Think by Numbers Podcast

The Future of US Government Debt

m@warondisease.org (Mike P. Sinn) — Sun, 01 Mar 2009 02:20:00 +0000

"These are extraordinary times. We can't worry about the national debt now. We'll deal with that later."

This is what people defending massive deficit spending say. It sounds reasonable. Who wants to worry about the credit card bill while the house is on fire?

Here's the problem: "later" never comes.

Graph Source: Government Accountability Office Citizens Guide 2008

This chart shows federal debt held by the public from 1940 to 2080. The blue line is the baseline scenario. The red line is the "alternative fiscal scenario," which is government-speak for "what actually happens when politicians keep doing what they're doing."

What You're Looking At

In 1940, debt was around 40% of GDP. World War II pushed it to 100% of GDP by 1946. Fighting Nazis costs money, apparently.

After the war, debt fell to about 25% of GDP by 1980. Peacetime economies typically don't require selling war bonds to citizens who fear invasion.

Then things get interesting. Debt started climbing in the 1980s and never really stopped. By 2008, it was back to 40% of GDP.

The red line shows what happens if current policies continue. By 2040, debt reaches 200% of GDP. By 2080, it hits 350% of GDP.

That's not a prediction. It's a math problem with one solution: something breaks.

Why "Later" Doesn't Work

Every crisis becomes an excuse to add debt:

Financial crisis? Add debt.
Pandemic? Add debt.
War? Add debt.
Economic slowdown? Add debt.
Recovery? Keep the debt, add more.

The pattern is simple. When times are bad, deficit spending is "necessary stimulus." When times are good, deficit spending is "investment in growth." The debt only goes one direction.

Politicians have two time horizons: the next election and never. Debt reduction falls into the "never" category.

The Math

Debt as a percentage of GDP works like this:

Debt-to-GDP ratio = Total Government Debt / Gross Domestic Product

If you earn $50,000 per year and owe $50,000, your debt-to-income ratio is 100%. Banks get nervous around 40%. The government is heading toward 350%.

You can fix this ratio two ways:

Reduce debt (spend less than you collect)
Increase GDP (grow the economy faster than the debt grows)

Option 1 requires politicians to cut spending or raise taxes. Both are unpopular. Option 2 requires faster economic growth than the rate at which you're adding debt. This is theoretically possible but practically unlikely when you're borrowing trillions per year.

Option 3, the one we're currently using, is to ignore the problem and hope math stops working.

How This Usually Ends

Countries with debt-to-GDP ratios above 100% typically experience:

Higher interest rates (lenders want compensation for risk)
Inflation (printing money to pay debts)
Slower economic growth (resources go to debt service instead of investment)
Currency devaluation (nobody wants your money)
Austerity (sudden, forced spending cuts when lenders stop lending)

Or they experience economic growth so explosive that it outpaces debt accumulation. This happens approximately never.

Sources: GAO Financial Report 2008, Wikipedia: United States Federal Budget

http://media.blubrry.com/thinkbynumbers/thinkbynumbers.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/tbn002_us_national_debt.mp3

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Historical Examples Show Government Intervention Only Prolongs Economic Downturns

m@warondisease.org (Mike P. Sinn) — Sun, 01 Mar 2009 02:31:00 +0000

This study by the Federal Reserve examines the effects of government intervention and the absence thereof in two similar financial crises which occurred simultaneously in Chile and Mexico. Chile liquidated the insolvent banks and instituted a new regulatory system to prevent future abuses. Mexico nationalized the entire banking system keeping the insolvent banks on life support at the expense of the taxpayer.

Sometimes I wonder if economic experiments are just countries playing Rock, Paper, Scissors with each other's futures.

This is what happened. Over the next 25 years, Chile's per capita GDP grew 100% while Mexico has exhibited an impressive 0% growth rate. This means the average Chilean is twice as rich as he was 25 years ago, whereas the average Mexican stayed just as poor as he was before. It's like one country took the stairs and the other took the escalator that was broken and just stood there.

The lesson is clear. If the government subsidizes bad behavior you get more of it. If the government taxes good behavior you get less of it. This raises the profound question: What if we subsidized good behavior instead? But that would be too simple, wouldn't it?

Yet that's exactly what were doing. We're taxing successful, competently run businesses to subsidize irresponsible, poorly run businesses. It's like punishing the kid who did their homework to reward the kid who ate it. Until we realize this simple fact, the previous trend of increased productivity and standards of living will only be a memory.

http://media.blubrry.com/thinkbynumbers/thinkbynumbers.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/tbn005_chile_mexico-government-intervention.mp3

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Bailout Costs $16,000 per Worker

m@warondisease.org (Mike P. Sinn) — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 05:31:00 +0000

Toxic Assets

In 2008, Wall Street financial institutions gave loans to people who couldn't pay them back. This is called "bad business." The institutions were going to lose money.

They did not want to lose money.

Losing money is what happens to regular people when they make bad decisions. For banks, there's a different system. It's called "getting billions of dollars from the government." The two systems are very different, but both are perfectly fair depending on whether you're a bank or not.

Privatizing Gains, Socializing Losses

The solution: have the Federal Reserve print new money and buy the bad loans for way more than they were worth. This process is called quantitative easing (QE).

Source: Visual Capitalist

Heads CEOs Win, Tails You Lose

Then the banks used taxpayer money to reward executives for their bad decisions.

Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, and JPMorgan Chase paid $18 billion in bonuses in 2008. They received $45 billion in taxpayer bailout funds through TARP.

They turned $45 billion of your money into $18 billion of executive bonuses. The remaining $27 billion covered the losses from the bad bets they made.

This is called "accountability." The executives were held accountable by receiving millions of dollars in bonuses. It's a tough lesson, but someone had to learn it. That someone was you, and the lesson was "you're paying for this."

Source: Wall Street on Parade

Moral Hazard

The moral of the story for bankers:

When you make good investments, you keep all the profits.

When you make bad investments, the Fed gives you free money and losses get spread over the entire population.

This is called "moral hazard." It means rewarding failure creates more failure.

There's No Inflation, So What's the Harm?

There are two types of inflation:

Monetary Inflation - increase in total money supply
Price Inflation - increase in cost of goods and services

The Fed created $6 trillion in new money over 12 years. That's monetary inflation.

Source: Visual Capitalist

Annual price inflation has only been about 1.5% over the period. So where did the money go?

It went to asset prices. Stock prices. Real estate prices. The things rich people own went up. The things poor people buy stayed relatively flat.

This is how you transfer $6 trillion from everyone to the already wealthy without most people noticing.

It's the perfect crime. You print $6 trillion, give it to rich people, their assets go up in value, and poor people can't afford houses anymore. Then you say "inflation is only 1.5%" because bread prices didn't change. Everyone claps. The end.

http://media.blubrry.com/thinkbynumbers/thinkbynumbers.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/tbn006_us_pays_16000_per_worker.mp3

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

What Would Have Happened If We Let AIG Fail?

m@warondisease.org (Mike P. Sinn) — Mon, 13 Apr 2009 22:29:00 +0000

The average American household paid $2,000 to bail out AIG. Your bill arrived without your consent. You paid it anyway.

It's like when someone orders bottle service at the club and then splits the bill evenly, except the someone is an insurance company and the club is the global financial system and you weren't even at the club.

Source: nicolasrapp.com

What Is A Credit Default Swap?

Image by Scott Pollack

A credit default swap is insurance for financial products. AIG sold this insurance. Then the products failed. Then AIG didn't have the money to pay out.

This is what insurance companies call "a problem." It's also what normal people call "not having insurance," but on Wall Street they use fancier words.

Think of it like selling flood insurance for every house in Florida and then being surprised when it rains. Except instead of rain it's the entire financial system collapsing, which was definitely impossible to predict if you weren't paying any attention whatsoever.

How AIG Failed

AIG got downgraded from AAA to A credit rating. This triggered provisions requiring AIG to provide billions in collateral to counterparties like Goldman Sachs.

AIG didn't have billions in collateral.

The "Loan"

The government loaned AIG $170 billion. This was called a loan. Loans typically get repaid. This one won't.

As of 2011, $11.4 billion has been repaid. At this rate, full repayment will occur sometime after the heat death of the universe.

The word "loan" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. It's technically a loan in the same way that setting money on fire is technically "outdoor heating."

Most of the money went to European banks. American taxpayers paid European banks because an American insurance company sold insurance it couldn't pay out. Capitalism for the poor, socialism for the rich.

It's a beautiful system. When rich people make bad bets, everyone pays. When poor people make bad bets, they lose their house. This is called "moral hazard," which is Latin for "we can do whatever we want."

The Alternative

Former AIG CEO Hank Greenberg testified to Congress that bankruptcy would have been better for taxpayers.

