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Showing posts with label Fun Math Facts. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Fun Math Facts. Show all posts

Sunday, December 29, 2013

Simple Math

Check out this piece on how Utah is set to end homelessness. The answer?

Government spending.

Utah has reduced its rate of chronic homelessness by 78 percent over the past eight years, moving 2000 people off the street and putting the state on track to eradicate homelessness altogether by 2015. How’d they do it? The state is giving away apartments, no strings attached. In 2005, Utah calculated the annual cost of E.R. visits and jail stays for an average homeless person was $16,670, while the cost of providing an apartment and social worker would be $11,000. Each participant works with a caseworker to become self-sufficient, but if they fail, they still get to keep their apartment.

Huh. Whouda thunk it? Simple math...


Friday, June 01, 2012






































What amazes the most about these figures is not the disparity but the willful ignorance of the right and the cries of "class warfare" and "wealth envy." With an economy that is 70 percent consumer spending, it's no wonder ours is stagnant with so much wealth at the top.

In addition, I fear that if this trend continues we may indeed have a socialist revolution and it will be the real ones, not the make believe ones that exist only in the minds of guys like Bill Whittle and Kevin Baker.

And it will all be because we had to manage their fantasies...

Friday, May 25, 2012

Fun Math Facts

To go along with the post below...
























And those are Fun Math Facts!!!

A Really Big Lie

These days, when someone from the right will make a statement, the first thing that pops into my head is a question.

"Do I really want to waste my time researching this when I know it's likely completely bullshit?"

Take, for example, the assertion by Mitt Romney and virtually everyone on the right that President Obama has been spending like crazy. An "inferno" is what Mr. Romney called it.

Well, a new piece by Marketwatch has this to say.

Of all the falsehoods told about President Barack Obama, the biggest whopper is the one about his reckless spending spree.

But it didn’t happen. Although there was a big stimulus bill under Obama, federal spending is rising at the slowest pace since Dwight Eisenhower brought the Korean War to an end in the 1950s.Even hapless Herbert Hoover managed to increase spending more than Obama has.

There damn well better be some numbers to back that up!

• In the 2009 fiscal year — the last of George W. Bush’s presidency — federal spending rose by 17.9% from $2.98 trillion to $3.52 trillion. Check the official numbers at the Office of Management and Budget. 

 • In fiscal 2010 — the first budget under Obama — spending fell 1.8% to $3.46 trillion. 

 • In fiscal 2011, spending rose 4.3% to $3.60 trillion. 

 • In fiscal 2012, spending is set to rise 0.7% to $3.63 trillion, according to the Congressional Budget Office’s estimate of the budget that was agreed to last August. 

 • Finally in fiscal 2013 — the final budget of Obama’s term — spending is scheduled to fall 1.3% to $3.58 trillion. Read the CBO’s latest budget outlook. 

Over Obama’s four budget years, federal spending is on track to rise from $3.52 trillion to $3.58 trillion, an annualized increase of just 0.4%

Huh. I guess we can put the lie away now along with the raising taxes and apologizing to everyone nonsense.

This would be why I don't like to waste my very valuable time. It always turns out to be another bullshit lie.

Saturday, May 19, 2012

Actual Handwaving

A few months ago, one of my regular commenters that migrated over from Kevin's site brought out that ol' chestnut about small business. Haplo9 (a small business owner) informed me that not only do I not know what I'm talking about when it comes to small business but that people like me and other Democrats/liberals/etc are actively seeking to destroy small business and, indeed, the free market.

Let's look past all the facts and evidence to the contrary that I have been putting up of late and focus on some small business owners themselves. First, I worked for a small business before I became a teacher. We were a small, four person multimedia company that handled medium sized businesses first forays into online commerce back in the mid to late 1990s. I had left an ad firm where I worked to help out two friends of mine who were the owners of the business.

Not once did I hear any discussion about the government inhibiting them from making money. The onus was on all of us to grow the business and we certainly never played the victim card and blamed the government. Our concern was getting more clients and in order to do that, we wanted to see state and federal policies that supported consumer spending which would lead to more revenue for our clients  and, in turn, more money to spend with us. It wasn't taxes or fear of possible future regulation that altered our decisions. It was customers coming through the door.

This is also true for our very own John Waxey, an owner of a manufacturing concern in Wisconsin that makes a product that helps with shipping and commerce. His company does about 20 million a year in business. I had the occasion to chat with him recently when I visited his cottage.

"How's the company doing?" I asked.
"Never better," he replied. "In fact, we are moving in to a new facility to accommodate all our new business."
"So, Barack Obama and the Democrats aren't destroying your company?"
"No," he chuckled. "We do well when our clients have more customers. Then they come and spend money with us."

John's family has owned this business for his entire life, thirty three years of which he has been my best friend. So, to say that I don't know what I'm talking about when it comes to small business (or any size business for that matter) is wrong. That being said, no one should take our lives and anecdotes as gospel. Perhaps we are outliers? Biased?

No, not so much...because of this little thing called How The Free Market Actually Fucking Works. Yesterday, I was perusing the MPR site for some post-mortem on the recently ended state government session and I came across this. House Republican Majority Leader Matt Dean was a guest on the program and they took a call from a small business owner named Andy. 


Here is the audio below. Start it at the 13 minute mark. 



Giving tax breaks to small business owners leading to more hiring is NOT how the free market works? Representative Dean (a REPUBLICAN...GASP!!) doesn't know how the free market works? That it's actually more consumer spending leads to more hiring? Oh, Andy. Don't you dare question one of the central creeds of their rigid dogma! Only THEY are Sacred Keepers of the Free Market. Don't you know you're just going to get glassy-eyed nonsense for an answer?

And that's just what happened. Rep. Dean (sounding as if he was both under hypnosis and attempting to hypnotize Andy) gave a response which (ahem) can best be described as hand waving. Shocking, I know, that someone from the right is actually doing the very thing that I am wrongfully and continually accused of doing. And doing it to someone who actually owns a small business! Well, he owns a hair salon so he's probably gay anyway so he doesn't really know what he's talking about, right?

What all of this perfectly illustrates is how the right really doesn't know what the fuck they are talking about when it comes to this stuff. If small businesses are given tax breaks without new customers coming through the door, why would they hire anyone? They're just going to sit around just as Andy described.

But no. Oh no. It's taxes. It's supply side. Never aggregate demand.  They are only interested in making sure that their ideology is pure and, in behaving in this manner, they completely ignore the core of what drives growth in this country.

Watch as consumer spending magically disappears in my hat!

Friday, May 18, 2012

Fun Math Facts























And those are Fun Math Facts!!

Thursday, May 17, 2012

Fun Math Facts

From 1960 to 2005 the gross domestic product measured in year-2000 dollars rose an average of $165 billion a year under Republican presidents and $212 billon a year under Democrats. That's a 12.6% under Democrats versus a GOP increase of 10.7%.

And that's a Fun Math Fact!!