The protocols of religious Jewish advocacy groups in the US

In a recent report on religious advocacy groups in the US, Pew lists the top 40 organizations by advocacy expenditures and policy makers and other government agencies and officials. Unsurprisingly, AIPAC comes in at number one.

The top 40 groups account for 85% of all dollars spent by religious groups for the purpose of influence peddling. Because I tend to use the term "neocon" disparagingly, it follows that I must harbor an envious hatred of Jews and consequently am wondering what percentage of the $330 million spent came out of the coffers of explicitly Jewish advocacy groups!

As it turns out, just over one-third (34.1%) of it. For constituting less than 2% of the nation's total population, with a constituency that is notoriously secular to boot, it would sure seem that 'religious' Jewish groups carry a lot of sway!

And yes, I realize I'm not the first person to make this observation. To those with that reaction, I kindly direct you to the blog's header.

National government spending as a percentage of GDP by country

A few years ago, I became frustrated when unable to find a table of national governmental expenditures as a percentage of GDP by country. So, using data from the invaluable CIA World Factbook, I created one.

It's gathered some dust, and an update is in line, especially since something or other having to do with the global economy occurred between then and 2010, from which the most recent data come. An inquiry from an author (who I won't name but who is certainly welcome to be made known in the comments if he so desires) searching for more recent numbers served as the impetus to actually get it done. Getting out in front of the inevitable objections, a disclaimer: These data do not include all government spending and state, local, and provincial government outlays of course differ from country to country. For consistency, all figures are in exchange rate terms:

Country	GE as GDP
1. Iraq	88.1%
2. Cuba	86.5%
3. Ireland	67.0%
4. Lesotho	65.5%
5. Denmark	58.4%
6. France	55.7%
7. Finland	53.6%
8. Sweden	53.4%
9. Belgium	53.0%
10. Austria	52.9%
11. Libya	52.2%
12. Netherlands	51.3%
13. Italy	51.2%
14. United Kingdom	50.9%
15. Portugal	50.6%
16. Iceland	50.1%
17. Bosnia and Herzegovina	49.8%
18. Hungary	49.3%
19. Greece	49.3%
20. Serbia	49.3%
21. Equatorial Guinea	47.3%
22. Cyprus	46.6%
23. Germany	46.5%
24. Norway	46.3%
25. Slovenia	46.3%
26. Belarus	45.1%
27. Spain	44.9%
28. New Zealand	44.4%
29. Cape Verde	43.9%
30. Canada	43.8%
31. Latvia	42.8%
32. Bolivia	42.5%
33. Botswana	42.5%
34. Croatia	42.4%
35. Malta	41.8%
36. Eritrea	41.8%
37. Brunei	41.7%
38. Lithuania	41.4%
39. Luxembourg	41.3%
40. Slovakia	41.0%
41. Moldova	40.8%
42. Japan	40.6%
43. Romania	39.3%
44. Swaziland	38.9%
45. Estonia	38.8%
46. Bulgaria	38.0%
47. Algeria	37.8%
48. Saudi Arabia	37.7%
49. Chad	37.3%
50. Oman	37.2%
51. Macedonia	36.4%
52. Czech Republic	35.8%
53. Australia	35.7%
54. South Africa	35.6%
55. Burundi	35.3%
56. Malawi	35.3%
57. Trinidad and Tobago	35.0%
58. Georgia	34.8%
59. Switzerland	34.7%
60. Angola	34.6%
61. Ukraine	34.3%
62. Vietnam	33.7%
63. Mongolia	33.1%
64. Nicaragua	32.9%
65. Kuwait	32.9%
66. Namibia	32.6%
67. Jamaica	32.6%
68. Israel	32.4%
69. Kyrgyzstan	32.3%
70. Uzbekistan	32.2%
71. Seychelles	31.9%
72. Ecuador	30.9%
73. Papua New Guinea	30.8%
74. Aruba	30.7%
75. Uruguay	30.5%
76. Mozambique	30.2%
77. Zimbabwe	30.1%
78. Egypt	29.8%
79. Guyana	29.7%
80. Albania	29.6%
81. Jordan	29.4%
82. Nepal	29.0%
83. Lebanon	28.8%
84. Belize	28.7%
85. Colombia	28.3%
86. Kenya	28.1%
87. Gabon	27.8%
88. Panama	27.6%
89. Burkina Faso	27.5%
90. British Virgin Islands	27.4%
91. Venezuela	27.4%
92. Brazil	27.4%
93. Senegal	27.3%
94. Yemen	27.2%
95. Bahrain	27.0%
96. Azerbaijan	26.9%
97. Armenia	26.5%
98. Malaysia	26.5%
99. Turkey	26.3%
100. Morocco	26.3%
101. Tunisia	26.3%
102. Rwanda	26.2%
103. Tajikistan	26.1%
104. Ghana	25.9%
105. Tanzania	25.5%
106. Mauritius	25.5%
107. Mexico	25.4%
108. Syria	25.2%
109. Iran	25.2%
110. Sierra Leone	24.5%
111. Qatar	24.4%
112. Kazakhstan	23.7%
113. United States	23.6%
114. Argentina	23.5%
115. Russia	23.3%
116. Zambia	23.2%
117. China	23.0%
118. Sri Lanka	22.8%
119. Chile	22.8%
120. Guinea	22.6%
121. El Salvador	22.5%
122. Honduras	22.2%
123. Togo	22.1%
124. South Korea	22.1%
125. Cote d'Ivoire	22.0%
126. Haiti	21.6%
127. Benin	21.3%
128. Afghanistan	21.1%
129. Laos	21.1%
130. United Arab Emirates	21.0%
131. Poland	20.9%
132. Republic of the Congo	20.6%
133. Pakistan	20.4%
134. Costa Rica	19.8%
135. Cameroon	19.7%
136. Sudan	19.5%
137. Thailand	19.5%
138. Peru	19.5%
139. Taiwan	19.0%
140. Gambia	18.8%
141. Indonesia	18.8%
142. Cambodia	18.6%
143. Philippines	17.9%
144. India	17.5%
145. Paraguay	17.4%
146. Hong Kong	17.3%
147. Bahamas	17.2%
148. Uganda	17.2%
149. Ethiopia	16.9%
150. Central African Republic	16.5%
151. Dominican Republic	16.5%
152. Madagascar	16.2%
153. Nigeria	15.5%
154. Bangladesh	15.1%
155. Singapore	14.5%
156. Guatemala	14.5%
157. Turkmenistan	9.3%

To view a visual representation, click here.

