I wrote previously: "depreciation schedules implemented are crucial for the amount of distributed and undistributed profits.""
Yesterday I was looking at the most recent detailed US IRD and NIPA data, which I hadn't done before, and I noticed this fact is actually acknowledged in the NIPA calculation of corporate profit income - thus, gross profits are adjusted for different methods of depreciation write-offs and the change in the value of inventory stocks. In this way, a large profit can be shrunk to a small profit by an economist, to fit his concept of national income. I mused that it's sad that, given the excellent data sets provided by organisations such as the US Department of Labour, US Bureau of the Census, Federal Reserve Board, the National Association of State Budget Officers and the Bureau of Economic Analysis, so-called Marxists in the USA often make such very paltry, trivial analyses. Because socialists could make very powerful political arguments, if they investigated the data, and don't let an urge for mathematical obscurantism, banale hedonism and theoretical orthodoxy get in the way - the crimes of the capitalists, if such they be, are recorded there for all to see. If they uses their brains, instead of collapsing in a postmodernist stupor. Just to take a very simple example that's a sign of our times - gross farm business income in 2002 is said to be $236.9 billion and net farm business income is said to be only $36.2 billion (direct government support payments constituted about 17 billion of this net income, i.e. nearly half). Farm business assets were valued at $1.29 trillion in 2002. Farm debt reached $201 billion at the end of 2002, and looks to be increasing fast. But just by examining this data, it's clear the annual gain in farm asset values actually exceeds the increase in debt levels. Now who exactly is getting rich out of all this, and who is losing money ? Actually, it turns out that farm real estate is valued at more than eighty percent of the farm sector's assets. In 2001, farm business assets were valued at $1251 billion, of which physical assets were $998.7 billion in real estate and $193.3 billion in other physical assets, and $58.9 billion financial assets. It's not just a game of monopoly or "I spy with my little eye" here, we're talking about the lives of around a million wage workers, of which half parttimers, around a million self-employed workers, and thirty thousand or so unpaid family workers. Surely there's a good story in that, for the motivated researcher ? On the surface, the story of America's economy seems to a high drama of daring financial speculation, but in reality it's more a case of "borrow and hope" for some, and "grab what I can get" for others. Yet the moral ideas which underly that lifestyle seems to go unquestioned, they aren't critically examined. We're all supposed to be nice and sexy, and love Unca Scrooge, is that it ? Jurriaan