In Chapter 11 bankruptcy, AIGFP would be broken up and sold. Creditors would receive 20-30% of what they were owed.

Goldman Sachs received $12.9 billion from the bailout. They spent $18 billion on executive bonuses in 2007. So receiving only $3 billion from bankruptcy would not have destroyed them. It would have merely reduced executive compensation.

The Real Motivation

Congress asked Treasury to explain how AIG's bankruptcy would destroy the financial system.

Treasury declined to provide this explanation.

Goldman Sachs was Obama's number one campaign contributor. Goldman Sachs spent $43 million on political contributions.

They received tens of billions from the AIG bailout.

$43 million is a bargain.

Your Bill

$2,000 per household. That's what you paid to protect AIG's counterparties from the consequences of their decisions.

If AIG's bets had paid off, you would not have received $2,000.

Privatized gains. Socialized losses. The system works exactly as designed.

Source: insuranceproviders.com

http://media.blubrry.com/thinkbynumbers/thinkbynumbers.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/tbn008_what_if_aig_failed.mp3

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Government Spends More on Corporate Welfare Subsidies than Social Welfare Programs

m@warondisease.org (Mike P. Sinn) — Mon, 07 Mar 2011 03:03:00 +0000

Time Magazine, Vol. 152 No. 19

About $59 billion is spent on traditional social welfare programs. $92 billion is spent on corporate subsidies. So, the government spent nearly 50% more on corporate welfare than it did on food stamps and housing assistance in 2006.

Before we look at the details, a heartfelt plea from the Save the CEO's Charitable Trust:

There's so much suffering in the world. It can all get pretty overwhelming sometimes. Consider, for a moment the sorrow in the eyes of a CEO who's just found out that his end-of-year bonus is only going to be a paltry $2.3 million.

Before you judge CEOs, try living on $2.3 million yourself. You can't even buy a small yacht with that. You'd have to settle for a medium-sized yacht, which is basically poverty.

“It felt like a slap in the face. Imagine what it would feel like just before Christmas to find out that you’re going to be forced to scrape by on your standard $8.4 million compensation package alone. Imagine what is was like to have to look into my daughter’s face and tell her that I couldn’t afford to both buy her a dollar sign shaped island and hire someone to chew her food from now on, too. To put her in that situation of having to choose… She’s only a child for God’s sake.”

It doesn’t have to be this way. Thanks to federal subsidies from taxpayers like you, CEO’s like G. Allen Andreas of Archer Daniels Midland was able to take home almost $14 million in executive compensation last year. But he’s one of the lucky ones. There are still corporations out there that actually have to provide goods and services to their consumers in order to survive. They need your help.

For just $93 billion a year the federal government is able to provide a better life for these CEO’s and their families. That’s less than the cost of 240 million cups of coffee a day. Won’t you help a needy corporation today?

The Traditional Welfare Queen

Definition: social welfare

n. Financial aid, such as a subsidy, provided by a government to specific individuals.

When one thinks about government welfare, the first thing that comes to mind is the proverbial welfare queen sitting atop her majestic throne of government cheese issuing a royal decree to her clamoring throngs of illegitimate babies that they may shut the hell up while she tries to watch Judge Judy. However, many politically well-connected corporations are also parasitically draining their share of fiscal blood from your paycheck before you ever see it. It's called corporate welfare. The intent here is to figure out which presents the greater burden to our federal budget, corporate or social welfare programs.

Before you criticize welfare queens, try sitting on a throne of government cheese yourself. It's very uncomfortable. The cheese is not structurally sound. This is why corporations prefer cash subsidies, which are much easier to sit on and also don't attract mice.

There are, of course, positive and negative aspects to this spending.The primary negative aspect is that you have to increase taxes to pay for it. Taxing individuals lowers their standard of living. It reduces people’s ability to afford necessities like medical care, education, and low mileage off-road vehicles.The common usage definition of social welfare includes welfare checks and food stamps. Welfare checks are supplied through a federal program called Temporary Aid for Needy Families. Combined federal and state TANF spending was about $26 billion in 2006. In 2009, the federal government will spend about $25 billion on rental aid for low-income households and about $8 billion on public housing projects. For some perspective, that’s about 3 percent of the total federal budget.

Note: I do not consider Medicaid to be included in the term “welfare” as it is used in common parlance. Typically, if one states that someone is “on welfare”, they mean that the person is receiving direct financial aid from the government. If we included Medicaid in our definition of social welfare, we would also have to consider any service that the government pays for to be “welfare”. For instance, public roadways to individuals’ homes would also be considered “welfare” under that expansive definition.

TANF (Temporary Aid to Needy Families)

Another negative aspect relates to the fact that social welfare programs reduce the incentive for recipients to become productive members of society. However, in 1996, Congress passed a bill enacting limited welfare reform, replacing the Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) program with the new Temporary Aid to Needy Families (TANF) program. Now, with the recent changes in healthcare including Obamacare tax implications, some states are enacting strict criteria that a family must meet to be eligible for TANF. One key aspect of this reform required recipients to engage in job searches, on the job training, community service work, or other constructive behaviors as a condition for receiving aid. The bill was signed by a man named Bill Clinton, who is much better known for an act of fellatio which, of course, had far greater societal implications. Regardless, the success of this reform was pretty dramatic. Caseloads were cut nearly in half. Once individuals were required to work or undertake constructive activities as a condition of receiving aid they left welfare rapidly. Another surprising result was a drop in the child poverty rate. Employment of single mothers increased substantially and the child poverty rate fell sharply from 20.8 percent in 1995 to 16.3 percent in 2000.

Graph Source: http://census.gov/hhes/www/poverty.html

The Corporate Welfare Queen

Now, let’s consider the other kind of welfare.

Definition: corporate welfare

n. Financial aid, such as a subsidy, provided by a government to corporations or other businesses.

The Cato Institute estimated that, in 2002, $93 billion were devoted to corporate welfare. This is about 5 percent of the federal budget.

What is NOT considered corporate welfare?

Government Contracts – To clarify what is and isn’t corporate welfare, a “no-bid” Iraq contract for the prestigious Halliburton, would not be considered corporate welfare because the government technically directly receives some good or service in exchange for this expenditure. Based on the Pentagon’s Defense Contract Audit Agency (DCAA) findings of $1.4 billion of overcharging and fraud, I suppose the primary service they provide could be considered to be repeatedly violating the American taxpayer.
Tax Breaks – Tax breaks targeted to benefit specific corporations could also be considered a form of welfare. Tax loopholes force other businesses and individual taxpayers without the same political clout to pick up the slack and sacrifice a greater share of their hard-earned money to decrease the financial burden on these corporations. However, to simplify matters, we’ve only included financial handouts to companies in our working definition of corporate welfare.

What IS considered corporate welfare?

Subsidies – On the other hand, the $15 billion in subsidies contained in the Energy Policy Act of 2005, to the oil, gas, and coal industries, would be considered corporate welfare because no goods or services are directly returned to the government in exchange for these expenditures.

Infographic Source: http://awesome.good.is/transparency/web/1012/subsidize-this/flat.html

Whenever corporate welfare is presented to voters, it always sounds like a pretty reasonable, well-intended idea. Politicians say that they’re stimulating the economy or helping struggling industries or creating jobs or funding important research. But when you steal money from the paychecks of working people, you hurt the economy by reducing their ability to buy the things they want or need. This decrease in demand damages other industries and puts people out of work.

Most of the pigs at the government trough are among the biggest companies in America, including:

The Big 3 automakers
Boeing
Archer Daniels Midland
Enron

Farm Subsidies

However, the largest fraction of corporate welfare spending, about 40%, went through the Department of Agriculture, most of it in the form of farm subsidies. (Edwards, Corporate Welfare, 2003) Well, that sounds OK. Someone’s got to help struggling family farms stay afloat, right? But in reality, farm subsidies actually tilt the cotton field in favor of the largest industrial farming operations. When it comes to deciding how to dole out the money, the agricultural subsidy system utilizes a process that is essentially the opposite of that used in the social welfare system’s welfare system. In the corporate welfare system, the more money and assets you have, the more government assistance you get. Conversely, social welfare programs are set up so that the more money and assets you have, the less government assistance you get. The result is that the absolute largest 7% of corporate farming operations receive 45% of all subsidies. (Edwards, Downsizing the Federal Government, 2004) So instead of protecting family farms, these subsidies actually enhance the ability of large industrial operations to shut them out of the market.

Graph Source: http://ers.usda.gov/data

Wal-Mart. Always high subsidies. Always.

