My heart bleeds for the people of s***hole countries, cities, and neighborhoods. God knows there are enough of the latter two in the U.S. Why is that? Certainly, there are cultural and genetic factors at work. But those have been encouraged and reinforced by governmental acts.

Government — the central government especially — has long been a silent killer of economic opportunity. Jobs are killed by regulation that hinders business formation and expansion and every government program that diverts resources from the private sector.

How bad is it? This bad:

Because of increases in the rate of government spending and the issuance of regulations, the real rate of GDP growth has been halved since the end of World War II.

If GDP had continued to grow at an annual rate of 4 percent from its 1946 level of $1.9 trillion (in chained 2009 dollars), it would have reached $30 trillion in 2016 instead of $17 trillion.

Given the relationship between employment and real GDP, the cost of government policies is huge. There could now be as many as 207 million employed Americans instead of the current number of 156 million*, were it not for the “helpful” big-government policies foisted on hapless Americans by “compassionate” leftist do-gooders (and not a few dupes in center and on the right).

My heart bleeds.

* The relationship between employment and real GDP is as follows:

E = 1204.8Y^0.4991

where
E = employment in thousands
Y = real GDP in billions of chained 2009 dollars.

This estimate is based on employment and GDP values for 1948 through 2016, which are available here and here.

An increase in employment from 156 million to 207 million would raise the employment-population ratio from 60 percent to 80 percent, which is well above the post-World War II peak of 65 percent. The real limit is undoubtedly higher than 65 percent, but probably less than 80 percent. In any event, the impoverishing effect of big government is real and huge.