“When a government official spends on his own behalf one hundred [dollars] more, this implies that a taxpayer spends on his own behalf one hundred [dollars] the less. But the spending of the government official is seen, because it is done; while that of the taxpayer is not seen, because—alas!—he is prevented from doing it. You compare the nation to a parched piece of land and the tax to a life-giving rain. So be it. But you should ask yourself where this rain comes from, and whether it is not precisely the tax that draws the moisture from the soil and dries it up. You should ask yourself further whether the soil receives more of this precious water from the rain than it loses by the evaporation.”[1]
Spending Pressure measures that.
Complexity Theory and various Alternative Economic Models use metaphors to enhance understanding of economics.[2] A challenge is to present aggregate levels of something like all government spending, “as when gas pressure is considered an emergent phenomenon nonetheless completely reducible to individual gas molecules.”[3]
That’s Spending Pressure. We reduce the aggregate pressure of all of the spending to individual units of government all pressurizing your specific address. You can then investigate the specific identity of the spenders manning each unit of government, and the budgets they produce that add up to your Spending Pressure. We give you the initial comparative tool to perform your own differential diagnosis. As the academic writers describe it:
emergence [of Spending Pressure] is assumed to exist at aggregate or upper-level states of systems even though it is conceived in reductionist terms and thus fully retraceable to individual, lower level components.[4]
Our input data is all certified as accurate by the U.S. Census Bureau. Unlike some economists, we don’t make up exemplar data, or postulate states of perfection to make our numbers work. They are the government’s own numbers. We just map them to your address with our programming.
All of which shows using the government’s own data that when government spends more, you have less. The less you have, the more you suffer from Spending Pressure.
[1] Fredric Bastiat, What is Seen and What is Not Seen (1850) Sec. 3 “Taxes”
[2] See, for example, Bier and Schinkel, Building Better Ecological Machines: Complexity Theory and Alternative Economic Models, Engaging Science, Technology, and Society 2 (2016), 266-293.
[3] Supra, fn. 2. At 274.
[4] Id. The authors go on to point out that such a model is “founded on …principles of fixed, integrated parts that add up to a whole and have a set of fixed mechanistic outputs for a set of determined mechanistic inputs.” (284).
