Are you saying our tax money leaves the US (interest on the public debt perhaps) or that it gets used for non-productive purposes? I have no problem saying taxes are the biggest drain on consumers and businesses alike, but the subject was how much the dollar losing value effects the consumer.
What does mortgage interest have to do with re-insurance or did you mean to apply it to insurance? The biggest portion (over half) of that was health, do re-insurers get involved with health insurance (I honestly don't know)? What portion of a premium is the cost of re-insurance?
I think you are mistaken in terms of housing products being mostly imported. Two by fours, block, brick, drywall, plywood, cement and insulation are products that are usually made pretty close to their destination because their price is too low to ship them far. I live in the gypsum board capital of the world. A lot of kitchen cabinets, wood flooring, doors and windows, bathroom fixtures are made in the mid-west. While fasteners are almost all made over seas. I'm married to a construction worker, I ask a lot of questions about where things are made. This is not to say, walking into a Home Depot you won't find a lot of imports, you will. You just won't find most housing is built from products bought at a Home Depot, most housing in the US already exists. Commercial construction, otoh has a great deal of imports incorporated into it.
My point was that most money spent by consumers is spent here in the US. Even if you shop at Walmart every week, what portion of your income goes there compared to your tax bill and your mortgage? Retail is anywhere from 100 to 1000% markup from wholesale. So if you are a really big Walmart spender, maybe you spend 6k a year there, that means 600 to 3000 goes overseas. More likely you are like me, you spend maybe $2000 a year on stuff made over seas and 200-500 goes out of the country. Even with obvious stuff like gas, how much is the cost of foreign crude and how much is taxes, fees, refining and retail markup?
I have three cars, one US and two foreign and of the foreign one was assembled here. There's no doubt in my mind that even things assembled here are made with imported goods, made with imported machinery. But what percentage of the final price is imported goods? In retail clothing it can be as low as 10%.
In my biz, photo lab, its normal to have cost of goods to be in the 33% range, back out the labor and you have 8-9% cost of material. In my case I import paper from a US branch of a foreign subsidiary owned by a US multi-national. What is funny is that the US multinational makes the base that the foreign subsidiary puts the emulsion on so the final product is an export-import. So now how is that accounted for when we talk about trade deficits?
When people freak out about the current account deficit what they really should be freakin out about is how poorly it is measured and how completely distorted it is in regards to imports vs. exports. Actually perhaps they shouldn't freak out about it at all , because it really isn't particularly important but I guess it distracts them from the most important issue and that is reducing the drag that is caused by taxation which is a built in cost of everything. |
