Some Scary Numbers
You may recall the catchphrase “Billions and Billions” (of stars) that was associated with astronomer Carl Sagan’s popular TV show Cosmos.(1) It seemed like an enormous number, commensurate with the vastness of the universe. Now, however, Billion is passe’, Trillion has become the new Billion –- such as in the US Federal budget deficit for 2011 is more than a Trillion dollars – and we need to recalibrate our mental calculators. So much has changed.
I remember making $1.80 an hour hauling beef for Wilson & Co, the meat packers. That was 1961 and I was not making much more than the black maids in that new movie “The Help.” And I was paying income tax and FICA.
Today the Government Motors unionized workers make $28 an hour (plus another equal amount in benefits) and yet complain. They just got a signing bonus of $5,000 plus inflation protection to ink their latest contract. Now that $28/hr is a scary number because it is unsustainable. We cannot compete in the global marketplace when nut-turners make $28 an hour. And thus far we have been somewhat lucky since the countries that make good cars –- Germany, Japan, South Korea –- are all expensive places to manufacture them. When the $5 per hour Chinese learns how to make a good car – say in 5 years – it will be all over except the shouting.
But I digress. What I really want to talk about are the scary large numbers. Take $1 Trillion (that is a million x $million) for example. $1 Trillion is the amount the US Federal Government collects in income taxes from those of us lucky enough to pay income taxes. It is also equal to the amount we claim on our deductions; thus the tax code saves us an equal amount, ie $1 Trillion. For the average Joe the deductions come from mortgage interest, charitable contributions, supporting your mother-in-law, and the like. Note that only about 10% of the $1 Trillion tax savings goes to those evil corporations (which happen to employ our neighbors). So when Obama talks about generating a few hundred billion dollars by closing tax loopholes, it is largely our loopholes he wants to close. And remember, also, that nearly half of US households pay no Federal income tax at all. When the President talks about paying our fair share, I wonder if it is those folks he wants to do more.
An even scarier number is $14 Trillion. That is roughly the US Gross Domestic Product (GDP), the total value of all goods and services produced in a year. But $14Trillion is also roughly the value of the Federal government debt, and also the total US household debt. Let’s do some arithmetic. If we divide the GDP by the US population, some 310 million, then the GDP per person is about $45,000, so is the Federal debt per person, and so is the personal debt of each person. For a family of four, that sums up to $180,000 in all three categories. Thus the average family owes $180,000 in government debt (not including State debt) and another $180,000 in family debt. Those are some scary numbers. Could it get much worse?
Oh, yes it can. Have you heard about the UNFUNDED LIABILITIES? Projecting into the future, the revenues from all Federal taxes will not be able to fund the required expenditures. The numbers are actually quite staggering: Social Security - $17T, Medicare - $88T, adding up to more than $100 Trillion dollars. Since the private net worth of all Americans together is estimated at just over $50 Trillion dollars by the Federal Reserve, you can see the problem.
James Madison foresaw the problem with government excess in Federalist 51:
If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place, oblige it to control itself.
It is pretty clear that the government, at least since FDR, and at all levels, has failed to live up to its obligation of restraint. Then Obama goosed it, but good!
(1) The title of Sagan’s last book was “Billions and Billions.” As a humorous tribute to him, a sagan was defined as a unit of measurement equal to at least four billion, since the lower bound of a number conforming to the constraint of billions and billions must be two billion plus two billion. What is the US deficit measured in sagans? Or should we call it an obama?
Imagine God and Country
Imagine there's no Heaven It's easy if you try…
It was the tenth anniversary of 9/11 and we were at church. The service was moving and memorable. Then the minister announced that the next song would be John Lennon’s Imagine, and added that he was very glad it was chosen. I wondered why?
In the book Lennon in America, by Geoffrey Giuliano, Lennon himself explained that Imagine was “anti-religious, anti-nationalistic, anti-conventional, anti-capitalistic, but because it's sugar-coated, it's accepted.” Imagine is commonly referred to as the “atheist’s anthem.” So why sing such a song in church? Why, especially, on a day of national sorrow? Have we somehow misplaced our moral compasses?
The next day I read about a research study by eminent Notre Dame sociology professor Christian Smith. The study asked about the moral lives of young people 18 - 23 years of age, and the results are depressing. (“If it Feels Right,” David Brooks, New York Times, 9/12/11)
When asked about wrong or evil, they could generally agree that rape and murder are wrong. But, aside from these extreme cases, moral thinking didn’t enter the picture, even when considering things like drunken driving, cheating in school or cheating on a partner. The default position is that moral choices are just a matter of individual taste. The study revealed an atmosphere of extreme moral individualism -- of moral relativism and nonjudgmentalism.
Imagine all the people
Living for today
When there is no God or Heaven, living for today seems like a reasonable ethics.
