I’ve previously blogged about the declining status of the United States, as measured by objective sources such as the Economic Freedom of the World Index and the World Economic Forum’s Global Competitiveness Report.
My attitude about these developments is to sarcastically say, “Thanks for nothing, Bush and Obama.”
But the real insult to injury is that America is dropping even according to indices created by left-wing groups.
The Tax Justice Network is a bunch of crazy Euro-socialists (no snarky comments about redundancy, please), and they specialize in seeking to undermine tax competition in order to make it easier for government to impose class-warfare taxes and expand the burden of government.
One of their projects in a “Financial Secrecy Index,” in which they identify the supposedly bad jurisdictions that have strong human rights policies on financial privacy. The TJN crowd hates privacy since it makes it difficult for greedy governments to track – and tax – flight capital.
Anyhow, these statists issued their first Index in 2009 and I’m proud to say the United States came in first place, presumably because of our pro-growth policies to attract foreign investment and the business-friendly incorporation laws in states such as Delaware and Nevada.
But now, as you can see, we’ve dropped to 5th place in the 2011 Index.
I confess, though, that I didn’t bother to read the accompanying report, so perhaps changes in methodology account for America’s decline in the rankings.
Regardless, it can’t be a positive sign that the United States is losing its status – particularly when we need more investment to counter the negative impact of the Bush-Obama policies.
One can only hope that there will be changes that lead to America claiming the top spot when the next Index is released.
By the way, for more information about the value of tax competition and financial privacy, click this link.
And here’s a link to a British politician, Dan Hannan, who understands what is at stake.
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…But wait! Keeping in line with other macroeconomic gimmicks, there will be an advertising campaign aimed at countering the fundamentals of a more hostile American environment to foreign capital — and loss of competitiveness to more friendly markets (or at least not as unfriendly as they once used to be)…
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204294504576617502167150790.html?mod=googlenews_wsj
I don’t know if the following is true, but if so, would be rather telling…
“…The U.S. economy used to be the largest single magnet for foreign investment, attracting 40% of the world’s total a decade ago. But that share has dropped to 17% today, according to estimates by Matthew Slaughter, an economist at Dartmouth College’s Tuck School of Business….”
Free lunch great ideas -> Flattening of effort/reward curve -> Decline -> Desperation -> More desperate great free lunch ideas.
The dynamics of decline are now on autopilot.
It may seem new to Americans but it is the same scenario of decline experienced by many other cultures many times over in many different parts of the world.
Americans need to think. What was that made us different? What was that once set us apart from the rest of the world? Are we strengthening those differences or are we weakening them and becoming more like the rest of the world? The inevitable outcome of Cultural convergence will be economic convergence.