As the Iraq war finally draws to a close, at least we were able to transfer one tenet of contemporary Western democracies in a recognizable form to Baghdad. What's that? Isonomy? Respect for dissenting viewpoints? Individual liberty? No, no, no, Don Quixote. It's big government, of course!

Outside of a few paradises like Cuba, Western Europe dominates the top spots. The US figure, in comparison, is a bit of an apples-to-oranges one, as the table is, as mentioned previously, constructed on central (that is, federal) governmental expenditures and does not directly include the spending by local, state, or provincial governments. Around 40% of government spending in the US is doled out through state and local governments, a proportion higher than just about anywhere else in the world. Consequently, the US ratio appears deceptively small.

Still, if non-federal spending is included, the US is neck and neck with Japan, well below the bulk of the rest of the Western world. As ubiquitous as government seems to be stateside, its presence is relatively small compared to Europe.

Parenthetically, Switzerland (for which the CIA factbook includes cantonal and municipal spending in addition to federal spending) , a favorite of the American alternative right, stands apart from the rest of the Old Continent. In so many ways, this beautiful Alpine country instills in pessimistic conservatives a hope for what might yet be.

As a Radio Derb votary, I've long wondered why Turkmenistan is singled out as recipient of so much love on the weekly broadcast. To an ignorant yankee like myself, it's scarcely distinguishable from the rest of the crapistans. I need wonder no longer. The Derb may claim that the president's name is the source of affection, but the table above reveals the truth of the matter!

The relative paucity of government spending in affluent East Asian nations like Japan, South Korea, Singapore, and even officially communist China is to some extent a consequence of the absence of generous government-provided welfare systems in these places, with pensions, medical care, and the like mostly covered by employers rather than by the state, as tends to be the case in Western Europe.

There is a statistically significant but modestly positive correlation (.22, p = .01) between a country's per capita GDP and that country's amount of government spending as a share of its GDP. Correlation is not necessarily causation, of course, but with otherwise backwards countries that have enormous resource wealth (ie, Botswana and Saudi Arabia) tending towards the leviathan end of the governmental expenditures scale, to the extent that the causation arrow exists, it probably points from high GDP towards prodigious government spending rather than the other way around.

On its face, there doesn't appear to be much here that validates the libertarian view that minimizing the size of the federal government, and avoiding the consequent economic distortions its continued growth will otherwise cause, should be the exclusive goal of a society wanting economic prosperity and an overall improved quality of life. Ceteris paribus it's relevant, perhaps (I certainly think it is), but there are clearly a host of other demographic and cultural variables that are of greater importance. Who would rather operate a business--or live--in Nigeria instead of in Denmark?

Calling BS on Timothy Geithner

A few weeks ago, Timothy Geithner was interviewed by NPR's Robert Siegel ahead of a "working dinner" between the US Treasury Secretary and the Chinese vice premier concerning currency policies and intellectual property. In response to a question from Siegel about how responsible the putative undervaluation of the yuan is for the ongoing US trade deficit with China, Geithner offered this response:

Well, the big reason we have a trade imbalance in China is because we're a very large economy. We're about three times as large as China. We're about six times richer than China. So for those reasons, we buy more goods from China than we export to China.

That should immediately set off your BS detector, as it did mine. Yes, our economy is larger than China's, but our economy is larger than any other nation's economy is as well. Relative to the rest of the world, China's economy is enormous.

If the size of the US' economy relative to the size of the economy of the country in question influenced whether or not the US ran a trade surplus or a trade deficit with said country in the way Geithner suggests, if we're running trade surpluses with anybody, it should be with China, the world's second largest economy as measured by GDP. Conversely, we should, using the same logic, be running deficits with--arbitrarily using the small countries beginning with "A"--Albania, Antigua and Barbuda, Armenia, and Aruba. In reality, we are running surpluses with all of them.

Including all countries with which the US did at least $50 million in trade during 2010, I ran a regression using US trade balances by country and national GDP. The correlation is a very robust inverse .83 (p = 0). That is, the US runs deficits all over the place with large (and generally, though not necessarily, advanced) economies while running surpluses with smaller (and again, generally less advanced) ones. The reality is exactly the opposite of what Geithner says.

What about Americans being more affluent than the Chinese are? Is Geithner correct in asserting that our relative wealth is a big reason for why we're running a perpetual trade deficit with China? Do we tend to run deficits with countries where the populations are poor and surpluses with countries where the populations are rich? No. Correlating US trade balances and purchasing power parity by country reveals no correlation at all between the two (r = .03). We run deficits with many poor countries like Sri Lanka and Ecuador and many wealthy countries like Germany and Japan. And we run surpluses with several poor (Peru, Ghana) and wealthy (the Netherlands, Australia) countries alike.

I'm certainly not an expert on trade balances nor their implications, in either an abstract economic sense or from the perspective of an American patriot, but it's depressingly humorous to me that a top government official who should be an expert on both accounts is able to get away with making assertions that are so blatantly fallacious.