Posted on 01/21/2011 9:31:55 AM PST by SeekAndFind
We’re No. 9!
America has slipped one spot since last year — from earth’s eighth-freest economy in 2010, according to the 2011 Index of Economic Freedom. This 17th annual report, jointly published by the Heritage Foundation and the Wall Street Journal, sifts through the wreckage caused by government’s turbocharged acceleration during the Bush-Obama years. America’s slump in the rankings (we’re down from No. 5 in 2008) confirms the urgent need for Washington to revitalize free markets and restrain government intervention.
Among the 179 countries examined in the Index, Hong Kong is ranked first, followed by Singapore, Australia, New Zealand, Switzerland, Canada, Ireland, and Denmark. These nations all outscored the U.S. across ten categories, including taxes, free trade, regulation, monetary policy, and corruption.
America barely made the top ten. Bahrain was tenth, with 77.7 points, one decimal point behind America’s 77.8 score. Chile reached No. 11 with 77.4, just 0.4 points behind the United States.
Even worse, with a score below 80, the U.S. is spending its second year as a “mostly free” economy. As it departed the family of “free” nations in 2010, it led the “mostly free” category. Even within this less-than-illustrious group, America now lags behind Ireland and Denmark.
How did our once-unassailable country wind up so winded?
“The national government’s role in the economy has expanded sharply in the past two years, and the federal budget deficit is extremely large, with gross public debt approaching 100 percent of GDP,” explain the Index’s authors, Terry Miller and Kim R. Holmes. “Interventionist responses to the economic slowdown have eroded economic freedom and long-term competitiveness. Drastic legislative changes in health care and financial regulations have retarded job creation and injected substantial uncertainty into business investment planning.”
Miller and Holmes also criticize Washington for abandoning the free-trade posture of earlier years, an area where Democrat William Jefferson Clinton boldly guided his party, starting with the NAFTA trade pact. Washington Democrats these days scorn Clinton’s enriching example. As Miller and Holmes write, “Leadership and credibility in trade also have been undercut by protectionist policy stances and inaction on previously agreed free-trade agreements with South Korea, Panama, and Colombia.”
On fiscal freedom, the Index rates the U.S. as below average. The top American federal income-tax rate is 35 percent, versus a worldwide average of 28.7 percent. At 35 percent, America’s federal corporate tax outpaces the world’s 24.8 percent average and increases U.S. exports#…#of jobs. America’s overall average tax burden was 26.9 percent of GDP, compared with 24.4 percent globally.
America also earns a below-average score for government spending. Worldwide, such expenditures average 33.5 percent of GDP; in the U.S., 38.9 percent.
Compare America with Rwanda, the Index’s most-improved nation. This landlocked African country leapfrogged 18 spots, from No. 93 in 2010 to No. 75 today. How?
“Rwanda scores relatively high in business freedom, fiscal freedom, and labor freedom,” Miller and Holmes observe. “Personal and corporate tax rates are moderate. With a sound regulatory framework that is conducive to private-sector development, Rwanda has achieved annual economic growth of around 7 percent over the past five years.”
As I noted on my visit there last month, Rwanda remains poor, with a long list of challenges. Yet there is no denying its self-confidence and unflagging commitment to pro-market modernization. Rwanda is moving on up.
America remains blessed with wealth, durable institutions, and creative, clever, industrious citizens. Yet its self-doubt is fueled by an insatiable state that constantly devours more of the nation’s output, and with little to show for its gobbling. Depleted, America stumbles downhill.
Miller and Holmes surveyed the globe and reached this conclusion: Rather than multi-billion-dollar stimuli and 2,000-page regulatory behemoths, “the best results are likely to be achieved instead through policy reforms that improve incentives that drive entrepreneurial activity, creating greater opportunities for investment and job growth.”
The path back to American prosperity and preeminence lies in the leadership of both parties in Washington abiding by the previous paragraph.
— New York commentator Deroy Murdock is a nationally syndicated columnist with the Scripps Howard News Service and a media fellow with the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace at Stanford University. Murdock visited Rwanda thanks to a grant from the SEVEN Fund of Cambridge, Mass.
