Re: [Marxism] The complexity of accounting for US national income

[steve heeren <tzsche@xxxxxxx>]

Jurriaan:

thanks for all the figures but can you somehow break it down into two
categories (which our taxing system does here in canada and, I'm sure, at
some level, is also done in the US): income based on LABOUR expenditure and
income based on INVESTMENT (sometimes captiously called "unearned income")?
That way we could get a rough estimate of the distribution of income
between the two great "classes" (ooops!): capital and labour.

In canada about thirty years ago the breakdown was roughly 50 -50, i.e.,
about half of all income went to labour and the other half went to the
investor class (which can sometimes overlap, as when, for instance, an auto
repair shop owner in the prairies works for a wage during the winter to tide
hir over) Still, given the size of the respective populations of "labour"
(90%) and "capital" (at most 10%) there remains a huge discrepancy,
especially given that labour is the root of all profit (to reverse the local
Chamber of Commerce slogan)  And this way of thinking doesn't even reach
into the issue of ownership of financial or industrial wealth.

Since then, of course, due to the backlash and resurgence of capital against
the welfare state, things have slipped greatly in favour of capital. But I
would appreciate your estimate of the breakdown. Ballpark figures would be
fine with me.

steve heeren



----- Original Message -----
From: "Jurriaan Bendien" <andromeda246@xxxxxxxxx>
To: "Marxmail List" <marxism@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Sunday, September 19, 2004 5:04 PM
Subject: [Marxism] The complexity of accounting for US national income


| To show you the complexity of accounting for national income, and the
| difficulty of devising a system of transactors that shows you without myth
| "who gets what and how much from whom" in society as a whole, I've
itemised
| the main national income flows for the USA in 2002 using mainly data drawn
| from different tabulations in the NIPA system, emphasising in this
exercise
| personal income receipts (but I've also included the government tax take).
| Some totals are provisional. To estimate the real tax impost on different
| income classes accurately, would take a lot of work and some modelling.
| Meantime you can only admire the NIPA team for their work - as you can see
| in NIPA table 7.12, the system involves a lot of imputations, and to
really
| master the NIPA system takes many months of work.
|
| U.S. NATIONAL INCOME 2002
|



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