Spare_change
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- Jun 27, 2011
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- #21
No, I believe there are government positions that have an overall positive wealth contribution by enabling other producers, as in examples I gave. It is no different than the difficulty in quantifying the exact financial impact of some administrative assistant working at Intel, they aren't directly selling or creating something but (hopefully) they enable others who do.
If a government worker clears the streets of snow so that a few thousand other people can go to work, they do not contribute zero the country's GDP.
I suppose that by some folks definition, all management and professional services are valueless because they do not physically manipulate tangible property on an assembly line. Makes me wonder why we pay such people as CEO's and board chairmen anything since they "produce" nothing.
Of course, national income accounts value government services at their cost, and make no distinction between transfer payments, current expenses, and capital expenditures, which makes such statistics nearly worthless for many purposes and drives CBO nuts. Just look at their rationale for "dynamic scoring".
Of course, you miss the entire point ..... to use your words, " ... national income accounts value government services at their cost " means that they add nothing to the collective profit of the country. The question isn't whether or not they are a valued expense, the question is whether they contribute economically.