There's a wrinkle in the statistics Fareed Zakaria cited for his argument for Obama's priorities over Romney's. Fareed noted that the US was still 5th in the world in competitiveness but 24th in terms of infrastructure. Daniel Ikenson breaks down that competitiveness number. "Taxes and regulations" is just one category contributing to "competitiveness," it turns out, and when you isolate that, the US looks less business-friendly:
On the “Burden of Government Regulation,” the United States ranked 58th with a score of 3.4 on a scale from 0-to-7, slightly above the global average of 3.3. On the “Extent and Effect of Taxation,” the United States ranked 63rd out of 142 countries. On “Total Tax Rate, % Profits,” the United States came in 96th out of 142. On the issues that President Obama is pushing, the United States performs better than on those Romney advocates, which seriously weakens Zakaria’s argument.
The United States ranks 24th on quality of total infrastructure, better than on taxes and regulations. Likewise for “technological readiness” and “innovation.” “Higher education” (but not “job training”) generates bad scores for the United States, but clearly not for lack of spending. You can dig into the data here, and you’ll find that they tell a very different story than the one you may have read in yesterday’s Post.
Go dig in the data. It is not, of course, in any way contradictory to favor fewer regulations and much simpler taxes and more government investment in infrastructure. It's just that our polarized and over-ideological politics makes that kind of obvious bipartisan win-win close to impossible.
The Dish 