The same is true in all other industries, too. The government gives tons of favors to the largest corporations, increasing the significant advantage they already have over smaller competing businesses. If, in the court of public opinion, Wal-Mart has been tried and convicted for the murder of main street, mom-and-pop America, then the government could easily be found guilty as a willing accomplice. Wal-Mart receives hundreds of millions of dollars of subsidization by local governments throughout the country. These subsidies take the form of bribes by local politicians trying to convince Wal-Mart to come to their town with the dream of significant job creation. Of course, from that follows a larger tax base. For example, a distribution center in Macclenny, Florida received $9 million in government subsidies in the form of free land, government-funded recruitment and training of employees, targeted tax breaks, and housing subsidies for employees allowing them to be paid significantly lower wages. A study by Good Jobs First found that 244 Wal-Marts around the country had received over $1 billion in government favors.

The Big Picture

So now let’s look at the big picture. The final totals are $59 billion, 3 percent of the total federal budget, for regular welfare and $92 billion, 5 percent of the total federal budget, for corporations. So, the government spends roughly 50% more on corporate welfare than it does on these particular public assistance programs.

Should we spend less on corporate welfare and/or social welfare programs? Or should we spend even more? It’s up to you. A bunch of people died horrible deaths to make sure this country remained a democracy, so if you feel strongly about this issue you owe it to them to call or write your congressman and senators and give them a piece of your mind.

Some More Sources:

2013 Budget: http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/omb/budget/fy2013/assets/budget.pdf

Source: Office of Management and Budget, Budget of the United States Government (Washington: Government Publishing Office), various years; and data from the American Association for the Advancement of Science R&D Budget and Policy Program, various years.

Source: U.S. Department of Agriculture, Economic Research Service, http://www.ers.usda.gov/data.

Source: Export-Import Bank, 2006 Annual Report (Washington: Export-Import Bank, 2007).

Source Data from Chris Edwards at Cato:

Corporate Welfare by Agency

Corporate Welfare by Agency 2

Corporate Welfare by Company

I am extremely appreciative of any corrections or additional info that I left out. Please include hyperlinked SOURCES. I want to update this post with more recent numbers and more expansive definitions of both corporate and social welfare.

http://media.blubrry.com/thinkbynumbers/thinkbynumbers.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/tbn003_corporate_welfare_statistics.mp3

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Government Pays Doctors $44,000 to Use an iPad

m@warondisease.org (Mike P. Sinn) — Sat, 06 Aug 2011 04:57:00 +0000

The Obama administration allocated $19.2 billion to help doctors buy iPads. More specifically, they gave up to $44,000 per doctor to switch to electronic medical records using apps like Drchrono.

The funding came through the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health Act (HITECH Act), which President Obama signed on February 17, 2009 as part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. An economic stimulus bill that stimulated the top 0.2% of income earners in the world.

Here's how this works: Take taxes from administrative staff making $25 per hour. Give that money to doctors in the top 0.2% of global income earners. Watch those doctors use the technology to fire the administrative staff who paid for it. It's wealth redistribution, just in the direction that typically makes economists check their notes twice.

Electronic health records are obviously good. Efficiency is good. But it's notable that we funded this by taking money from the people who would lose their jobs from the efficiency gain, and giving it to people who could have afforded an iPad by working for 3.7 hours.

The average doctor salary in the US is approximately $200,000. An iPad costs about $500. The government gave them $44,000. The math requires third-grade arithmetic. The policy requires explaining.

http://media.blubrry.com/thinkbynumbers/thinkbynumbers.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/tbn004_ipads-for-doctors.mp3

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Fun Facts About Iraq

m@warondisease.org (Mike P. Sinn) — Sun, 14 Aug 2011 04:50:15 +0000

The Iraq War cost $3 trillion. That's enough to end world hunger for 100 years. We chose differently. Here are the numbers.

A trillion is a very big number. It's bigger than a billion. I think it's made by adding lots of smaller numbers together until you get tired of counting. We got tired at three trillion, which is how much we spent making Iraq worse.

The Human Cost

100,000+ Iraqi civilians died. That's 35 September 11th attacks. We respond to one by starting a war that causes 35 more. The math is third-grade level, so the logic is mysterious.

4 million Iraqis lost their homes. That's the entire population of Maine, Idaho, and New Hampshire combined. They cannot all crash on your couch.

Liberation means setting someone free. We liberated 4 million Iraqis from their homes. Now they're free to live somewhere else, like a refugee camp or a foreign country that doesn't want them. Freedom is very complicated.

4,444 U.S. troops died. 98% male, 91% non-officers, 54% under age 25. We sent children to die. We call this "supporting the troops."

32,051 U.S. troops wounded. 20% are serious brain or spinal injuries. These don't count psychological injuries, because apparently those don't matter.

"Supporting the troops" means sending them to Iraq and then they get shot. I thought "support" meant helping someone, like holding them up so they don't fall down. But in military terms, it means the opposite. We supported them so hard that 4,444 of them died.

The Money We Chose To Spend

$900 billion spent through November 2010. That's approved spending. The real number is higher.

$9 billion just disappeared. Also 190,000 guns, including 110,000 AK-47 rifles. We shipped them to contractors and nobody knows where they went. This is called "losing track" rather than "theft" because the people who lost track also approve the budgets.

I think $9 billion disappeared because money is very small and easy to lose. Like when you lose your keys, except instead of keys it's nine billion dollars. And instead of looking for it, we just printed more money and kept going.

$1 billion in equipment missing. Tractor trailers, tank recovery vehicles, machine guns, rocket-propelled grenades. All gone. Probably fine.

$10 billion mismanaged and wasted. This is the official number from Congressional hearings, which means the real number is larger.

"Mismanaged" means you managed something badly. The opposite would be "well-managed," which is when you don't lose a billion dollars of equipment. We chose the first option because the second option requires paying attention to where things are.

$1.4 billion in Halliburton overcharges deemed "unreasonable and unsupported" by the Pentagon. They paid anyway.

$20 billion paid to KBR (formerly part of Halliburton) for food, fuel, and housing. Pentagon auditors questioned $3.2 billion of this. We paid that too.

$5,000 spent per second in 2008. That's the sound of money burning.

$390,000 to deploy one soldier for one year. We could have paid them $390,000 to stay home and saved money on ammunition.

Graph Source: http://awesome.good.is/transparency/013/transparency013trilliondollarwar.html

Supporting The Troops By Sending Them To Die

47,000 U.S. troops remained after all other nations withdrew. Apparently we were the only ones who didn't get the memo.

316 non-U.S. troops died. 179 from the UK. They figured it out faster than we did.

30% of returning troops develop serious mental health problems within 3-4 months. We don't count these as casualties because that would make the numbers look bad.

75 military helicopters downed. At least 36 by enemy fire. Helicopters cost money. People don't, apparently.

Graph Source: http://www.wallstats.com/blog/us-troop-stength-in-iraq-and-other-data/

The People Who Actually Live There

180,000 private contractors in August 2007. That's more contractors than troops. We privatized war. The invisible hand of the market now holds a gun.

146 journalists killed. 97 murdered, 49 in acts of war, 14 by U.S. forces. Apparently some people didn't want this documented.

9,889 Iraqi police and soldiers killed as of January 2011. We trained them to fight and then they died. This is called "building capacity."

100,000+ Iraqi civilians killed according to secret U.S. government documents released by Wikileaks. The UN says this is "significantly under-reported" and estimates reach 600,000. We're not sure because we didn't count. You don't count things you don't care about.

Graph Source: http://musingsoniraq.blogspot.nl/2011/01/2010-ends-with-slight-drop-in-iraqi.html

55,000 insurgents killed. Roughly estimated, because we're better at killing than counting.

572 non-Iraqi contractors and civilian workers killed. People came from other countries to help and died.

306 non-Iraqis kidnapped. 57 killed, 147 released, 4 escaped, 6 rescued, 89 status unknown. We're not great at keeping track.

The Insurgency We Created

Daily insurgent attacks:

February 2004: 14 attacks per day
July 2005: 70 attacks per day
May 2007: 163 attacks per day

Insurgency strength:

November 2003: 15,000 fighters
October 2006: 20,000-30,000 fighters
June 2007: 70,000 fighters

We invaded to fight terrorists. We created more terrorists. The math is simple. The logic is absent.

An insurgent is someone who fights against an occupying force. We became the occupying force, so people started fighting against us. Then we called them insurgents. Before we invaded, they were just people living in Iraq. After we invaded, they became insurgents. It's like magic, except instead of pulling a rabbit out of a hat, we pulled 70,000 fighters out of a country we destroyed.

Life in "Liberated" Iraq

2.25 million Iraqis displaced inside their own country as of May 2007.

2.1-2.25 million Iraqi refugees fled to Syria and Jordan. We freed them from their homes.

27-60% unemployment where curfew isn't in effect. Those are Depression-era numbers. We brought them democracy and unemployment.

50% inflation in 2006. Food costs double. Wages don't. This is called "economic freedom."