For decades, thinkers in many disciplines have warned about the erosion of a shared moral framework. Alaisdair MacIntyre argues that the disintegration began during the Enlightenment with the rejection of Aristotle’s teleological idea -- that human life had a proper end, and that human beings could not reach this natural end without preparation. Throughout history, society has served to provide this preparation through the family, the church, school and the state. The group was seen to be the essential moral unit. Religion defined rules and practices, families imposed moral discipline and schools supported the families. Now, however, we are told that it does not matter what we believe as long as we follow our hearts -- the individual as the essential moral unit.
Imagine there's no countries
It isn't hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion too
The founders of our great country firmly believed that God was the foundation of virtue and that “respect for His authority, mediated by the authority of parents, was the foundation of godly character.” The public schools were established with the goal of reinforcing this parental obligation to mold moral citizens.
Somehow, through machinations known only to the intellectual soul, the “Men in Black” decided that religion needed to be banished from the public square. Thus teachers were left toothless in their battle with the child’s instinctive willfulness. Now there are movements afoot to banish the Pledge of Allegiance from the schools as well. Heaven help us if the courts get to decide.
Imagine no possessions I wonder if you can No need for greed or hunger A brotherhood of man Imagine all the people Sharing all the world
Imagine, indeed! Every time the sharing all the world crowd has taken control of a society or nation the result has been violence and widespread destitution. The forces that are trying to transform this country into a Lennonesque utopia must be resisted, or we will inherit the culture we deserve, and it won’t be pretty.
References
Barzun, Jacques, The Culture We Deserve
Bloom, Allan, The Closing of the American Mind
Bork, Robert, Slouching Toward Gomorrah
Himmelfarb, Gertrude, The De-Moralization of Society
Hunter, James, The Death of Character
Levin, Mark, Men in Black
MacIntyre, Alasdair, After Virtue
PolyMath or Pretender
I like to read the New York Times articles by Paul Krugman: though pretentious, they are usually good for a few laughs. You see, Krugman is a Nobel Prize winner in Economics who yet adheres to Keynesianism, an outmoded and generally discredited economic theory. Although it has been clearly shown that Keynesian government “investment” actually prolonged the Great Depression, and that his theory utterly failed to explain Jimmy Carter’s stagflation, Krugman still clings to his childish belief that yet another “stimulus” is just what we need to cure the Obama recession.
Occasionally Krugman goes off the reservation and tries to display his scientific acumen. He is, after all, the guy who wrote an essay on the computation of interest rates on goods in transit near the speed of light. I kid you not. (See “Sixty-seven, and Smarter than Paul Krugman,” palosverdesblog, 5/5/09.) In his recent Times piece, “Republicans Against Science” (8/28/11), Krugman criticized Rick Perry for this “vile” statement: “I think there are a substantial number of scientists who have manipulated data so that they will have dollars rolling into their projects. And I think we are seeing almost weekly, or even daily, scientists are coming forward and questioning the original idea that man-made global warming is what is causing the climate to change.” Yep, Krugman called that “vile.” Let us see if Mr. Krugman knows what he is talking about, or is he just a pretender.
What makes a scientific theory? Let me use an example to illustrate the concept. If I say that things fall down, that is true, but is not a scientific theory. If I add that things fall down because the Earth attracts them that is a hypothesis, still not a theory. If say that all the planets move in orbits because the Sun attracts them, that generalization is still less than a theory. When, however, I say that the force of attraction between the planets and the sun is proportional to the product of the masses and inversely as the square of the distance between them, then I am able to calculate the motion of the planets for comparison (and prediction). Now I have a scientific theory.
Thus a scientific theory is more than an idea. It must be descriptive, quantitative, predictive and testable. Thus, it must also be falsifiable. Newton’s gravity meets all these criteria. As an exercise for the reader, ask yourself if evolution does the same. Treat microevolution (Lamarck, c1800, which predates Darwin) and macroevolution (Darwin’s big idea) separately. Here I’ll put global warming “science” to the test.
The central premise of global warming theory is that man-made carbon dioxide emissions have been trapping heat in the earth's atmosphere and warming the earth. Since the beginning of the industrial age, the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has been increasing inexorably, from about 280 ppm in 1800 to 390 ppm today, an increase of 39%. Yet during that time the average global temperature has gone up and down. And during the Medieval Warming (900 -1300AD), before the advent of the industrial age, the global temperature was comparable to today.
Even overlooking the obvious fact that to base your science on one variable – actually a small proportion of one variable – is not science, the evidence does not even support the idea. Indeed, the global warming “science” - based on computer models - fails the criteria of a scientific theory. In the memorable words of physicist Wolfgang Pauli, it is “not even wrong.”
As for pseudo-polymath Paul Krugman, his theme song should be
“Yes, I’m the great pretender…”
