But what about the polar bears?

The foundation of Science is good measurements that can be independently verified. Consider the following two charts on historical temperatures:

These two charts could hardly be more different and yet both are produced by Climatologists who stand behind their accuracy. The first shows that we have climbed quite a bit since 1600 but that was an extreme cold dip;  AND our current high is less then 1100 BC before the carbon crisis AND we seem to be on a downward dip since 1998.

The second chart is the famous hockey stick graph cited by Al Gore in his documentary as proof of modern global warming. Wikipedia has a detailed discussion on it at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hockey_stick_controversy

Bottom Line

The wiki article cites many recent papers as supporting the hockey stick with results like warmest in the past 400 years or warmest in the past 600 years. But this is only proving that it's warmer than the start of the "Little Ice Age".  Temperature data older than this is still rather fuzzy but getting better with ice cores, etc.

So it may be fair to say the question is still open. What caused the Medieval warming period of 1000 years ago? Why is the modern warming different? or is it?

Who's in your Genes?

I think I'm a clone now
'Cause every pair of genes is a hand-me-down
- Weird Al Yankovic lyrics

This wonderful graphic I found at http://visualecon.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/09/usancestry-2000.jpg  It shows the ancestry with the largest population in each county according to the 2000 census. However, the ancestry listed might not be a majority (>50%) of the population, just a plurality. In 2000, 58 percent of the population specified only one ancestry, 22 percent provided two ancestries, and 1 percent reported an unclassifiable ancestry such a mixture or adopted. Another 19 percent did not report any ancestry at all.

I'm surprised by the large midwest region descended from Germans. These are low density population states so we're not talking huge numbers of people but still, Germans? During my vacation this summer I drove through many of the bluish states. While visiting the Pabst mansion I learned that Milwaukee was a very German town in the early 1900s and that Pabst was just one of many German families with a Milwaukee beer brewery. In Cedar Rapids, Iowa I visited the Czech Village and learned that the town was once 25% Czech, drawn to the region by a huge sausage factory? Perhaps the German ancestry includes the old German-Austrian Empire such as Poland, the Czech Republic, etc?

I'm also surprised to see so little English ancestry on the map (why Nevada?) I can trace most of my family lines to England, with one ancestor from Germany, a few from France, and several from Sweden. Perhaps those of British descent are the ones declaring themselves as "American"?

Bottom Line

Genealogy can be a lot of fun and many records are available on the Internet. I've found many Quakers in my colonial ancestors, no idea why. The Swedish line were Mormons who emigrated to Utah and created some unusual family group sheets. Both my father's and mother's main line trace back to early Virginia farmers with several generations who settled new territories in the Midwest (Illinois, Nebraska) and kept moving westward along different paths until all my great-grandparents settled down in Idaho. Most of my relatives are still in Idaho four generations later with a fifth generation just started; my cousin's grandchildren.

Do Empty Stomachs cause Riots?

A full gut supports moral precepts
-Burmese Proverb

Spread the table and contention will cease
-English proverb

A society is only three meals away from anarchy.
-British Sci-Fi show, Red Dwarf

What causes riots? No, not the riots in London but riots in general, around the world? Researchers at the New England Complex Systems Institute in Cambridge, Mass. think they've found a clue.

This graph shows the average price of food and the riot events around the world. Above a certain food price threshold, social unrest sweeps the planet. It stands to reason that people become desperate when food is difficult to obtain. The French Revolution was preceded by a food crisis when the price of bread became too high for the common working man to afford (which led to the famous reply by the French queen, "Let them eat cake.")

The researches say that high food prices don't necessarily trigger riots themselves, they simply create a tipping point in which social unrest can flourish. "These observations are consistent with a hypothesis that high global food prices are a precipitating condition for social unrest," according to Marco Lagi.

Bottom Line

Why are food prices so high? One reason is traders speculating on the price of food, a problem that has worsened in recent years by the deregulation of the commodities markets and the removal of trading limits for buyers and sellers. (Recall what Enron did to the price of energy in California with abusive trading.)