28% of Iraqi children chronically malnourished in June 2007. But 72% aren't, so clearly things are going well.

40% of professionals left Iraq since 2003. The smart ones fled.

34,000 physicians before the invasion. 12,000 physicians left after the invasion. 2,000 physicians murdered since the invasion.

We killed the doctors. Then wondered why healthcare got worse.

Doctors are people who make sick people better. When you kill the doctors, there's nobody left to make sick people better. So sick people stay sick, and then they die. I'm not sure why we killed the doctors. Maybe we thought Iraqis didn't need healthcare anymore because they were liberated.

Baghdad electricity before the war: 16-24 hours per day Baghdad electricity after liberation: 5.6 hours per day

We made electricity scarce. This is called "spreading freedom."

Electricity is what makes lights work. Before we liberated Iraq, lights worked for 16-24 hours per day. After liberation, lights worked for 5.6 hours per day. So freedom makes lights work less. I always thought freedom meant having more choices, but apparently it means having less electricity.

37% of homes connected to sewer systems. Most people live with raw sewage. We spent $3 trillion on this.

70% of Iraqis lack adequate water. Water doesn't work but at least we brought democracy, which also doesn't work without water.

22% of water treatment plants rehabilitated. We broke the rest. "Rehabilitation" implies they're getting better. They're not.

Graph Source: http://www.foreignpolicy.com/story/cms.php?story_id=4228

What Iraqis Think About Being Liberated

82% strongly oppose coalition troops. We liberated them. They want us to leave. The disconnect is notable.

Less than 1% believe coalition forces improved security. We spent $900 billion. Less than 1% think it helped. The return on investment is poor.

67% feel less secure because of occupation. We made them less safe. While spending money to make them safer. This is either incompetence or lying, and both are bad.

72% have no confidence in multinational forces. Three-quarters of the people we're "helping" don't trust us. This is called "winning hearts and minds."

Poll taken in Iraq in August 2005 by the British Ministry of Defense (Source: Brookings Institute)

Graph Source: http://www.good.is

What You Can Do

The war is over. The lessons aren't learned. Here's how to prevent the next one:

Track military spending - Check the National Priorities Project to see current military budgets
Follow contractor fraud - Monitor the Federal Awardee Performance and Integrity Information System
Contact representatives - Use specific numbers from this article when asking questions
Remember the math - $3 trillion could have ended world hunger for 100 years

Data presented as of March 31, 2011, except as indicated.

Sources

http://media.blubrry.com/thinkbynumbers/thinkbynumbers.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/tbn009_fun_facts_about_iraq.mp3

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Voters See 'Corporate Welfare' Programs As A Good Place To Cut Government Spending

m@warondisease.org (Mike P. Sinn) — Wed, 07 Sep 2011 03:29:41 +0000

What Voters Actually Want

According to Rasmussen Reports, voters have opinions about corporate welfare. Shocking, I know.

In a democracy, what the voters want matters. This is why we ask them what they want, write it down carefully, and then do the opposite.

Foreign Military Sales Subsidies

70% of voters oppose giving foreign countries money to buy weapons from US companies.

15% support it.

15% are still thinking about whether subsidizing weapons sales is a good idea.

To be fair to that 15%, it IS a complex question. Should we pay other countries to buy murder equipment from us? Really makes you think. Ideally for less than 30 seconds, because then you might notice we're doing it anyway.

The government does it anyway.

Farm Subsidies

The US government gives $20 billion per year to farms.

46% of voters think this should stop.

37% think it should continue.

17% haven't decided if paying farmers not to grow food makes sense.

The 17% undecided voters are probably just trying to understand how "paying someone to NOT grow food" works. It's simple: you give them money, and then food doesn't happen. It's like reverse farming, which is apparently something we do now.

The government continues giving farmers $20 billion per year.

Export-Import Bank

The Export-Import Bank gives billions in loans and loan guarantees to Boeing and General Electric. The stated purpose is to "sustain American jobs."

29% of voters support this.

46% oppose it.

25% are undecided about whether Boeing needs help from taxpayers.

The government continues providing these loans.

The Pattern

In each case, voters oppose corporate subsidies by large margins. In each case, the subsidies continue.

This is democracy working exactly as designed. The design just isn't what you were told it was.

It's like ordering a pizza and getting a cinder block. Sure, it's not what you asked for, but the delivery system worked perfectly. The cinder block arrived on time and you still have to pay for it.

Source: Rasmussen Reports

http://media.blubrry.com/thinkbynumbers/thinkbynumbers.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/tbn010_cut_corporate_welfare.mp3

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

A More Progressive Tax System Makes People Happier

m@warondisease.org (Mike P. Sinn) — Fri, 09 Sep 2011 03:49:26 +0000

Illustration by The New York Times

Here's a thing humans claim to want: happiness. Here's another thing humans do constantly: argue about who should pay what percentage of their papers to the government.

Turns out these two things are connected. Who knew.

The Study: 54 Countries, One Obvious Finding

University of Virginia psychologist Shigehiro Oishi and his colleagues did something unusual - they asked 59,634 people in 54 nations if they were happy, then checked what kind of tax system their government used. The results were published in Psychological Science.

The finding: People in countries with progressive taxation (where richer people pay higher rates) reported being happier than people in countries with flat taxation (where everyone pays the same rate).

Not "felt slightly better about abstract concepts of fairness." Actually happier. On a scale of 1 to 10, rating their lives closer to "best possible life." Experiencing more days of smiling and being treated with respect. Fewer days of sadness and shame.

The math here requires third-grade arithmetic, so the decades of debate about this are notable.

Why This Works

The happiness wasn't just people feeling warm and fuzzy about fairness. It came from something concrete: satisfaction with public goods like schools, housing, and public transportation.

Progressive taxes → better public services → people who use those services are happier.

The researchers measured tax progressivity by the gap between the highest and lowest tax rates, accounting for family size and benefits. Then they asked people to rate their life satisfaction and their satisfaction with public services.

Countries with bigger gaps between rich and poor tax rates had happier citizens. The citizens specifically said they were more satisfied with the public goods those taxes funded.

The Weird Part

Higher government spending alone didn't make people happier. In fact, there was a slight negative correlation.

"That data is kind of weird," Oishi said, displaying the scientific term for "what the hell."

His guess: Some countries are terrible at converting tax money into actual services. The U.S., for example, spends more on education and healthcare than most developed countries while ranking poorly in both. It's like using a calculator to hammer nails - expensive and ineffective.

What This Means

If you want happy citizens, tax progressivity appears to matter more than total spending.

Not because progressive taxation is morally superior or ideologically correct. Because it empirically correlates with people reporting that their lives are better.

You can debate economic theory all you want. The people living in these systems have opinions about their own lives, and they shared those opinions with researchers, who counted them.

The U.S. has been reducing tax progressivity for decades. This study suggests that's probably making people less happy, though Americans have many other reasons to be concerned about their choices.

Source

Medical News Today - Progressive Taxation Linked to National Happiness

http://media.blubrry.com/thinkbynumbers/thinkbynumbers.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/tbn011_taxes_make_us_happy.mp3

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

GOP Presidential Candidates' Budget Plans EXPOSED!!!

m@warondisease.org (Mike P. Sinn) — Mon, 07 Nov 2011 00:52:13 +0000

GOP Candidate Ron Paul has produced a detailed budget containing over $1 trillion in first-year reductions. Mitt Romney, Rick Santorum, and Newt Gingrich have only indicated that they would attempt to repeal Obamacare saving an average of $20 billion a year.

Why Do the Candidates’ Budget Plans Matter?

The only way that a president can noticeably affect the everyday lives of all Americans is by raising or lowing their standard of living. This is accomplished through their influence over the real tax rate. The real tax rate encompasses all normal forms of taxation, but it also includes a hidden tax known as inflation.

All of the Republican candidates have detailed plans for modifying the tax code. But saying you’re going to cut taxes without cutting spending correspondingly is sneaky. If you cut taxes, but maintain the same level of spending, then you have to either borrow or print the resulting budget shortfall. Borrowing the money is worse than paying with taxes immediately, not only because we’ll have to pay it back in a future when the government’s fiscal situation is predicted to be far worse than is today, but we’ll also have to pay a bunch of interest on top of that.

The alternative to borrowing is to have the Federal Reserve fire up the printing press. The FED creates trillions of new dollars out of thin air and give it to the government through the purchase of treasury bonds. The effect of this is identical to the effect of criminal counterfeiting. If one doubles the money supply without a corresponding increase in GDP, the long-term result is that everyone’s paycheck can only buy half as much.

