Damned lies and statistics

Fark.com linked to this NewsMax story in which a Congresscritter from Iowa proclaims the relative safety of Iraq. I found a similar piece about the Congresscritter in the New York Sun.

As we all know, Iowa is home to an enormous number of experts in urban crime, insurgency, civil war and statistics, making this a particularly insightful piece. No, really. Well.

Basically, U.S. Rep. Steve King took some Pentagon estimates about civilian deaths and compared the civilian death rate of Iraq to the civilian death rate of select American cities, and found "Iraq" is safer. MeTheSheeple immediately screamed "WHAT?!?" on the realization that there's a real apples-to-oranges comparison here. MeTheSheeple is sure that the civilian death rate in some Kurdistan villages will compare nicely with, say, Switzerland. But you can't compare countries with cities. He could try it the other way, too: Why not compare the civilian death rate in Baghdad with the civilian death rate in Iowa? Yeah, let's find out how that one turns out.

Farkers are busy tearing apart his statistics, finding his calculated death rate may actually be only about half of the real rate. It's interesting reading for those inclined. For those not inclined, just think twice before accepting any statistic at its apparent face value.

Add: A quick Google search turned up earlier debates about Iraq's death toll. In 2003, one guy claimed -- very erroneously -- that the frequent availability of guns made Iraq a safe place to be. There, too, the comparison was with Washington, D.C. MeTheSheeple won't open any gun-control argument right now, but the point is the claim of relative safety was utter bullshit -- by a factor of about 20. Another 2003 story here compares the experience of a Baghdad coroner.

Little may have changed, with deaths in the Baghdad region running about 1,000 per month, or dozens of times D.C.'s rate.

Sad. So sad.

Follow-ups

Good news and bad news.

First, the Catholic Church greatly limited its payout to a man accused of serial sexual harassment while leading the Boston-area Catholic hospitals. Sorry for the late news; this was a follow-up to the previous post here.

Second, WeTheSheeples previously posted about the national debt using a story several years old. USA Today recently followed up to find the average American household owes $510,678 for these public liabilities. As pointed out by one political cartoonist, word of such liabilities could deter illegal immigration.

Business-like approaches

I've never heard of politicians running on a "Bureaucracy is great!" platform. Normally, when politicans describe changes in service, they talk about a more business-like approach. These days, that's not always a good thing.

MrsSheeple was irked by reports about Fannie Mae, a quasi-private company founded by the United States government that has embraced some accounting practices used by other companies. Said accounting practices today resulted in a $400 million fine over a saga of deceitful practices that also helped get top executives much larger bonuses.

MeTheSheeple is glad to see such entrepreneurial spirit, but wonders why they didn't take it farther. Perhaps there could have been some Enron-style shell games? Or maybe some almost-off-the-books debt like U-Haul? If Fannie Mae's core business is moving money around and working with debt, then such accounting seems ideally suited. Yeah. That's the ticket.

Other business-like activity is brought to us by a charitable division of the Catholic Church. After finding out that the head hospital honcho may have sexually harassed several hospital employees, the church is now finding out ... oh, maybe it's at least a dozen women. So now the church is trying to figure out whether it can pay the guy $3 million to go away. Boston Globe columnist Eileen McNamara suggests that for the church the only effective regulation is litigation.

Corporations have many amazing, wonderful things for people all around the world. Of course, not everything is perfect. Next time someone says they want to run a charity more like a business, or run a government agency more like a corporation, you might want to ask just what they mean.

Efficiency expertise

MeTheSheeple hasn't written a whole lot about the immigration debate. What a great time! (Disclosure: MrsSheeple wasn't born here, but she speaks much better English.)

So, Shrub yesterday backed a plan that may lead to amnesty for the immigrants here, possibly a ploy to get on their good side and convince 'em to become lifelong Republicans.

He's also proposing sending thousands of National Guardsmen to the border. Word is the commitment could eventually reach all three of the Guardsmen not already in Iraq, recuperating from Iraq, or who won't say bad things about the lack of federal coordination in New Orleans.

In actuality, he proposed last night as many as 6,000 troops on the border with Mexico. This is kind of funny, because last year he chopped nearly 10,000 border-patrol guards from his own budget proposal -- likely on forced austerity because of expenses like, oh, I don't know, maybe IRAQ ... where so many of the Guardsmen are. Bush also called for an increase in the number of ... border-patrol agents. Pat Paulsen could have made this funny, yes; unfortunately, Bush is trying for a different effect.

