From: Jurriaan Bendien (adsl675281@TISCALI.NL)
Date: Tue Sep 05 2006 - 11:23:26 EDT
In the 2006 Analytical Perspectives document, an annex to the US Budget
(Table 13-4: National Wealth, p. 195), estimates are provided for the value
of total tangible capital assets of the USA, which basically doubled since
1980 (stated below in trillions of dollars, at September 30, 2005). Point
is, in this total capital stock, private physical production capital
represents "only" $14.7 trillion (or $28.1 trillion if you include all
land - which of course includes residential land, I cannot easily separate
out productively used land yet). The total stock of residential
buildings is worth more than the stock of industrial plant.
I've provided some brief íntroductory discussion of
capital formation at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_formation.
The implication for capital reproduction theories is clear: if Marxists just
focused exclusively on the value of production capital, they are likely to
obtain rather warped ideas about economic reproduction, since non-productive
capital assets (existing abundantly in the USA) also permit of
accumulation - and this latter accumulation process can, with the aid of
credit, acquire a relative autonomy from the productive base.
Sure, the significance of value-adding production is that it makes net
additions to the total physical stock of assets which can be traded, whereas
activities external to production typically do not - which is an important
factor for the total debt level a country is able to sustain. Ultimately a
growing amount of financial claims requires a growing mass of tangible
(appropriable and consumable) assets to sustain it, so for that reason
already there's a critical relationship between the growth of debt
repayments and GDP growth; if e.g. the US national debt is $8.5 trillion,
and the average interest rate on this debt is 5% annually, the annual
interest payment which must be met is $425 billion, and to pay a growing
interest bill, you are forced to either tax more, or borrow still more. But
anyway, clearly the stock of physical production capital owned by
capitalists is only the minor subset of the total capital stock (the total
capital stock obviously includes also liquid deposits, obligations and the
like, i.e. financial assets, money capital).
One of the central economic problems of our time is precisely that of how
policymakers could cajole capital into productive, job-creating investments,
which is basically a problem of how, after frenetic deregulation, you shift
capital from the sphere of circulation back into the sphere of production,
and which obviously implies that capital can also accumulate external to the
sphere of production, i.e. a distinct circuit of claims on property income.
Thus, a focus exclusively on the composition of production
capital provides at best only half of the story of economic reproduction.
Jurriaan
2005 ESTIMATE OF NATIONAL WEALTH, UNITED STATES (US$ TRILLIONS)
Publicly owned physical assets:
Structures and equipment . . . . . . $6.4
federally owned or financed . . . $2.4
Federally owned . . . . . . . . $1.1
Grants to state and local govt . $1.3
funded by state and local govt . . $4.0
Other federal assets . . . . . . . . $2.0
Subtotal (1). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . $8.5 trillion
Privately owned physical assets:
Reproducible assets . . . . . . . . $33.6
Residential structures. . . . . . $15.2
Nonresidential plant & equipment $12.9
Inventories . . . . . . . . . . . $1.8
Consumer durables . . . . . . . . $3.7
Land . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . $13.4
Subtotal (2). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . $47.0 trillion
Education capital:
federally financed . . . . . . . . . $1.6
financed from other sources . . . . $46.6
Subtotal (3) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . $48.1 trillion
Research and development capital:
federally financed R&D . . . . . . . $1.2
R&D financed from other sources . . $2.0
Subtotal (4). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . $3.3 trillion
TOTAL ASSETS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . $106.9 trillion
Net claims of foreigners on US . . . . . . . . . . $5.5 trillion
Net wealth . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .$101.4 trillion
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