Growing the Economy for Dummies. Richard W. Rahn

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Did you know that in Denmark, the poorest 30 percent pay 14.1 percent of all taxes and the richest pay 48.7 percent, while in the United States, the poorest 30 percent pay just 6.1 percent of all taxes and the richest 30 percent pay a whopping 65.3 percent? The surprising thing is not that the richest pay most of the taxes but that the U.S. has nearly the most progressive tax system in the world, while the Scandinavian countries have about the least progressive tax systems, contrary to commonly held belief.

In his new book, Mr. Tanzi clearly shows how governments in most developed countries have grown over the past century. The many tables are a delight for us data hounds. Some advocates of higher taxes argue that tax rates on labor do not have much impact on the willingness to work, but Mr. Tanzi gives us a very clear chart plotting the tax rate on labor versus the number of hours worked per year in many countries. It shows that there is a strong inverse relationship between tax rates on labor and hours worked. Such facts are inconvenient for the big-government, high-tax crowd. Mr. Tanzi is far from being anti-government, but the facts and data he presents show how most governments have grown far beyond the optimum point, and he is a bit pessimistic about the ability of democracies to rein in excessive and destructive government.

Near the end of the book, Mr. Tanzi observes: "Once the population of a country (or, more often, groups within it) come to see the government as a potential cow that can be milked, there is no longer a limit to the demands for more public spending. There are literally infinite 'needs' of the population, and infinite groups capable of organizing politically, to press for more government spending or other government actions that would benefit them."

But despite Mr. Tanzi's pessimism, he documents how two countries, Sweden and Canada, have changed course and reduced the size of government because the body politic came to understand that the cow was being overmilked and soon would go dry or die.

The Chilean system has been so successful during the past 30 years that it has been copied by more than 30 countries, including Sweden and Australia. Chileans retire with far more wealth than the average American, despite the fact that Chile is just a low-middle-income country. In both Chile and the United States, employers are required to set aside a little more than 12 percent for the pension program, but in Chile, someone with the same earnings as an American will be getting $55,000 as an annual pension, while the American, working the same number of years, just gets $18,000.

The fact, as Mr. Ferrara explains so well, is that we need not have miserable retirement and government medical systems that barely serve the needs of the people while driving the country into bankruptcy. What we need instead are programs in which individuals have control over their own retirement and medical accounts and have the flexibility to design them to meet their needs. Other countries have proved it can be done.

Vía Francisco Capella.