A second reason is the conversion of corn into ethanol. The supply of corn for food has been greatly reduced. I recently read that half of the US corn supply is being turned into ethanol.

The US really needs to stop subsidising ethanol. We are using taxpayer money to make expensive fuel from corn and creating starvation as a byproduct.

A Radiant Story

“Incidentally, disturbance from cosmic background radiation is something we have all experienced. Tune your television to any channel it doesn't receive, and about 1 percent of the dancing static you see is accounted for by this ancient remnant of the Big Bang. The next time you complain that there is nothing on, remember that you can always watch the birth of the universe.”
-Bill Bryson

Flickr.com has a interesting story and graph about radiation. An  executive at a Silicon Valley tech firm (San Francisco) traveled to Japan for business.  One of his destinations was 50 miles from the crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant that generated much frantic news after the big earthquake.

"As a precaution, a colleague gave him a Geiger Counter so he could make sure it wasn’t getting dangerous as he approached the plant."

Instead of only running the Geiger Counter near the site of the nuclear meltdown, the executive left it on the entire trip with fascinating results below. The tiny bump near hour 144 is the exposure from the damaged nuclear power plant. The much larger spikes occured while flying. San Francisco to Hong Kong, Hong Kong to Singapore, Singapore to Tokyo, and Tokyo back to San Francisco. This is completely normal - a plane a mile or two up has less atmosphere to block in comming radiation from the sun and from space. The last trip has an extra tall spike because the flight went near the North Pole which blocks even less radiation than other parts of the globe.

Bottom Line

It helps to put things in perspective. Yes the radiation at the plant is bad and a meltdown did occur - BUT the effect is very local and dimishes rapidly. Persons living nearby (50 miles or so) need to be concerned about long-term accumulative risk. Visitors and tourists get greater exposure from the flight to Japan than from the damaged nuclear plant.

Where in the world is ....?

“The world is not dangerous because of those who do harm but because of those who look at it without doing anything”

-Albert Einstein quotes

Each year the TED conference hands out TED prizes to individuals with an idea that can change the world. One winner talked about tracking disease epidemics world-wide with data from Google and other sources. Now it appears that that dream is alive and well.

Check out HealthMap at http://healthmap.org/en/. 

"HealthMap brings together disparate data sources to achieve a unified and comprehensive view of the current global state of infectious diseases and their effect on human and animal health. This freely available Web site integrates outbreak data of varying reliability, ranging from news sources (such as Google News) to curated personal accounts (such as ProMED) to validated official alerts (such as World Health Organization)."

The home page is a bit overwhelming with all outbreaks from the past three days. Hover the mouse over any pin to see the name of the disease.

I find the display more interesting when a single disease is searched. The default is the past 3-days but you can change this up to one month with the Advanced search options. I selected Typhoid in the past month and found cases in Algeria, China and Kyrgyzstan.

Bottom Line

This is a great resource for keeping an eye on swine flu or any other illness that you are concerned about.

Information is Beautiful

Everything is beautiful
In its' own way
- lyrics, Ray Stevens

If you're a regular reader of my blog, you'll know I love graphs and visual representation of data. Today I "discovered" InformationIsBeautiful.net which collects excellent examples of visual displays.

For example:

Which health supplements are backed by scientific evidence?
http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/visualizations/snake-oil-supplements/

A color wheel of emotions
http://www.flickr.com/photos/shellberry/5468624509/in/pool-16135094@N00

Plants that grow well together
http://www.flickr.com/photos/nhawtin/5549980086/

This one I've posted before, The True Size of Africa
http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/2010/the-true-size-of-africa/
but this version also shows the US compared to Europe and US compared to Antarctica.

Bottom Line

Numbers by themselves don't say much. A picture makes a huge difference.

The Great Recession, 2008 - ???