So using the magical money machine to pay the bills just shifts the tax burden to an inflation tax. According to the Consumer Price Index, inflation is only about 3.5%. However, the real rate of inflation is currently almost 10%. The inflation tax, while largely ignored, hurts middle-class and low-income Americans the most. This is because inflation is flat tax which doesn’t tax the poor at a lower rate the way our progressive income tax system does. In fact, it’s somewhat regressive because the loss in value is delayed. When the new money is initially created, price inflation hasn’t set in yet. The first people who get to spend the new money are generally giant financial institutions. By the time it filters down the average Joe, it’s already lost a lot of it’s value.

So the only way a president can change the real tax rate is by increasing or decreasing government spending. Therefor, the only thing about a candidate that’s guaranteed to significantly impact your life is not whether they think gay people should have the right to suffer through the institution of marriage. It’s not whether or not their religion’s doctrine includes magic underwear. It’s not even their tax plan. It is only the candidates’ positions on spending that is guaranteed to directly affect your everyday life by increasing or decreasing your standard of living.

But does a president really have any control over spending?

After all, isn’t the level of spending set by the congress? This is generally true, but the president does have a number of very powerful means of controlling the budget:

The Power to Appoint the Chairman of the Federal Reserve – This power enables the president to choose a chairman who would refuse to monetize the debt. In this case, the government wouldn’t be able to print new money out of thin air. Then congress couldn’t spend any more than tax revenues or borrowing permits.
The Power to Veto – The president has the power to veto bills containing spending which he opposes. Congress would then have to override this veto with a two-thirds majority both houses.

The Candidates Compared

We know that President Obama stands shoulder to shoulder with our nation’s drunken sailors on spending, but what about the potential Republican nominees?

Mitt Romney

(a.k.a. Mormobot 5000)

Specific Cuts = $20 Billion

Romney wants to repeal Obamacare (which is very similar to Romneycare aside from the fact that Romneycare covered abortions). As stated before, this would save $20 billion a year.

Other than that, this is the maximum level of specificity from his programmers:

“Mitt Romney will bring fiscal restraint to Washington by placing a hard cap on federal spending to force our government to live within its means and put an end to deficit spending.

Mitt will also curb federal spending by repealing Obamacare, the federal takeover of health care that is scheduled to cost taxpayers one trillion dollars over the next ten years. He will also focus on eliminating wasteful government spending and right-sizing the federal government to save taxpayer dollars. 00010101.”

The Romney Record on Spending

If we’ve learned anything from the vast disparity between George W. Bush’s fiscal rhetoric and fiscal record, it’s that Romney’s gubernatorial record might be a better indicator of what we could expect from a Romney federal budget. Under Mr. Romney, state spending went from $22.3 billion to $28.1 billion, an annual increase of 6.5 percent. This is twice as much as the average 2.9% average statewide budget increase.

So, if his record is any indication, we shouldn’t expect too much from a Romney presidency in the way of cutting the federal budget.

Image Source (Below)

Ron Paul

(a.k.a. Dr. No)

Specific Cuts = $1 Trillion

From his complete detailed and itemized budget:

p style=”text-align: justify;”>“The Plan to Restore America cuts $1 trillion in spending during the first year of Ron Paul’s presidency, eliminating five cabinet departments (Energy, HUD, Commerce, Interior, and Education). It abolishes the Transportation Security Administration and returns responsibility for security to private property owners. It also abolishes corporate subsidies, stops foreign aid, ends foreign wars, and returns most other spending to 2006 levels.

CUTTING GOVERNMENT WASTE:

Makes a 10% reduction in the federal workforce, slashes Congressional pay and perks, and curbs excessive federal travel. To stand with the American People, President Paul will take a salary of $39,336, approximately equal to the median personal income of the American worker.”

Image Source (Above)

The Paul Record on Spending

Paul’s congressional record consists of a long list of votes against federal spending.

Voted against the Medicare Prescription Drug Act
Voted nine out of nine times against raising his own pay
Voted against No Child Left Behind
Voted against the subsidy-laden 2002 Farm Bill
Voted against the 1998 and 2005 Highway bill, only 1 of 9 to vote against the pork-filled 2005 bill
Voted against the Stimulus, TARP, auto bailout, and Cash for Clunkers
Voted against the Iraq War

Note: I tried to write this objectively, so I seriously put a lot of effort into finding any votes by Ron Paul for significant spending increases. I hoped to find some to add an appearance of increased credibility to the piece but was unsuccessful. If you have any examples, please leave them in comments at the bottom.

Let’s look at how Ron Paul’s plan would affect the individual taxpayer. He wants to cut $4,000,000,000,000 over his 4-year term. Divide this number by 142,449,000 federal income tax filers and that comes out to an average of $28,080.23 in savings for each taxpayer. Alternatively, the $4 trillion should be divided by 307,006,550, the total US population. This would produce a 4-year savings of $13,029.04 per person.

Newt Gingrich

(a.k.a. Sorry, There’s Nothing Funny About Newt Gingrich)

Specific Cuts = $20 Billion

Like Cain and Romney, all his cuts would come from the repeal of Obamacare.

Other than that, he’s not too specific. From his website:

“Balance the budget by growing the economy, controlling spending, implementing money saving reforms, and replacing destructive policies and regulatory agencies with new approaches.”

The Gingrich Record on Spending

Gingrich’s fiscal record is mixed. During his time in Congress, he had an exemplary voting record on a lot of the top spending proposals:

Voted NO on the Chrysler bailout in 1979
Voted YES on the Gramm-Rudman balanced budget bill in 1985
Voted YES on a balanced budget amendment (as part of the “Contract for America” effort that he led) in 1995
Led the effort and voted YES to cut $16.4 billion from the budget in 1995.
Voted YES on welfare reform in 1996

Gingrich has also been a vocal opponent of most of the big spending habits pushed by the White House and Congress over the past few years. He opposed the $787 billion stimulus proposal, the auto bailout, and Cash for Clunkers.

On the other hand, in 2003, when he urged “every conservative member of Congress” to support the Medicare drug benefit bill. He called it the “most important reorganization of our nation’s healthcare system since the original Medicare Bill of 1965.” The drug benefit now costs taxpayers over $60 billion a year and has almost $16 trillion in unfunded liabilities.

Notably in 2008, he also backed the $700 billion Wall Street bailout.

He’s also attacked those who oppose omnibus spending bills. These bills roll thousands of programs which may not pass on their own into massive one massive all or nothing bill that is more likely pass. In 1998, he derided a group of House conservatives by calling them the “the perfectionist caucus” for opposing a 4,000-page omnibus spending bill, adding that “those of us who have grown up and matured in this process understand after the last four years that we have to work together on big issues.”

Herman Cain

(a.k.a. Pizza Dude)

Specific Cuts = $20 Billion

Like all the other candidates, Cain wants to repeal Obamacare which would save $20 billion a year. But other than that, this is about as detailed as it gets:

“Nothing should be off the table. Every federal agency, every government program and expenditure must be reviewed and revised with a keen eye and a red pen.”

The Cain Record on Spending

It doesn’t exist. With no political record, Cain needs to be way more specific for voters to make anything close to an educated decision.

What is known is that Cain supported TARP, the government bailout of the financial industry. He even chastised those who opposed it.

On the other hand, Cain opposed the Democrats’ stimulus, saying, “The Obama-Reid-Pelosi cure for more national economic pain – more spending, more taxes and more socialism! That’s just more pavement for the road to perpetual debt.”

This sounds nice, but without significant specific spending cuts, Cain’s 9-9-9 tax plan will actually be a 9-9-9-9 plan. A 9% corporate tax, a 9% sales tax, a 9% income tax, and a hidden 9% inflation tax.

Rick Perry

(a.k.a. The Executioner)

Specific Cuts = $50 Billion

From his rock:

“Consolidating Department of Education funding for all elementary and secondary programs, reducing it by 50 percent, and returning the rest of the money to the states would save $25 billion in the first year. Reducing the portfolio of investments by government-sponsored enterprises like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac would save $26.5 billion over ten years.”

The Perry Record on Spending

Like Romney, Perry’s real record is not one of fiscal restraint. Rick Perry came into office in December 2000. Texas general spending has risen from $29 billion that first Perry year to $41 billion by fiscal year 2011, which works out to an average annual increase of 3.5 percent. (Data from NASBO).

For some perspective, let’s look at Perry versus the average spending increases of governors in all 50 states over the last decade.

Here is NASBO data showing increases in state general fund spending between fiscal 2001 and fiscal 2011:

Texas, Perry: $29 billion to $41 billion, a 41 percent increase.
Total of 50 states: $506 billion to $651 billion, a 29 percent increase.

Under Perry, the Texas budget increased 41% from

However, the Texas population has grown faster than the U.S. population, so let’s put these figures on a per-capita basis.

