As I will continue to say until I am blue in the face, you can’t rather suddenly add 3.5 billion people to the free market (half the world’s population) and not expect the 700 million people in the developed world to remain competitive at dramatically higher wages than those accepted by the new arrivals.
Last night I had a horrifying dream that a group of well-intentioned middle-aged people who could not distinguish between a domain name and an IP address were trying to regulate the Internet.
As bad as their politics has got, Americans could always comfort themselves with the knowledge that their business leaders, entrepreneurs and workers were the most dynamic and innovative in the world. But they may look back on 2011 and see three events that undermine that story: the downgrade of America’s credit rating; the last flight of the space shuttle; and Mr Jobs’s death.
Yes, small businesses account for 65% of net job creation in the US.
But the Small Business Administration’s Office of Advocacy that publishes those statistics defines small businesses as all companies with fewer than 500 employees. With that definition, 99.6% of the 4.8 million private employers in the US are small businesses.
So I would say: largest 0.4% employers create 35% of all net jobs, and that’s precisely the issue with long-term job (non-)growth.
Most European countries have total tax revenues over GDP above 40%. In the US, total tax revenues (federal, state and local) are about 25% of GDP.
And yet Republicans keep vetoing any tax raise. Go figure.
Fiat justitia, et pereat mundus