"So, for example, the country was into recession right after I was sworn in, a dot-com bust had taken place. Then the attacks of September the 11th, and then of course the great financial meltdown - the fundamental question facing any presidency is how do you deal with the hand you're dealt?"
George W. Bush

May we all be dealt a better hand in 2011. In 2010 we may have reached the bottom of the Great Recession but we are still in for a long recovery period.

click to enlarge

This graph from CalculatedRisk shows the percent of jobs lost in each recession since 1948, relative to the peak of the pre-recession job market. In terms of the percent of jobs lost, the current recession is by far the worst we’ve seen since World War II.

I have a friend who is an economics professor. He said the Gross National Product (GNP) is nearly back to a pre-recession level. This means most companies have succeeded in restoring revenue without hiring back employees fired or laid off. It's called a jobless recovery.

Bottom Line

From the graph above, it looks like only the 2001 recession has lasted as long as the current one, but the impact on employment was much less then. There are many articles online stating that current government policy during this recession, from health care, to tax law, to environment regulations have discouraged corporate growth and new hiring.

So what about the Trillion dollar stimulus package? Did it help create jobs? Counting back from November 2010 in the graph to January of 2009 when Obama began his office as President, the red line was just crossing 2% line. It fell an additional 4% over the past two years despite the Stimulus. The brief upwards dip in the graph last year came for hirings for the 2010 census. So there is no evidence that the Stimulus helped at all.

World Population

“USA Today has come out with a new survey - apparently, three out of every four people make up 75% of the population.”
- David Letterman

There is a great deal of truth to the adage "a picture is worth a thousand words." A great graph can make a point much better than mere words. For example I know India and China both have over 1 billion people out of a world total of 6.7 billion. But I never visualized this as nearly half of the world's people. The chart below shows how people are distributed throughout the world by latitude and longitude. Note the spikes for India and China.

Bottom Line
The bottom graph sure puts the US in perspective. We use the most resources in the world with the lowest population density. Unless they have traveled to Europe or Asia, most Americans have no appreciation for how land-rich we are; how uncrowded in comparison. We think nothing of large parks, golf courses, giant cemeteries, thousand acre farms, etc. Open land is rare and expensive elsewhere in the world.

Presidential Landslides

"The price of freedom is eternal vigilance." - Thomas Jefferson

French cartographer, Frédéric Salmon, has collected/created voting maps of all US presidential elections. The collage below was assembled from Salmon's maps by RealClearPolitics.com. It shows the county voting patterns of presidential landslides for Roosevelt in 1932 and 1936, Eisenhower in 1952, Johnson in 1964, Reagan in 1980, and Obama in 2008. Democrats are yellow/brown; Republicans are blue. The color darkens as the win margin increases.

There are many interesting points that I see.

1. In past landslides, when you won the election most of the land area of America supported you. Look at the majority of yellow/brown for Roosevelt and Johnson, the vast amounts of blue for Eisenhower and Regan.

2. The Obama victory is quite different. A naive look at the map would make blue the winner. But compare 2008 to 1980. Obama won the large cities on both coasts and the greater Chicago area. He lost the rural vote.

3. Take a look at the Bush 2004 win which evenly split the country. The map looks amazing similar to the 2008 "landslide". It takes few moments to see the differences. Obama took a few extra counties in California but the real difference is the Rust Belt, the Great Lakes region that remains seriously depressed with the failure of the US automotive industry and steel industry. During bad economic times, people will switch their vote in hope of "Change". Obama was very clever to use "Change" as his theme.

4. On a historical note: note the erosion of the Dixie Land Democrats. The south is VERY Democrat in 1932 and 1936, starting to drift away in 1952 and divided in 1964. From the 2008 map it's hard to tell if Obama won or lost the south. Did he win enough city votes to take the southern states?

Bottom Line

Today's political division is not North-South, regional or state based. It's rural vs city.

Tax the Rich! Fails again.

Taxation with representation ain't so hot either. ~Gerald Barzan

What a topic today - I get to discuss government, sports and mathematics!