Texas, Perry: $1,360 per capita to $1,598 per capita, an 18 percent increase.
Total of 50 states: $1,774 per capita to $2,091 per capita, an 18 percent increase.

Perry is touting the “Texas Miracle” as a template for the rest of America, which is stuck in a rut of high unemployment and could certainly use some fresh ideas for how to create jobs. Texas has clearly fared better than most other states since the recession began at the end of 2007. Its unemployment rate is 8.2%, a full point lower than the national average. The housing bust in Texas was far milder than it was in other places. A strong energy sector kept state tax revenues from plunging the way they did in other states, which forestalled layoffs in state and local government. Additionally, the majority of the jobs created in Texas were government jobs. From the beginning of 2008 to the end of 2010, government employment in Texas increased by 7 percent, whereas it only increased 2 percent over the rest of the country. Private sector jobs in Texas only grew by 0.6% during this period.

So Perry’s record is perfectly mediocre. Like with Romney, we shouldn’t expect too much in the way of cuts if past is prologue.

The Verdict

So after examining the records and proposals of all the candidates, it appears that Ron Paul is the only candidate who intends to make balancing the federal budget a real priority. Based on the others’ records and proposals, it appears pretty likely that, under their administrations, we’re going to continue the status quo Washington spending spree.

http://media.blubrry.com/thinkbynumbers/thinkbynumbers.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/tbn012_presidential_plans_compared.mp3

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Why Think by Numbers?

m@warondisease.org (Mike P. Sinn) — Tue, 25 Jun 2013 23:34:02 +0000

Numbers cannot lie.

A world without disease, starvation, violence, and suffering is the ultimate destination of humanity. Getting there will require voters to base their decisions on statistical cost-benefit analyses instead of irrational emotions. The power of numbers can make utopia a reality.

The Others

Your mind has been infiltrated. Your logical and conscious prefrontal cortex is ever thwarted by powerful saboteurs hiding within the dark realm of your subconscious. The usurpers of your decision-making processes are none other than the ignorant reptilian brain stem and emotional limbic system. They torture you with sadness for the slightest defiance. They drug you with narcotic neurochemicals to reward your obedience. This diabolical duo is responsible for all forms of irrational human behavior, such as racism, war, and marriage. Your only defense against these illogical bastards is to base your decisions on cold, hard numbers. For unlike these very flawed and mischievous components of our brains, numbers cannot lie.

Three Brains are a Crowd

You have a total of three brains: the reptilian brain, the paleo-mammalian brain, and the rational brain. In a sense, a human being is what you might get nine months after a romantic evening between a lizard, a dog, and Mr. Spock.

Diagram Source: http://www.ascd.org/publications/books/101269/chapters/A-Walk-Through-the-Brain.aspx

Brain 1: The Lizard – The reptilian part of us, the brain stem, deals with the basic survival, instinctive, and reproductive functions. These functions are otherwise known as the four F’s:
- fight
- flight
- feeding
- intercourse

That’s all that crocodiles really do with their tiny, pea-sized brains. This republican, I mean reptilian brain is “rigid, obsessive, compulsive, ritualistic and paranoid”. It is prone to repetitive, programmed behaviors and is incapable of learning from mistakes. The reptile brain’s only saving grace is that it is responsible for all core tasks required for self-preservation.

Brain 2: The Dog – The second evolutionary stratum consists of the ancient paleo-mammalian limbic system. The limbic system adds feelings to instincts. It morally classifies everything as either “good or bad”. The value in this portion of the brain is that it can generates more nuanced, varied and flexible behaviors than can the basic brain stem.
Brain 3: Mr. Spock – The characteristically human layer is the neocortex. This is the realm of reason and logic. It is this part of our brains that has given mankind the great gifts of philosophy, mathematics, science, and man’s crowning achievement, the Snuggie™.

So within our craniums, we have an ongoing battle between the vicious, impulsive lizard, the slobbering dog digging a hole in your couch to china for no reason, and Mr. Spock struggling to determine the fate of our planet. Wouldn’t it be best to leave this job solely to Spock?

Triune Brain Painting – Michael Stancato

Why Our Brains Don’t Work Rite

So, we’ve got this top of the line neocortex which is perfectly capable of rational thought. Why then, do we behave so irrationally as a species? The problem is that the rational neocortex is enslaved by the lower brains. It is not free to examine all available information in it’s quest to attain objective truth. Instead, it frequently becomes a kind of a slimy neuro-lawyer defending and rationalizing the preconceived notions of our emotional limbic systems. Let’s break down the processing of new infomation:

Your sensory organs are exposed to a new piece of information in the form of stimuli.
This sensory stimuli is neurally transmitted to the limbic system.
The limbic system decides if this information is agreeable (true) or disagreeable (false).
The limbic system attaches positive emotions to agreeable information or negative emotions to disagreeable information.
That feeling gives that thought a sense of conviction or truth.
This information/emotion combination is what we call a belief.
At that point, the neocortex is employed to blindly protect and defend this belief.
The neocortex puts forth all available evidence which supports this belief.
The neocortex figures out ways to discount or filter out any information which contradicts this belief.

The limbic system, this primitive brain that can neither read nor write, provides us with the feeling of what is real, true, and important using its own often irrational and illogical criteria. It therefore poses great danger to all of human civilization.

Why No One is Reading this Sentence

Many of the hostile commenters on my site have expressed their own theories as to why this is. However, I feel that the reason for this can be explained by a concept known as “The Caveman Principle”. This principle states that our brains have generally evolved very little since the time of the caveman.

The human brain has been around for about 200,000 years. The Stone Age only ended about 6,000 years ago. So, ninety-nine percent of our ancestors lived in environments characterized by starvation and a general scarcity of resources. Evolution crawls at a snail’s pace, so we still have these caveman brains optimized for an environment millennia away from our own. So our wants, dreams, personalities, and desires have not changed much in 200,000 years.

So, like, what were cavemen into? Surviving long enough to successfully replicate one’s genes in an unstable environment requires brains with very specific interests. Hence, the type of brain that survived to reproductive age typically paid a great deal of attention to these questions:

Can I eat it?
Will it eat me?
Can I mate with it?
Will it mate with me?

Note these topics of interest, which are suspiciously absent from this list:

Statistics
Economics
Formal Cost-Benefit-Analysis

An interest in these topics was pretty much worthless to primitive humans struggling to survive in ancient Africa. This is especially true since math and written language didn’t even exist at the time. Conventional evolutionary theory states that traits that offer no survival or reproductive advantage will not persist in a species. Hence, these subjects are as fascinating to us as Al Gore recounting a riveting experience of watching paint dry.

Evolution has made these subjects brutally boring to most of us. So that, my non-existent reader, is why you are not reading this sentence, and are instead viewing one of the many fine pornographic websites that the prestigious internet has to offer.

Let’s Get Ignorant!

“It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data, fool.” – Mr. T

A general disinterest in economics and statistics wouldn’t be a big deal if we lived in a dictatorship. However, in our political system, government action is to some degree a product of public opinion. Thomas Jefferson once said, “An informed citizenry is the bulwark of a democracy.” Based on this quote, I think it’s safe to say that our democracy is currently bulwark-free. The fact that I don’t know what a bulwark is further proves that we do not have an informed citizenry.

The only way to understand the important details of complex and large-scale societal issues is through the use of statistics and economics. Additionally, formal cost-benefit analysis is the only way to make optimal decisions on these complicated issues. Unfortunately, most of us don’t even know what a cost-benefit analysis is, let alone have a firm grasp of the statistical and economic data needed to perform such analyses.

Here’s a list of what the average voter (such as myself) doesn’t know:

How much their government spends on:
- foreign aid
  - Asked to estimate how much of the federal budget goes to foreign aid the median estimate provided by survey respondents is 25%. Asked how much they thought would be an “appropriate” percentage the median response is 10%. In reality, a mere 1% of the federal budget goes to foreign aid.
- wars
  - Americans were asked which activities the U.S. government currently spends the most money on: national defense, education, Medicare or interest on the national debt? Just 39% of Americans were able to correctly identify national defense.
- education
- Medicare
- interest on the debt
How many troops have been killed in our various and sundry wars
- just 28% of adults are able to say that approximately 4,000 Americans have died in the Iraq war.
How many civilians have been killed in our various and sundry wars
- Iraqi civilian deaths are estimated at more than 54,000 and could be much higher; some unofficial estimates range into the hundreds of thousands. The estimate provided by the average survey respondant as 9,890.
How much they pay in taxes
What the rate of inflation is
What the unemployment rate is
How much profit corporations make
What the Dow Jones Average is
2 years after the terrorist attacks on 9/11, 70% of Americans believed that Saddam Hussein had perpetrated the attacks
How wealth is distributed among classes
only 2 out of 5 voters can name all three branches of the federal government.
only 1 in 5 know that there are 100 federal senators.