There's nothing quite like an obvious election-year ploy (a one-year commitment, no less) in the face of high levels of organization by immigrants, many of whom are here illegally.

In completely unrelated news, MeTheSheeple must turn back to WorldNetDaily, which in fact help start this utter waste of time blog. One of the latest posts backed massive deportation procedings in a highly unusual argument that must be read to be believed, albeit at the cost of stomach churning. In fact, the writer Godwin'd his own writings:

If it took the Germans less than four years to rid themselves of 6 million Jews, many of whom spoke German and were fully integrated into German society, it couldn't possibly take more than eight years to deport 12 million illegal aliens, many of whom don't speak English and are not integrated into American society.

Unfortunately, the WND nuts (not to be confused, necessarily, with the WMD nuts) often make their way into the popular media as so-called experts. For proof, just wander over to this blog's first real post.

Mortgaging the future

The grandchildren that MeTheSheeple does not yet have may be paying for mistakes that may have started on a cocktail napkin.

The napkin was the infamous napkin supposedly drawn upon by economist Arthur Laffer, who sketched the "Laffer curve" that theorized tax collections could increase as the tax rate decreased. Laffer has since said he doesn't remember the napkin and disavowed the theory.

Just last year, the Congressional Budget Office studied the results of a 10-percent tax cut. Assumptions varied, but the CBO decided that growth due to tax cuts would make up only a small fraction of government's economic losses due to the tax cuts: about one quarter, and quite possibly less. In other words, cutting taxes really cuts tax collection. It doesn't stimulate the economy nearly enough to make up the difference within a decade.

Today, Washington Post columnist Sebastian Mallaby argues that efforts to cut taxes -- and thus government revenue -- backfire and actually increase the size of the "beast," or government.

Everybody knows that the Reagan tax cuts did not actually cause spending to come down in the 1980s; most people have surely noticed that the Bush I and Clinton tax hikes were followed by spending constraint in the 1990s; and the Bush II tax cuts certainly have not stopped Congress from spending like a drunken sailor recently. But then the plural of anecdote is not data, and until the starve-the-beast theory is conclusively discredited, tax cutters won't stop hiding behind it.

Well, now it has been discredited. Rauch cites William Niskanen, an economist who worked in the Reagan White House and now chairs the Cato Institute. Niskanen has crunched the numbers between 1981 and 2005, testing for a relationship between tax cuts and government spending, and controlling for levels of unemployment, since these affect spending and taxes independently. Niskanen's result punctures his own party's dogma. Tax cuts are associated with increases in government spending. The best strategy for forcing cuts in government is actually to raise taxes.

Mallaby said the interesting thing to watch will be the Republicans' reaction.

Forget partisan politics as a spectator sport. MeTheSheeple's reaction is to worry about his yet-spawned grandchildren. Talk about the "national debt" comes and goes in cycles, but even less talked about are the government's obligations to Medicare, Social Security and other entitlement programs that are running out of money. And remember: These are the same entitlement programs facing a surge of demand from Baby Boomers. At the same time, we've decreased our ability to pay (tax cuts) and increased the obligation and debt (prescription coverage). Is any of this new? No, take a look at a story from 2004:

A USA TODAY analysis found that the nation's hidden debt — Americans' obligation today as taxpayers — is more than five times the $9.5 trillion they owe on mortgages, car loans, credit cards and other personal debt.

This hidden debt equals $473,456 per household, dwarfing the $84,454 each household owes in personal debt.

The $53 trillion is what federal, state and local governments need immediately — stashed away, earning interest, beyond the $3 trillion in taxes collected last year — to repay debts and honor future benefits promised under Medicare, Social Security and government pensions. And like an unpaid credit card balance accumulating interest, the problem grows by more than $1 trillion every year that action to pay down the debt is delayed.

"As a nation, we may have already made promises to coming generations of retirees that we will be unable to fulfill," Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan told the House Budget Committee last month.

Think of your grandchildren, or their grandchildren. Encourage your legislators to quit playing partisan poltics and mucking around in the feces-strewn sandbox of pet economic theories.