Since April, foreign sports stars competing in Britain have been liable for a top income tax rate of 50%. Now this is unpleasant but it gets even worse. Controversially, the tax is charged not just on the money they earn in Britain but on a proportion of their worldwide sponsorship income.

Many sports stars are voting with their feet and refusing to complete in Britain. The impact is being felt in Olympic type sports like track and field as well as tennis and golf. The organizers of UK sports are asking the government to repeal this tax.

A year ago I wrote about the unintended consequences of raising taxes on the rich,
Actions have consequences. The rich either move or declare a house in another state as their primary residence and the net tax revenue collected declines! The Financial Times reports that the number of Americans giving up their citizenship to protect their families from America’s tax system has jumped rapidly.

The idea that people flee from high taxes is captured in the Laffer Curve; a key part of Reganomics and much criticised by opponents who claim it has been discredited. Actually the stories above show exactly the opposite. It is politicians who are discredited by not understanding the Laffer Curve and negatively impacting the revenue collected with over taxation.

The theory goes like this. When the tax rate is 0%, the tax revenue is zero. Now consider the other extreme; when the tax rate is 100% what happens? Why would anyone work when all the money goes to the government? They'll opt out, collect unemployment, work off the books, use barter, leave the country, or find tax shelters. The end result is very few, if any, will choose to work for non-existent pay and the revenue collected is again zero (or very small).

From calculus you learn that a curve that crosses zero at two points must have a high point, a maximum value. (see image above) To the left of the max, raising taxes increases revenue to the government; but on the right side of the max, raising taxes results in less total revenue.

Bottom Line

Sadly the Laffer Curve is much misunderstood. It does not promise that revenue will always go up when the tax rate falls. It depends on which side of the maximum the current tax rate is. And unfortunately the Laffer Curve does not tell us where that max revenue value is. You have to find it by trial and error to get the perfect tax rate - neither too high nor too low.

http://www.vistech.net/users/rsturge/laffercu.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laffer_curve

Clever Icons

Win one for the Gipper!
- Ronald Regan in Knute Rockne: All American
I love good art design and wish I had the imagination for it. My brain is hardwired for seeing "what is" as opposed to wild envisioning. I can copy design tricks and use them but admire people who can create from scratch.
So I enjoyed the web posting, 23 Brilliant Logos With Hidden Messages, by a design artist blogger. The first logo in particular caught my eye. Here's why...
Last weekend my wife and I visited my Freshman roommate from college and his family in State College, PA to see the annual Art Fair. Thanks Mark & Margaret! We had a great time.
State College is home to Penn State, a Land Grant school, and like any good ag school it has an excellent dairy. Mark took us to the college ice cream shop and while there I noticed the flags for all the Big Ten schools including my Alma mater. (As a Michigan State alum it was funny to see "State" logos everywhere and have it mean something quite different than MSU.) I also noticed that there were 11 flags! I don't follow college sports so I was surprised to learn there are 11 schools in the Big Ten! It was aptly 10 back in my day. Penn State joined as #11 in 1990.

Bottom Line

My mathematical mind shudders at 11 schools in the Big Ten but I have to give credit for the clever logo incorporating the number 11. I guess they'll need a new logo next year when the University of Nebraska-Lincoln joins the league.

Update Aug 3
Here's a new list of clever logos
http://designshack.co.uk/articles/graphics/50-fantastically-clever-logos

Best paying college majors

“The art and science of asking questions is the source of all knowledge.”-Thomas Berger

Payscale.com has posted a chart and list of salary expectations for people with a Bachelor's degree in a variety of college majors. The chart shows both starting salary (blue) and mid-career salary (grey). For example economics majors earn less than computer programmers with their first job but will surpass them in 20 years or so. The top jobs are almost entirely engineering and science. The first non-science jobs I saw were Marketing at 21 on the list, and International Relations at number 22. Since this list is Bachelor degrees only - you won't see doctors or lawyers.

Bottom Line

Science pays!