Without factual data for our neocortices to utilize in doing a cost-benefit comparison of our electoral choices, our stupid brain stems and emotional limbic systems get to choose our candidates.

The US government is the most powerful man-made entity in the history of the world. Allowing an uninformed public control of this colossus is like giving a baby a nuclear bomb. My dream is that one day we might upgrade our democracy to the equivalent of a toddler with a nuclear bomb.

Keep In the Vote!

“If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.” — Pee Wee Herman

Elections are won and lost not primarily on “the issues” but on the values and emotions of the electorate, including the “gut feelings” that summarize much of what voters think and feel about a candidate or party.

Ideally, the goal in selecting any candidate is to identify the individual most likely to maximize the overall well-being of the citizenry. If our neocortices were in charge, politicians would be selected solely based on three primary criteria.

INTELLIGENCE, which is necessary to effectively identify and execute policies that maximize the general welfare of the populace. The best way to measure intelligence would be for the candidates to take psychometric tests and make their scores public.
KNOWLEDGE – An immense level of knowledge over a wide range of issues (economics, history, science, etc.) is necessary to identify and properly execute optimal public policies. This could be evaluated through standardized testing of the candidates.
RECORD – The candidate’s record proves whether or not they actually support policies that better the general welfare of the citizenry. It also indicates whether or not the candidate possesses the integrity necessary to resist the influence of special interests. These are small but powerful groups who would impose their own selfish policies at the expense of the greater society.

Unfortunately, I and most other voters have an informational vacuum between our ears with regard to this data for most candidates. Hence, our neocortices are unable to perform a rational calculation. This leaves the decision up to our stupid brain stems and emotional limbic systems. These portions of our brains can’t follow arguments of any complexity. They stuff themselves with slogans and advertisements. They eschew fact for myth. They operate on biases and stereotypes. They privilege feeling over thinking. The result is a political system of daunting irrationality.

The primary factors which do influence our electoral decisions include:

LOOKS – 70% of elections are won by the candidate with the prettiest face. Another study illustrates voter preference for candidates that possess facial features similar to their own.
LOVELIFE – Although infidelity may say something about a politician’s character, it has no direct impact of the lives of the voters. My theory is that throughout evolutionary history, man tended to live in small groups. Hence, the chosen leader was likely to come into direct contact with the voter’s spouse. Powerful individuals tend to elicit a greater ability to seduce spouses. Therefore, prehistoric voters who chose faithful leaders were less likely to have their spouse impregnated by this leader. This would leave their spouse’s womb available for their own progeny. Ultimately, their characteristic appreciation of fidelity would be passed to their offspring.
ELECTABILITY – Many people choose not to vote for a third party or independent candidate that they prefer because they’re unlikely to win. Their reasoning is that they would be throwing away their chance to help elect the lesser of two evils. A survey of college students shows that 79 percent of the students “felt that their vote makes a difference.” In reality, there is only a one in 60 million chance of a randomly selected voter affecting the presidential election. It much more likely that that voter will die in a car accident (1 in 1 million) driving to the polls. Hence, it’s irrational to believe that your vote is any more than a one data point in an opinion poll.
TRIBAL LOYALTY – Blind loyalty to political parties often distorts decision-making. Many would claim that their loyalty to a party’s candidate is a result of their agreement with that candidate’s policies. However, for a lot of partisans, the causality is reversed. Often individuals will modify their support for policies to achieve agreement with their candidate of the party to which they are loyal. For instance, upon the election of Barack Obama, a lot of republicans suddenly started complaining about the nation’s budget deficit. The odd thing is that, when George W. Bush was president, these same republicans were generally silent on the issue, despite the fact that Mr. Bush ran up $4 trillion in debt. At the same time, many democrats suddenly stopped complaining about the wars in Iraq or Afghanistan upon Obama’s election. It’s still unclear how having a democrat for a commander in chief can suddenly make a war morally justifiable.
VOTER’S MOOD – An experiment indicates that being in a bad mood while voting makes you more likely to vote out incumbents.
FLAGS – The mere appearance of the American flag in a voting booth makes voters more likely to vote Republican.

We’re damn lucky that CEO’s aren’t elected by popular vote. If the public got to decide who ran Microsoft, I would be typing this sentence on a typewriter.

How to Beat Out Your Brains

Utopia, a world without disease, starvation, violence, and suffering, is the ultimate goal and destination of society. The thinking, rational mind has the power to make utopia a reality through innovation. We’ve had a few hundred thousand years to get there, yet it remains a distant dream. Irrational or uniformed decisions are the primary reason why humanity fails to reach its true potential.

In a democracy and a free enterprise economy, voters and consumers are the deciders. Our prehistoric brains decide to waste society’s resources on wars and short-term gratification through erroneous decision-making. They are a drain on the economy, public welfare, the environment, and national security. Resources are misallocated, good ideas are rejected, and bad ideas are accepted. Money is wasted. Life and health are put in jeopardy.

Irrational beliefs are sand in the gears of the entire economy. It’s virtually certain that your life will be shorter and less happy as a result of emotion-based decisions.

The only way to break the shackles put on our neocortices by its evil stepsisters is through the use of numbers. When our rational mind has cold, hard statistics to support its arguments, it’s much more likely to overcome the emotion-based arguments of the primitive brains. Providing your neocortex with this ammunition is the purpose of this site. Using numbers we can overthrow this idiocracy and ignite a revolution of reason. Suffering can be eliminated and utopia can be realized.

It’s quite possible, and maybe probable, that I’m an idiot. I may be wrong about a lot of this stuff. If so, I would be eternally grateful if you were to straighten me out in the comments section.

Love,

Mike P. Sinn

http://media.blubrry.com/thinkbynumbers/thinkbynumbers.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/tbn013_why_think_by_numbers.mp3

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Financial Sector Costs Us More than Any Other Sector In Economy

m@warondisease.org (Mike P. Sinn) — Tue, 12 Apr 2016 03:24:00 +0000

The financial sector receives more of the average paycheck than any other sector of the economy. Its share of the economy totals $2 trillion dollars.

In 1985, the financial sector earned less than 16% of domestic corporate profits. Today, it’s over 40%.

In the 1960s, finance and insurance accounted for only 4% of GDP, whereas in 2007 finance and insurance accounted for 8% of GDP.

The purpose of the financial services industry is basically to transfer money from savers to entrepreneurs. It primarily consists of using a computer to shift money from one bank account to another. This service requires virtually no physical labor and very few material resources.

Yet, this relatively simple service cost our country more than $2 trillion in 2007. That was more than the country spent on health care, construction, food, utilities or transportation.

How can financial paper shuffling to cost us more than the construction of the skyscraper where the paper shuffling will then take place? How does this industry get us to spend such an inordinate amount of money on their services?

The free market system automatically optimizes resource allocation to satisfy society’s wants and needs. The current problems in our financial sector can be seen as our economy’s attempt to reduce the excessive size of the financial sector and redirect those resources to more productive purposes. Yet, the government is doing everything in its power to counteract this process. The feds have taken or committed to take over $12 trillion from the other sectors and given them to financial institution to maintain this imbalance. This works out to $42,105 for every man, woman and child in the U.S.

The financial sector is at a historic high as share of the overall economy.

Graph Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:NYUGDPFinancialShare.jpg

Note another year in history when it peaked, 1929. At that time, many of the country’s resources were shifted to this low-employee, unproductive sector. It was followed by a decade of unemployment and economic stagnation. This would suggest that it may be unwise for the government to fuel this bloating if they wish to avoid another lost decade.

This begs the question “Why is government taking money from the paychecks of working people and giving it to AIG and Goldman-Sachs?” They claim that their failure will result in the collapse of our entire economic system. This would, of course, eventually lead to a dystopian Mad Max scenario. However, the presented choice between government bailout and complete financial collapse is a false dichotomy. In reality, if the government allowed these irresponsible actors to fail, they would enter a bankruptcy process and be sold off to more smaller, more responsible companies.

Correlation doesn’t necessarily imply causation. However, the reason the government is so set on using tax dollars to prop up these insolvent companies (as opposed to taking the bankruptcy route) might be related to campaign contributions. For instance, AIG executives gave more than $630,000 during the 2008 political cycle even as the company was falling apart. President Obama collected a total of $130,000 from AIG in 2008, while McCain accepted a total of $59,499. Last year AIG and its subsidiaries spent about $9.7 million on federal lobbying, or about $53,000 for every day Congress was in session in 2008. Additionally, Obama’s top presidential campaign contributor was Goldman-Sachs. McCain’s was Merril-Lynch.

