America�s Most Successful Company

The Trumpet (Link) - Robert Morley (April 5, 2011)

What is America�s biggest employer? Here is a hint: It has added 200,000 jobs to the economy over the past two years! That might sound like a good thing, but the opposite is true. This gigantic corporation is sucking America dry. And it is a sign that the dollar is headed for collapse, and America with it.

So who is this corporate behemoth? It pays tens of thousands of people to build gas-guzzling trucks and SUVs. Its payrolls include tens of thousands who sell life, property and investment insurance to customers. This powerful corporation also provides banking services to millions of Americans. It has bases of operation around the world. It even probably owns your mortgage.

The people in this company are desperately trying to educate your children too, though in many cases they are failing terribly. This company is so big, that over the next generation, it will add 80 million retirees to its pension ranks. To pay for this looming expenditure, this company boasts the largest revenues in the world. However, it is also currently running the largest deficits the business world has ever seen.

The headquarters of the corporation is located in Washington, D.C., and its primary shareholder�soon to be impoverished shareholder�is you.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, approximately 2 million people work for the federal government. Minus last year�s temporary census workers, it is the largest federal workforce in modern history. But even this number is a gross underestimate. It does not include the approximately half-million postal workers, or America�s 1.4 million military personnel. It also does not include the fact that the federal government now owns the world�s largest insurance company (AIG), the world�s largest mortgage companies (Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac), and is partial owner of the largest automotive manufacturer in America (General Motors).

Shocked? Four million taxpayer-salaried workers�and that is just the tip of the proverbial iceberg..

State and local governments absolutely dwarf Washington in direct employment. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, there are 3.8 million full-time and 1.5 million part-time employees on state payrolls. Local governments add a further 11 million full-time and 3.2 million part-time personnel.

Almost 20 million people work directly for the government, and we are still only halfway there. We haven�t included government contractors. The National Review�s Iain Murray reports: �When we add up the true size of the federal workforce�civil servants, postal workers, military personnel, contractors, grantees, and bailed-out businesses�and add in state- and local-government employees�civil servants, teachers, firefighters and police officers�we reach the astonishing figure of nearly 40 million Americans employed in some way by government� (emphasis mine throughout).

One in every six workers in America owes his or her living directly and completely to the government. Many millions more regularly contract work from the government.

According to the Wall Street Journal, �more Americans work for the government than work in construction, farming, fishing, forestry, manufacturing, mining and utilities combined.�

That is absolutely shocking. Read the above sentence again. Ponder the implications. The real wealth-producing, income-generating sectors of the economy are minuscule compared to the size of the non-productive, wealth-consuming sectors.

No wonder so many people are falling further and further down the poverty ladder.

Any idea who the second-largest employer in America is? It is Walmart, and it employs around 1.5 million people�a full percent of America�s total workforce. America�s other big employers are McDonald�s, Sears, Home Depot and Target.

Back in 1955, the top employers were GM, Chrysler, U.S. Steel, Standard Oil of New Jersey, Amoco, Goodyear and Firestone.

Are you picking up on a pattern?

America is not the nation of producers it once was. Today many of America�s biggest companies are at best just wealth redistributors. Of the 216,000 jobs the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported were created last month, only about 31,000 were in areas of the economy that actually manufacture or produce things. The rest were either government jobs or in service sectors like hospitality and leisure, health care, temporary help services, and education.

On April 4, McDonald�s announced that it was looking to hire 50,000 employees. That made great headlines�and is sure to eventually result in America needing more health-care jobs down the road�but those employees will generate no new wealth. They will just take a share of the existing wealth.

Worse, many of America�s service sector companies actually create foreign wealth, at the expense of America. Almost everything sold at Walmart, for example, is manufactured overseas. Although certain products can naturally be produced more inexpensively in foreign countries, another reason so many things are now manufactured overseas is that companies have chosen to move production in order to gain access to foreign consumers. Companies like Boeing have taken factory jobs overseas in order to make sales to foreign governments. The vast majority of General Electric�s revenue is generated outside of America.

With a falling percentage of wealth-generating jobs composing the economy, it is inevitable that America�s wealth will continue to drain away. Thus it should be no surprise that according to the Census Bureau, the median household income has had no growth for the past decade and a half.

In other words, many people are worse off today than they were 14 or 15 years ago. And even if their wages have increased, inflation has eroded the purchasing power of their paycheck.

In some ways, America�s standard of living may have seemed to have risen, but, according to economic analyst John Mauldin, all that has really happened is that people have taken on more debt. Mauldin notes that over the past decade, Americans have doubled all forms of debt!

America�s economy is slowing dying. Debt has masked the decline. But sooner or later, increasing debt is no longer an option. And with real wealth-generating jobs becoming relatively more scarce, paying back all that debt�especially the foreign debt�will be all but impossible.

The Federal Reserve is already printing up money to provide for 70 percent of the federal government�s borrowing needs. And one out of every three dollars the government spends is borrowed. These kind of shenanigans can only go on for so long before a currency crisis results.

We have to retool our economy to win the future, says the Wall Street Journal: �The only way to do that is to grow the economy that makes things, not the sector that takes things.� But with low-cost China, India, Vietnam and Indonesia�coupled with greedy big businesses and debt-addicted American consumers�don�t get your hopes up. �