The State of the Internet

“The Internet is the first thing that humanity has built that humanity doesn't understand, the largest experiment in anarchy that we have ever had.”-Eric Schmidt, Google CEO

http://www.focus.com/ has published a beautiful series of graphs called the State of the Internet. Here is a summary of the results

- An equal number of men and women use the Internet (74%)

- Age matters. 93% of young adults 18-29 use the Internet while only 38% of senior citizens do.

- Income matters. Those with more money have faster Internet access.

- Education matters. Users without a high school education: only 39% while 94% of college graduates use the Internet.

- The most surprising graphic to me was the frequency of Internet use, pictured above. Only 38% of those surveyed say they use the Internet several times a day. %21 once a day. The majority are infrequent users. This explains my sister who does not check her email very often.

- Laptops are now in 46% of all homes.

- Scandinavia has the best Internet penetration into homes. Nothing else to do in the dark, cold, winter perhaps? The US is #5 after Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Netherlands.

- The US is horribly behind in Internet speed. Appx 5 mbps vs 61 mbps in Japan. (mbps = megabits per second)

Bottom Line

I’ve been an Internet user since the 1980’s when my college, Michigan State, gave everyone access. Then AOL in the early 1990’s, then Netscape and now mostly IE. I consider it one of humankind’s greatest inventions.

I used to buy reference books or seek out information at reference sections of libraries. But informational books can quickly become dated. Now I take for granted the easy access to global information on any subject – for example, yesterday I was looking for vendors of Pinewood Derby tracks for Cub Scouts and the costs. Did you know tracks come in wood, plastic and metal with laser controlled times on the finish line?

For more interesting Internet facts check out http://royal.pingdom.com/2010/02/08/15-fantastic-firsts-on-the-internet/ which describes 15 firsts like the first email, first spam, first web site, etc.

What are your neighbors buying?

"Some couples go over their budgets very carefully every month; others just go over them."-Sally Poplin

If you have a family budget (and you really, really should have a family budget), then you’ll appreciate a new web site that allows you to see what your “neighbors” are spending (in aggregate). The site is at http://www.bundle.com/ and is called EverybodysMoney. The photo at right is a screen shot of the site looking at spending for Stamford, CT, where I work. The values show monthly spending for the “average” neighbor.

$1,668 Family & Health (Pets, Insurance, Healthcare, School, Charity)
$1,139 Shopping (General, Hobbies, Office Supplies, Clothing, Electronics)
$1,022 Food & Drink (Dining out, Groceries)
$ 892 House & Home (Utilities, Phone, Home Improvement, Home Maintenance)
$ 659 Getting Around (Gas, Auto expenses)
$ 455 Travel & Leisure (Commuting trains, air fare, hotels, entertainment & cable TV)

Curiously Rent/Mortgage is not included anywhere.

In each bubble you can hover the mouse and click “Go deep” to get subcategories. Hover over the subcats and you can “See Stats” for greater detail. For example the top Merchant under Dining Out in Stamford is Starbucks! You also have the option of changing the location, looking only at homes with X kids, or only at homes in a particular income bracket.

This site is marked Beta and the data set is skimpy in places. I tried to look at Ossining, NY and could only get results for all of Westchester county.

Bottom Line

A tool like this can help you to discover that your spending is higher than average for your region. If yes, you may want to cut back. But don’t get too smug if all your expenses are “average”. I added $1000 per month to the Stamford numbers above for rent and got $6,835 spent per month. Multiply by 12 and this means $82,000 per year in EXPENSES. Assume 30% for taxes and you have to earn $120,000 per year to be “average” in Stamford.

Where the People Live

"An election cannot give a country a firm sense of direction if it has two or more national parties which merely have different names but are as alike in their principles and aims as two peas in the same pod"-Franklin D. Roosevelt

Years ago I worked with an Irish programmer who could not see the difference between the U.S. Republican and Democratic parties. You're crazy I told him and then pointed out the differences as I saw them. Now a decade later I'm less sure that he was wrong. Regardless of who's in office we see the same behavior of graft, corruption, lobbying, and business as usual. Not much changes.

