New Estimates of Federal Government Tangible Capital and Net Investment

Government capital formation raises a number of issues important to national economic well-being, yet the U.S., unlike most advanced countries, does not account for capital in its formal budget documents. We estimate depreciation of government capital using a methodology developed by Hulten and Wykoff which is based on used asset price data. We estimate a federal government net nonresidential capital stock of over $800 billion in 1984, more than 20% higher than estimated by the BEA. We also find much larger net federal investment since World War II than the BEA. The behavior of military and civilian structures and equipment is also examined.We analyze the potential importance of these results for measuring the net national savings rate, national wealth, the trend in government capital formation relative to private capital formation, and the relationship between net investment and deficits.

New Estimates of State and Local Government Tangible Capital and Net Investment

Measures of the state and local government capital stock and investment are necessary inputs into several areas of economic analysis, including the measurement of national wealth and its growth. We estimate net investment and depreciation of state and local government nonresidential capital. In aggregate, we estimate a net state and local nonresidential capital stock of $1.8 trillion in 1985, 17% larger than that estimated by the Bureau of Economic Analysis. Net state and local government investment has exceeded the state and local deficit annually for the last forty-five years. While the fraction of state and local purchase of goods and services devoted to net investment has fallen, it has exceeded federal government net capital formation except during defense buildups and has averaged more than 40% of private fixed nonresidential net investment since 1951. Similar comparisons reveal that the state and local government net capital stock substantially exceeds state and local debt, and is about twice the federal government capital stock.

Telephone Inquiries, Types of Calls : Are Emergency Service Nurses Qualified to Give Answers?

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Stripping the Boss : The Powerful Role of Humor in the Egyptian Revolution 2011

The Egyptian Revolution 2011 has shaken the Arab world and stirred up Middle-East politics. Moreover, it caused a rush in political science and the neighboring disciplines, which had not predicted an event like this and now have troubles explaining it. While many things can be learned from the popular uprising, and from the limitations of previous scholarship, our focus will be on a moral resource, which has occasionally been noticed, but not sufficiently explored: the role of humor in keeping up the spirit of the Revolution. For eighteen days, protestors persevered at Liberation Square in Central Cairo, the epicenter of resistance; at times a few dozens, at times hundreds of thousands. What they did was to fight the terror of the regime, which reached absurd peaks during those days, with humor – successfully. We offer a social-functionalist account of the uprising, which includes behavioral as well as cultural levels of analysis, and illuminates how humorous means helped to achieve deadly serious goals. By reconstructing how Egyptians laughed themselves into democracy, we outline a social psychology of resistance, which uses humor both as a sword and a shield.Peer reviewe