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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: i-node who wrote (861067)	6/3/2015 8:59:16 PM
From: TimF	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1573826

I was going to point out that Walmart's market cap is a stock, Denmark's GDP is a flow, and they shouldn't be compared. Then I looked at the data and saw that Walmart's revenue is larger than its market cap But should revenue or profit be used? GDP is the value of all the goods and services a country produces. Walmart has almost a half trillion in revenue but it doesn't create a half trillion worth of goods and services, retailing something is a service, but its rarely if ever worth the cost of the good your selling. So profit seems right, but it should be profit before interest and taxes (The fact that the government takes some of the value Walmart produces doesn't mean that Walmart didn't produce it. As for interest, they aren't deducted from GDP figures, so they shouldn't be deducted for Walmart either. Walmart's earnings before taxes and interest was $27.26 bil. Denmark's GDP is much larger than that. Denmark also has about two and a half times the "population" of Walmart (counting Walmart's employees as its population, but Walmart probably has more "tourists" its customers.) I don't think its correct to say Denmark isn't as big as Walmart. But your real point was that Denmark, Sweden, Finland, Norway... are very small countries, and comparisons to the US might be misleading (for that and other reasons). I sort of agree with that point. But something can be learned from observing them anyway. The fact that they can succeed with high tax rates shows it is possible, but they only manage to do ok with such high rates because in other ways they are very economically free. Try dumping all the regulations of say the US, New York State, and New York City (which has more people than any of the Nordic countries except Sweden) on Denmark along with these countries taxes and see how well they do. Another point to consider is the the US has higher PPP GDP per capita than the Nordic region and is only much lower in nominal GDP per capita than Norway (similar to Denmark, higher than Sweden, Iceland or Finland, probably higher than the whole region). And Americans of Nordic decent, definitely have a higher "GDP" per capita than the Nordic countries. They have more income then the average American.