Guest Post: 85% OF TAX REVENUE COMES FROM THE PRIVATE SECTOR
A guest post by Kiwi in America:
The left are totally invested in big government. The power of the state is the mechanism that they use to bring about a just and equitable society. Their goal is to tax the productive sector as much as possible to pay for ever more costly social programmes that they hope will create equality and thus a fairer and happier society. When they run up against the reality that the owners of capital are intelligent and seek the best returns on their assets and that a good percentage of capital is mobile and can be moved to jurisdictions less hostile to enterprise, they show their utter ignorance of how the free enterprise economy works.
A game I love to play with lefties who are employed in the government sector is to ask them who pays their salary. The conversation goes like this:
Me Who is your employer?
Lefty The University
Me Who funds the university?
Lefty The government
Me Who funds the government?
Lefty The tax payers
Me Who employs the taxpayers who pay the taxes who fund your salary?
Lefty Pause ….employers
Me What percentage of employers are private sector companies?
Lefty Cottoning on to where I am heading – “well the taxes from the employees of the government sector pay as much tax as the private companies and anyway all private company owners do is try to avoid tax”
Me Actually 85% of the total government tax take comes from the taxes paid by private sector companies, their employees and the self-employed – the productive non-government sector of the economy
Lefty That’s absolute rubbish and right wing propaganda
If any of you have had this discussion, here are the statistics to back up the claim – that 85% of all tax receipts source from the private sector activity in the economy. Almost all the money that governments expend on government services and benefits come from the pockets of hard working New Zealanders who own, or are employed by, evil capitalist companies. The chart below is a summary only and each line is footnoted – some to government department websites and the rest to supplementary charts that are available below the fold for those interested in seeing how I arrived at the total numbers. Note that the staff numbers for government entities were lifted from the statutorily required Annual Reports that each file in Parliament or from the entity’s own website.
The table provided is embedded below.