After castigating the Tea Party in the most ridiculous terms a few weeks ago (Tea Party’s War on America), Joe Nocera has something useful to say in today’s column about the ridiculous handling of the new Boeing plant in South Carolina.

Credit: Earl Wilson/The New York Times

Of all the lugheaded things the Obama administration has done in the way of regulation, this has to be one of the most obvious and most obviously hurtful to the economy. It is absurd that filing was even made by the NLRB, much less that they have pursued it.

As Nocera says:

“The law, to be sure, forbids a company from retaliating against a union. But the word “retaliation” suggests direct payback — a company shutting down a factory after a strike, for instance. Boeing did nothing like that. It not only hasn’t laid off a single worker in Washington State, it has added around 3,000 new ones. Seven out of every 10 Dreamliners will be assembled in Puget Sound.”

I should also note Nocera is not blanketly admonishing Dems on regulations – he thinks just this one situation has gone too far. He goes on to say that Republicans are blocking a lot of other regulations that would actually create jobs. He says he will write about that situation after Labor Day. I can’t really envision too many regulations that are net job creators, but we shall see what he’s got in mind.

Source: How Democrats Hurt Jobs

Very sanctimonious op-ed piece in the NYT indicting the GOP for tough times for state and local governments. This is the kind of thing that drives economic conservatives crazy.

Source: New York Times: A Growing Gloom for States and Cities

“Washington should have been trying to find a way to help states avoid the layoffs and cutbacks that have contributed heavily to the high unemployment rate.”

“The Republicans who produced this artificial crisis, and are responsible for its effects, say they would like nothing more than to see a reduction in state as well as federal spending. That is where government hits closest to home, affecting the size of classrooms, the bulbs in streetlights, the asphalt in potholes, and the lines in emergency rooms.”

I have two problems with this.

First, here and elsewhere liberals lament the loss of any amount of gov’t jobs even as the job losses in the private sector are many, many times larger – at least 10:1 if not a lot higher.

Here is a chart showing North Carolina data. It shows that in the state during the period of the Great Recession, 311,400 private sector jobs were lost (8.90% loss) while public sector has actually added 500 jobs (0.07% gain).

Source: Carolina Journal: Government Jobs Untouched by the Great Recession

I have seen this type of data before at the national level, but not having any luck finding it just now.

Ah, here’s something recent that shows percentage change in employment in private sector vs. state and local governments (still looking for Federal).

Source: Nelson A. Rockefeller Institute of Government, at the University at Albany: State and Local Government Employment Shows Broad, Continuing Declines

So we see that after initially rising during the heart of the recession, state and local governments have now been contracting for some months. Sure, this is an issue, but even after recovering from the deepest trough, private employment is still down over 5% whereas public employment is down by only 2%. Is that really so unfair given the severity of what we are going thru?

And here’s some reasonably current data showing federal employment: it’s up!! 98,000 more federal government jobs at the end of 2010 than at the outset of the recession. Yikes. That’s totally ridiculous. Even worse, most of those jobs are probably new regulatory positions to implement rules to clamp down on the private sector. Ugh.

Source: George Mason University: Even Accounting for Census, Federal Employment Grows During Recession

Then my second problem is the unquestioned assumption that the federal gov’t has the obligation to subsidize states so heavily even as many of them have grossly overspent just like the Feds. States need to be figuring out how to tighten their belts just like everybody else. If they don’t have enough money, they should figure out how to deliver more with less – businesses have been doing for decades. It is a skill set government needs to learn – and fast.

Mark Helperin of Time magazine published this quote from Mitt Romney:

“When you see what this president has done to the economy in just three years, you know why America doesn’t want to find out what he can do in eight.”

Darn funny!

And, of course, quite right. Obama is an economic disaster. No feel for how business is done and no respect for capitalism.

Original source: http://thepage.time.com/#ixzz1UCC9el3e

As part of this massive debt ceiling debate, I’ve been wondering how much income tax revenue is actually taken in by the Treasury and how much of that is paid by each income group.

Found a chart from the Tax Foundation that shows this.

Original source: TaxFoundation.org

This is awesome stuff. If you combine it with other data, you know that the group most vilified by the media are the folks in the Top 1%. These are the guys who make over $250,000 a year (top 1-5% make on avg $211K, top 5-10% make $127K).

So let’s look at the Top 1%:

• 1.4M households
• $1.6T aggregate annual income
• $392B total income tax paid (38% of total income taxes)
• 23.3% aggregate tax rate

So the gov’t debt is running at $1.2T+ per year (varies by year and actual data seems fuzzy) and the left seems to argue that we can close this gap by simply taxing the wealthy more.

Can we really cover that gap with higher taxes on the Top 1% as they suggest? I think this data shows we can’t. We’d have to tax the Top 1% at about 75% to cover the debt. I’m sure liberals would love it, but that doesn’t seem feasible to me – or it isn’t feasible for long.

Here’s why: if you take 75% of their income, then their average annual after-tax earnings fall to ~$285K / year. That’s a darn good income, of course, but it isn’t real wealth and it means they’ve not got the kind funds needed to make the types of investments we need wealthy folks to be making in new companies, new technologies, etc. It would also reduce the amount they could give to their foundations to near zero, so you can write-off all the great work that these groups do.

So maybe we can’t do 75%, but what if you were to double their taxes? That would bring in only another ~$400B per year. That’d be helpful, for sure, and maybe even fair, but we still would have a shortfall of ~$800B per year, every year. That’s a lot.

Note: all math is back of the envelope and may or may not be accurate.

Update: here’s a new chart I came across by the Heritage Foundation. Actually, they present 2 versions of this data that don’t seem to agree – not sure why. The pattern and the message are the same, however.

This is a great chart from the Washington Post. Actual data from a liberal media source, go figure?

Original source: Washington Post

It shows a disturbing trend that needs to be addressed for many reasons. But it is a very, very tough problem and I’m not sure how you solve it.

I don’t think more taxes are the answer (though they might be a partial solution). Taxes are the default answer for liberals, but they are an after-the-fact attempt to redress a more fundamental problem which is that too few people are making the lionshare of the money. Why is that? We need to figure it out.

A better solution would be to spread the wealth more widely upfront – to create more high income jobs and to raise the net worth of lots more households. To just throw more taxes into the mix will do little but perpetuate dynamics that have been leading towards a smaller and smaller percentage of people taking in more and more.

In some future post, I’ll try to touch on one of the mechanisms that I see that helps lead to increasing concentration – and it’s something that Democrats strongly favor even though it helps produce the result shown here.