The U.S. economy is sputtering, and it's no secret why: The government is standing in the way of private sector growth.
Second-quarter gross domestic product (GDP) growth was revised down to 1.0%. That means the economy grew at an average rate of 0.7% in the first half. That's pathetic.
Keynesians will say that without government intervention, we wouldn't even have seen that meager advance. But in reality, the government's intrusion into the private sector has stunted growth.
And truly, when you look at the harassment it is suffering, and at the output it is producing, the private sector actually has been remarkably resilient. If only the government would keep out of the way, growth might get onto a decent track during the rest of the year, and at some point people might get their jobs back.
As I discussed last week, there is a precedent for this statement.
When you look at output of the private sector during the 1930s, its most vigorous recovery was in 1939-40. And it was caused not by any good government policies but simply by the end of bad ones. The Republicans won a huge victory in the 1938 mid-term elections, which did not allow them to make policy but was enough to block the endlessly inventive and expensive experiments of the New Deal.
That success could be repeated now.
The private sector is still growing, albeit not very quickly. It expanded 1.9% in the first quarter and 1.4% in the second. In both quarters, government shrank slightly, mostly at the state and local level, making GDP growth even more sluggish than gross private product (GPP) growth.
More importantly, if you consider the handicaps under which the private sector is operating, it becomes clear that the private sector is capable of even more.
Specifically, there are seven things the government could do to jumpstart the U.S. economy by simply getting out of the way of the private sector:
Additionally, the mortgage business - one of their major profit drivers in normal times - has been subject to endless regulatory harassment and lawsuits. It's tough to sympathize with bankers, but it's also tough to imagine how they can grow their business and flourish under these conditions.
The combined overregulation and coddling of banks has suppressed small business lending to a level 25% below its pre-2008 plateau. Bang go more jobs.
Now energy companies have devised a wonderful new technique - "fracking" - that has immensely increased U.S. natural gas reserves. Fracking has reversed the decline in national energy self-sufficiency for the first time since the 1970s. It's also created an estimated 140,000 jobs since January 2010. However, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) wants to restrict this development. Even New Jersey Governor Chris Christie has gotten in on the act, imposing a 12-month fracking moratorium.
Sorry, but fracking has the potential to create more value, more national security and more jobs than all the dubious toys of Apple Inc. (Nasdaq: AAPL), Google Inc. (Nasdaq: GOOG) and Facebook Inc. combined. A new energy policy of "drill, baby, drill," and "frack, baby, frack" could speed U.S. growth into a brisk trot and it's not being allowed to happen.
A June 2011 survey of 329 large employers by the National Business Group on Health, a Washington-based nonprofit that represents large employers on national health-policy issues, reports that employers estimate their healthcare benefit costs will increase an average of 7.2% in 2012. Another survey from professional services firm Towers Watson said 9% of the midsize and large companies plan to drop employer-sponsored health insurance altogether after the Affordable Care Act takes effect in 2014.
Colombia's ambassador to the United States, Gabriel Silva Lujan, noted that U.S. farmers once claimed 46% of Colombia's food import market. Now the proportion is more like 20% and headed lower. Colombia also is the sixth-largest market for Caterpillar's construction and mining equipment.
Many of these actions have reasonable justifications - after all, more than half of the country voted for the administration that is introducing them. Yet their combined effect has been to suppress growth in the private sector and put us into a permanent recession worse than any since the 1930s.
The Tea Party victory of 2010 has not had the beneficial effect of the 1938 GOP landslide - much more economic power is in the hands of the bureaucracy these days, and that hasn't changed hands.
Add to this overregulation the adverse effect of the Federal deficit, the uncertainty created by the default threats during the debt ceiling wrangling, S&P's downgrade of the U.S. credit rating, and U.S. Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke's damaging monetary experiments and it's surprising that the private sector is open for business at all.
Still, the private sector data shows that the U.S. economy is poised for growth - if only government would stop hampering it.
Government as a rule is mostly unproductive, but it could at least try to be less damaging to private sector growth.
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