But that is not what I wanted to talk about today. The site http://www.fakeisthenewreal.org/ has published a map for Electoral College reform to avoid the "bucket effect"; i.e. if you win California by just one vote you get all 55 electoral votes of the state. The reform map creates 50 new electoral districts of equal population (5.6 million) - if you win the district, you get that one vote. I do not see this happening. A much easier system is percentage distribution- if you get 55% of the vote you get 55% of the electoral votes. Of course if this happens then there is not much point to the electoral college and you can just use the popular vote to elect.

But once again, I'm off topic. What impressed me about the map is the population distribution within America. Look at how much land is needed to gather 5 million people in the mid-west and mountain west. While California is chopped into 6 zones . It's hard to see on the map, but cities like LA, and San Francisco are huge population zones onto themselves. FakeIsTheNewReal has another graphic comparing relative populations of states - but with a twist. Metropolitan regions are pulled out of each state and included in the comparison on their own merit. The top three US population areas are NY metro, LA metro, and Chicago metro, with the state of Texas taking fourth (after Houston, Dallas, etc are removed). California is fifth and to my surprise, North Carolina is sixth. There must be a lot of people in NC outside of large cities. Sounds pleasantly bucolic.

Bottom Line

While I live in a crowded region of a blue state (NY metro), my roots come from an uncrowded red state (Idaho), so my conservative views are in the minority here. Ironically my father, who has retired to his Idaho home, has become very liberal - making him a minority view there. I believe the reality of the blue-red political maps (metro areas vote liberal, "country" regions vote conservative). I'm just not convinced that either political party is actually representing the views of either red or blue. I also fear that our electoral college system is biased in favor of metropolitan zones. The upper half of NY state is red/conservative/country but is nearly always overwhelmed in votes by the blue NY city region. So blue takes all and the votes from upstate NY have no influence at all at the national level.

Update

The Amazon book review for "In Search of Self-Governance" by Scott W. Rasmussen shares the notion about our two political parties acting too much alike:

"Today, Americans are united. United in the belief that our political system is broken, that politicians are corrupt, and that neither major political party has the answers. Add to this the growing disdain for the unholy alliance between the largest corporations and our government, and there's a lot of frustration festering in our country."

Two Charts

Today I have two items with nothing in common except both struck me as interesting statistics.

1. Which adult American film actress was the highest paid movie star of the year four times?

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Did you guess Doris Mary Ann Kappelhoff?

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Better known as Doris Day, this actress was a top-ten movie earner in years 1951-1952 and from 1961-1966. She was the highest paid movie star in 1960, 62, 63 and 64. This puts her 6th place overall, tied with John Wayne and Shirley Temple who were also were the top star for four years.

Who's #1 on the list? Another surprise, at least to me. Tom Cruise has 7 years at the top of the pay scale. There is a four-way tie for 2nd place with 5 years as #1: Bing Crosby, Burt Reynolds, Clint Eastwood, & Tom Hanks

'I knew Doris Day before she became a virgin.'- actor Oscar Levant

2. The second statistic is an unusual graph at Axiis (go to the source to see the chart key). It shows the percentage market share of the major Web Browsers from 2002 to 2009. Normally one would show this as a bar graph or multiple pie charts. While this chart is clever I'm leaning towards not liking it. I find it very difficult to "see" the relative size of each browser and it's hard to "see" if a given percentage is 30% or 40%? The original image at Axiis is interactive; as you hover over a band, the percentage is shown.

Bottom Line

I love numbers. This weekend I met a man who does actuary science, the statistics of accidents and mortality. I explained I had a great admiration for statisticians but also a wariness that it was easy to mislead with stats. You can make convincing false arguments by manipulating the data.