For all the awful investments AIG made, this political investment has produced a 1730000% rate of return.

http://media.blubrry.com/thinkbynumbers/thinkbynumbers.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/tbn007_financial_sector_costs.mp3

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Anti-Terrorism Spending 50,000 Times More Than on Any Other Cause of Death

m@warondisease.org (Mike P. Sinn) — Tue, 04 Oct 2016 14:40:00 +0000

The US spends more than $500 million per victim on anti-terrorism efforts. However, cancer research spending is only $10,000 per victim. Evolutionary psychology may offer an explanation for this irrational threat amplification.

But first a message from NATIONAL REPUBLICAN campaign committee:

Lightning.

Over the last decade it has stricken more Americans than terrorists have. It will stop at nothing to destroy our way of life.

Yet some politicians in Washington don’t see lightning as a threat. Barack Hussein Obama doesn’t. In the Senate, he voted to allocate hundreds of billions of dollars to the so-called war on terror, while spending absolutely nothing on a threat which has taken far more American lives. He just doesn’t get it.

Barack Obama.

Wrong on lightning.

Wrong for America.

This message paid for by the Committee to Declare War on Weather Patterns.

Putting Terrorism in Perspective

Roughly 3,000 Americans have lost their lives to terrorist attacks in the last decade. This averages out to a loss of 300 people a year, which is a tragic figure and, as a country, it behooves us to do everything we can to reduce or eliminate the threat of terrorism. But there are still a lot of other ways to wind up being the main course at a worm banquet. The gravest dangers we face include heart disease, cancer, and celebrity breakups. Unfortunately, our country doesn’t have infinite resources available to eliminate every threat. So the task falls to our government to allocate what resources we do have in a manner proportional to the magnitude of each threat. If we, as a society, want to effectively counter the dangers we face, we first have to put them in perspective.

How You’re Really Going to Die

Ranked by the number of victims, heart disease comes in as the number one threat. It’s responsible for 70 0,000 deaths a year. This coronary malady keeps food on the tables of funeral directors nationwide. And, like a perpetual motion machine, this very food fills their arteries with cholesterol leading to even more heart attacks.

On to number two. Cancer kills 550,000 people a year. But ironically, some futurists see it as a potential key to immortality. It removes the limit on the number of times that a cell can replicate itself. Thus, if properly harnessed, this disease could be used to defy aging by allowing eternal tissue regeneration. This would enable Joan Rivers to continue enchanting Americans with her iconic brand of celebrity commentary for generations to come.

Runners up for the best solution to overpopulation include strokes with 160,000 casualties a year, respiratory disease with 120,000 casualties annually, diabetes at 70,000 , pneumonia at 60,000 , Alzheimer’s disease at 50,000 , and vehicular accidents at 40,000.

As previously stated, averaged over the last decade which contained the worst terrorist attack in our nation’s history, terrorism still only killed about 300 people a year. Compare this to the 1000 people who are struck by lightning every year. Hopefully, by putting storm clouds on the federal no-fly list we’ll be able to reduce this number in the future. But until then, based on current trends you’re three times more likely to be struck by lightning than to be killed in a terrorist attack.

Risk	Annual Deaths	Lifetime risk
Heart disease	652,486	1 in 5
Cancer	553,888	1 in 7
Stroke	150,074	1 in 24
Hospital infections	99,000	1 in 38
Flu	59,664	1 in 63
Car accidents	44,757	1 in 84
Suicide	31,484	1 in 119
Accidental poisoning	19,456	1 in 193
MRSA (resistant bacteria)	19,000	1 in 197
Falls	17,229	1 in 218
Drowning	3,306	1 in 1,134
Bike accident	762	1 in 4,919
Air/space accident	742	1 in 5,051
Excessive cold	620	1 in 6,045
Sun/heat exposure	273	1 in 13,729
Shark attack*	62	1 in 60,453
Lightning	47	1 in 79, 746
Train crash	24	1 in 156,169
Fireworks	11	1 in 340,733

Sources: Unless otherwise noted, all accidental death information fromNational Safety Council. Disease death information from Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Lifetime risk is calculated by dividing 2003 population (290,850,005) by the number of deaths, divided by 77.6, the life expectancy of a person born in 2003. *Shark data represents number of attacks worldwide, not deaths.

Screwed Up Spending Priorities

Now that we’ve compared the risks, let’s examine how the government chooses to allocate our limited resources to combat these threats. To the least likely means of death I’ve mentioned, terrorism, the federal government devotes about $150 billion annually. On the other hand, to combat the most likely cause of death, heart disease, the government contributes only $2 billion. And just $300 million is devoted to research on the third most likely cause of death, strokes.

So looking at it another way, we spend $500 million for every death from terrorism and only $2,000 for every death resulting from strokes. That means we spend 250,000 times more per death on terrorism. I’m sure all of this is very flattering to Osama bin Laden, but this disparity might leave some stroke victims scratching their heads, assuming they’ve retained full motor control of their arms.

Why is the government response so disproportionate to the threat?

EVOLUTION

Evolutionary psychology may be able to explain this phenomenon. The human brain has been around for 200,000 years. More than 99% of that evolution has been characterized by starvation and general scarcity of resources typified the environment in which humans evolved. In this situation, violent acquisition of resources from other groups was often a necessary survival technique. Hence, human brains most hyper-vigilant and aggressive toward human threats (i.e. terrorists) were most likely to survive and propagate these characteristics.

On the other hand, throughout evolutionary history medical science was almost non-existent. Hence, there would be no survival value added by a tendency to focus on more likely health-related causes of death. We just weren’t designed for these times.

Anxiety Fatigue

One possible reason is anxiety fatigue. When an individual is subjected to a stimulus for an extended period of time, such as the aroma of a hospital room, the sound of a fan, or the endless nagging of the mother-in-law, their mind eventually just filters it out. Mortality risks such as heart disease and cancer extend farther back in time than even the existence of our current civilization. Our society now more or less accepts these unfortunate facts of life as another cost of doing business.Thus, they’re filtered out of our collective consciousness to some extent. On the other hand, consider the SARS virus scare a few years ago. Despite the absence of a single American fatality, the newness of this airborne illness allowed it to occupy headlines for weeks. Similarly, the Islamic terrorist menace is also a relatively new phenomenon to the US. Maybe threat fatigue for terrorism just hasn’t set in yet.

Economic Consequences

The economic consequences of terrorism would, at first thought, seem like a justification for the level of concern. There was a huge financial cost associated with the 9/11 attacks. Total related insurance claim payments are estimated at $32.5 billion. However, there’s been no definitive proof that the attacks lead to a significant decline in GDP. In fact, a GDP which had been falling due to recession in the quarter prior to 9/11 actually started growing again in the quarter following 9/11.

It’s conventional wisdom that military spending is good for the economy. However, most macroeconomic models show that, in the long term, military spending diverts resources from productive uses, such as consumption and investment. This ultimately slows economic growth and reduces employment. So if one thinks they’re protecting our economy by taking trillions of dollars away from other productive uses to fight the so-called global war on terror, they should consider upgrading their abycuss to a calculator.

Nuclear Bombs

Another seemingly more justifiable reason for a magnified response to terrorism is the potential for a nuclear attack that could result in a far greater number of casualties than the typical terrorist attacks have to date. According to many experts on nuclear proliferation, the possibly insurmountable technical challenges of building or acquiring a thermo-nuclear weapon are enormous. Including the requirement that the weapon be portable, makes the likelihood of acquisition dramatically more remote. However, there is a real threat that highly enriched uranium could be aquired from a former Soviet state and used to make a crude bomb. This is a serious risk and needs to be addressed by either securing or downgrading the 1000 tons of yellowcake remaining within Russia and her neighbors. The government currently spends about a billion dollars on this effort annually. Compare this to the two billion we spend in Iraq every week and one might assume we have a bonobo setting our national security priorities in exchange for bananas.

Human Psychology

Finally, the psychological makeup of our species could also be a contributing factor to this risk amplification. Just look at the plot structure of a work of fiction. The vast majority of conflicts are between a human protagonist and a human antagonist.We seem to maintain an inherent attraction to interpersonal or, on a larger scale, inter-societal conflict. It’s only natural that this affinity translates to our media diet as well. Many studies have shown that the media sets the public policy agenda.So, the point is that interpersonal and societal conflicts like that between Western civilization and Muslim extremists are simply better able to maintain our attention than conflicts between man and complex, abstract medical threats.

In addition, sociologists and psychologists have determined that society amplifies the danger of risks imposed upon them, such as terrorism. Conversely, society finds risks resulting from voluntary behavior, such as car accidents, more acceptable.

Graph Source: http://www.federationofscientists.org

Graph Source: http://calamitiesofnature.com

http://media.blubrry.com/thinkbynumbers/thinkbynumbers.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/tbn001_anti_terroism_spending.mp3

Podcast: Play in new window | Download