Assets of the U.S.A. - intangible and otherwise

In this weekend's edition, the Financial Times published a short bit on "America's best assets":

At the end of last year, there were $1,580bn of assets on the government's balance sheet. The fact that printing presses can be switched on at any time makes the number pretty arbitrary. Still, the near-trillion dollars of inventories, property, plant and equipment is real enough, of which almost 70 per cent is defence-related. Obviously, the US is not about to sell its uranium stockpiles but, according to the Government Accountability Office, the government - including the Pentagon - has "many assets it doesn't need".

That is only the half of it. Not even included on the balance sheet are the properties, land and heritage assets held in stewardship. How to value the Constitution is anyone's guess. But neither is a monetary value placed on the 28 per cent of the US landmass owned by the government. Selling national parks (or Alaska) for mineral resources would be controversial but many environmental studies conclude wilderness areas are no better managed under state ownership than they are privately.

I would disagree that we should think about privatizing these assets; what part of the word "stewardship" does the FT not understand.

However, the piece indirectly raises a different point when it asks about how to place a monetary value on the Constitution. The US government has a large collection of intangible assets that do not show up on the books. Like any organization, the Federal government needs to manage those assets well.

A first step would be to know what we have. In the past, I have called for a review of how much the government spends on developing intangible assets. An intangible asset budget would help tell us how we are doing in fostering the development of intangibles within the larger economy. We need an inventory of government-owned intangibles as well. That inventory would give us the baseline for better internal management. Both reviews would help bring the government into the I-Cubed Economy.