For example, the Doris Day numbers cited above are a bit of fluke. She may have been #1 some year by just $1 over the next star or missed being #1 by the same amount. The yearly rankings don't tell us how much she won (or lost) by. It's a classic winner take all scenario much like the electoral college in US presidential elections. A President might have just 50.001% of the vote but take 49 of the 50 states (losing only the home state of his opponent).

How could star power be more accurately measured? Two ideas come to mind.

1. Measure their total earnings in inflation adjusted dollars. Possible problem? Have stars always earned the same percentage of a movie's gross? Like modern free-agent sports stars, did salaries at some point leap upwards (way above inflation) so that modern stars demand a higher share of ticket sales and hence skew the statistics?

2. Assign weights to the top ten rankings. Top Ten is absolute and immune to the salary scale spikes describe above. To avoid the arbitrariness of counting only #1, assign ten points for #1, nine points for #2, and so on down to 1 point for #10. Then add the points and see who comes out on top. This gives 2nd placers a chance to come out on top.

What does a Trillion dollars buy?

"The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: 'I'm from the government and I'm here to help.'" - Ronald Reagan

For this post, I'll let a picture be the star. What has the one trillion dollar stimulus package achieved?

Lies, damned lies, and statistics

While the news in this graph is very bad for the US and for Obama, I'll switch hats from government cynic to mathematician for a moment.

I've always associated the phrase, "Lies, damned lies, and statistics" as a favorite quote of Mark Twain but Wikipedia claims it was first used by British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli. While the chart above is accurate, it uses three techniques to exaggerate the message and editorialize.

1. This chart does not prove a "swindle". That's just the artist's opinion. I do agree however with the byline, "Reality Trumps White House Promises".

2. I doubt very much that the Obama's sad face is related to the stimulus. The artist wants us to assume that Obama has acknowledged his "guilt" in the "swindle". To my knowledge Obama is still claiming with a smile that the stimulus is a success.

3. The vertical scale of the chart is approximately 7 to 10.5%. By not starting the vertical scale at zero, differences are exaggerated. The White House predicted 8% but got 10%. This is an actual error of 1/4 or 25%. But the graph shows the red line climbing to 4 times higher than the White House "promise" for a perceived error of 400%.

Now here is a more honest graph of the same numbers.

Bottom Line

I'm now putting my government cynic hat back on...

Recall how this stimulus package was passed in Congress. It was urgent to prevent an economic disaster. There was no time to read the details. We were asked to trust our leaders that they knew best how to solve the crisis by throwing lots of money at it. I hope Americans never make that mistake again.

Federal Pay Gap

“That government is best which governs least” – attributed to Thomas Paine but unknown

I’d like to thank Cato-at-Liberty for the charts in today’s blog. The numbers come from the annual report of The Bureau of Economic Analysis showing compensation levels by industry (Tables 6.2D, 6.3D, and 6.6D).

At one time federal employees were underpaid. So in order to attract workers they were offered great benefit packages instead. But a funny thing happened. In order to attract top talent and win the votes of federal employees, congress has been steadily increasing the pay for itself and for all government employees. In 2008, the average wage for 1.9 million federal civilian workers was $79,197. Compare this to an average of only $49,935 for the nation’s 108 million private sector workers (measured in full-time equivalents). As the chart below shows this pay gap is increasing.

If we also measure the always-generous federal benefits the size of the gap is astonishing! Federal worker compensation averaged a remarkable $119,982 in 2008, more than double the private sector average of $59,909.

Bottom Line

Government is a necessary creature but it should not be pampered or overfed. George Washington warned in his farewell address as president of the dangers of "big government". Even a democratic government can become a "despot" if it assumes too much power.

"It is important, likewise, that the habits of thinking in a free country should inspire caution in those entrusted with its administration, to confine themselves within their respective constitutional spheres, avoiding in the exercise of the powers of one department to encroach upon another. The spirit of encroachment tends to consolidate the powers of all the departments in one, and thus to create, whatever the form of government, a real despotism. A just estimate of that love of power, and proneness to abuse it, which predominates in the human heart, is sufficient to satisfy us of the truth of this position."