No, the answer is higher tariffs. If we make a $100 television cost $125, and double the price of gasoline, the economy will boom.
We live in a corporate police state where The JP Morgue, The Goldman Sack, The Ben Nernank, GE, Disney, Google, GM/UAW et al loot the taxpayers and the treasury.
Meanwhile idiots enjoy the daily brainwashing in HD.
Let’s split it down the middle with the central planning fans. Let’s invade Prince Edward Island for living space for the homeless and a easy win, and print our way out of depression.
I agree. And also we need to raise taxes. And raise the minimum wage to $100 per hour. Then everyone will be rich. That’s the ticket!
The elite have to save themselves so that when the economy if and when it takes off, they can ‘guide’ the people to a thinner, joggier, brighter whiter smile labor force on the great, tasteful, pseudo classical plantations of the entrenched, generational leadership class.
We’ll all live in cutesie cottages( out back ), ride solar powered Segways, have free Prozac and easy towel handing out jobs by the vast pools were bi-partisan float amongst nymphs and tended lily pads.
One will NB that while these clowns are cheerleading the usual “lower taxes and regulations,” they’re conspicuously silent on WHICH regulations they’re wanting to cut.
That’s what I love about these types of clowns. Lots of pom-pom waving. Damn few specifics.
Here’s their stack of slideware to go with their pom-poms:
No specifics on what to cut in there, either.
How about this piece of news...
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/21/us/politics/21spend.html?ref=business
G.O.P. Bloc Presses Leaders to Slash Even More
EXCERPT
House Republican leaders confronted pressure from conservatives on Thursday to take more aggressive steps to cut federal spending, with a large group of lawmakers calling for outlays to be slashed by $2.5 trillion over the next decade, far more than the party has sought so far.
The proposal, from the Republican Study Committee, a conservative bloc that counts more than two-thirds of House Republicans as members, calls for immediate reductions of at least $100 billion, compared with cuts in the current fiscal year of up to $80 billion being sought by party leaders.
The $2.5 trillion in cuts would exclude the military, and would not touch the big entitlement programs, Medicare and Social Security. As a result, its effect on the entire array of government programs, among them education, domestic security, transportation, law enforcement and medical research, would be nothing short of drastic.
CLICK ABOVE LINK FOR THE REST
You might want to read this document PRESENTED TO CONGRESS BY REPUBLICAN CONSERVATIVE BLOC :
http://rsc.jordan.house.gov/UploadedFiles/JORDAN_004_xml.pdf
TITLE : PROPOSAL TO REDUCE FEDERAL SPENDING BY $2.5 TRILLION THROUGH FISCAL YEAR 2021
a) Chump change. That amounts to what, $200B/year for 10 years?
We’ve increased the US national debt by over $1 trillion (with a “T” - Carl Sagan would have to say “One Thooossssaaaand Billliyun...”) in 2008, 2009 and 2010.
We’re projected to have trillion dollar deficits for at least the next two years.
This isn’t a time to be talking about cutting $100 to $200B/year from the national budget for 10 years in a row. This is the time to be talking about cutting $500 billion THIS YEAR.
Because if we don’t, we don’t have 10 years to deal with this. The Baby Boomer retirement wave and draw-downs on SS and Medicare will explode the deficits in their own right by 2017. We have to have the situation dealt with by then.
And the GOP plan won’t do it.
b) the Fannie/Freddie portions of that legislation do little to prevent a recurrence of the losses being swallowed by the taxpayers already.
What they need to do is reinstate the 20% down payment requirement for a conforming mortgage that the GSE’s buy. No exceptions.
c) they fail to take on the duplication of federal home lending - if both Fannie and Freddie are government owned, why have both? Freddie was created to provide “competition” for Fannie. They should be merged into one and duplication removed.
d) They could have gotten much more aggressive with federal property disposal. The feds keep wrapping their arms around more and more land (especially in the west), which increases the budgets for the BLM, USFWS, USFS, et al. Time to dispose of lands controlled by the Department of the Interior, as originally envisioned in the 19th century.
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