main vehicle for campaigning. He's going to accuse you of being too old and too feeble to run for another term. We're going to have to respond to him. We're going to have to make our own TV commercials. It's going to cost $2 or $3 million.

And Stennis was shocked. He said, "How could I raise so much money?" And Ray started to explain, "Well, you're going to go to the defense contractors, who you've helped as the chairman of the Armed Services Committee for so long. And you're going to ask them for contributions." And Stennis utters this memorable line, which I love. He looks at Strother and says, "Young man? Would that be proper?" And then he answers it, "No, it wouldn't be proper. I hold life and death power over those companies. I will not solicit their money," he says. But he did. And they got it. And the commercials were made. And they won the election. And I think that was 1982. And I think that was sort of when we lost the war here. From then on, "Would that be proper?" is a question we don't hear very often.

- RAR

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From December 2008

Counting Receipts in America:

Are We Bailing Out and Incenting the Right People?

Maybe, this holiday season, everyone should skip a viewing or two of whatever Christmas fare is being offered on the Hallmark channel and instead spend a little time exploring the Internal Revenue Service website at www.irs.gov . It is fun like you have never had, a treasure trove of memories that will last this and many more holiday seasons, as long as stores are still in business and bankers rule the world. (That first caveat references an item of real concern, the second not so much.)

Here are some of the fun things there to learn:

• The IRS compiles revenue data for about 27.5 million businesses, each of which it categorizes into one of 20 business sectors.

• For some reason, the IRS only has complete data available through 2003, but in 2003 the revenues received by all businesses totaled about $24.5 trillion and, on a percentage of revenue total basis, that was accounted for as follows:

   

  BUSINESS SECTOR	TOT RECEIPTS($)	PCT OF TOT
  Wholesale and Retail Trade	6,529,996,825,000	26.69%
  Manufacturing	6,183,040,355,000	25.28%
  Finance and Insurance	2,882,359,092,000	11.78%
  Construction	1,519,215,932,000	6.21%
  Information	1,116,078,845,000	4.56%
  Professional, Scientific and Technical Services	1,071,918,767,000	4.38%
  Health Care and Social Assistance	716,377,314,000	2.93%
  Utilities	715,189,885,000	2.92%
  Transportation and Warehousing	701,730,444,000	2.87%
  Management of Companies (Holding Companies)	694,636,451,000	2.84%
  Accommodation, food services, and drinking places	547,853,588,000	2.24%
  Administrative and support and waste management and remediation services	477,545,664,000	1.95%
  Real Estate and Rental and Leasing	404,363,546,000	1.65%
  Mining	276,452,553,000	1.13%
  Other Services	258,819,188,000	1.06%
  Agriculture, forestry, fishing, and hunting	168,676,661,000	0.69%
  Arts, Entertainment and Recreation	151,838,028,000	0.62%
  Educational Services	38,945,973,000	0.16%
  Religious, grantmaking, civic, professional and similar organizations	3,452,032,000	0.01%
  Unclassified Industries	3,459,621,000	0.01%

The first thing I notice about those numbers above are that trade and manufacturing accounted for about 52% of all revenues in 2003, the last fully reported year. This is of interest because those two sectors represent the "heart" of American enterprise, the production and sale of goods. This, to use a tired but apt cliché, is where the rubber meets the road for most American workers; "apt " given the sad state of affairs in the U.S. automobile manufacturing industry, which is having trouble even putting rubber on wheels, let alone "the road."

• Revenue from Individual Income accounts for about 51.7 percent of IRA tax revenues, with Business Income accounting for about 48.3 percent. Otherwise, America's workforce is contributing to the nation's treasury a little better than equally with their employers.

These numbers are particularly interesting to kick around given this season of high-end economists looking at the same and more recent information and making big decisions about America's, and Americans', futures. These are not "near future" considerations they are dealing with, however much people may be focused on "how long this recession will last," but rather "long term" changes in our place in the global economic community.

The table below provides an interesting snapshot of the ten largest economies in the world. In 2003, the nearly $14 trillion U.S. economy was nearly twice that of our nearest competitor, China, but the gap is closing rapidly, and this table offers a simple explanation - "simple" because the complexities of even comparing economic realities from one country to the next are still only being captured as concepts in various economic theories. The IRS, which is the source of this information below, likes the "Purchasing Power Parity" idea (see footnote below table) that essentially compares apples to oranges and comes up with a common "value," which of course is ridiculous. But anyway...

As this table shows, some economies are more balanced in the contributions of their primary economic sectors than are others. China and India are providing more balanced economies and they are the countries that are experiencing the greatest growth in GDP. 

¹There are a couple ways of looking at Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and this is based on the "Purchasing Power Parity" theory that "uses the long-term equilibrium exchange rate of two currencies to equalize their purchasing power." Go to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purchasing_power_parity for one of the most confusing and possibly worthless definitions of a theory ever written by anyone anywhere!

The table above will look radically different in 2008 figures, as the more "mature" service-oriented economies in the U.S., Japan, Germany, U.K. and France slide into abysmally less robust territory as manufacturing shows a continued drift toward the Asian markets.

I might encourage you to click here to read Riding the "S" Curve in the U.S.A., an essay that addresses the changes and reinventions required of entities of all kinds as they experience development.