Applying basic math to recent news reports can unearth very useful information. Here, phrased as those dreaded “word problems,” are four such examples (numbers are rounded in some cases to make calculating the results easier).
Problem 1: Chrysler sold 79,000 vehicles in May during 26 selling days. During the month, before 800 dealers were terminated, it had 3,200 dealers. How many cars did the average Chrysler dealer sell per day in May?
Answer: Less than one (79,000 ÷ 26 ÷ 3,200 = 0.95).
Comments: That really makes you wonder what your billions of tax dollars are subsidizing, doesn’t it? Even with the dealer reductions, if overall sales volume stays the same, the average Chrysler dealer will be selling about 1.27 cars a day. Big whoop.
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Problem 2: The Underground Railroad Freedom Center in downtown Cincinnati may receive a two-year subsidy of $3.1 million from the State of Ohio to keep its doors open. The Center receives 62,000 visitors per year who pay $9 or less to get in. If attendance is stable, how much will each visit be subsidized by state taxpayers during the next two years?
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Problem 3: President Obama claims that his health care plan will cost $1 trillion over 10 years while reducing the number of Americans without health insurance from 46 million to 30 million. If all of this comes to pass, how much will taxpayers shell out for the average newly insured person per year, even if the expected drop in the number of uninsured occurs immediately?
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Problem 4: An advocacy organization claimed in mid-June that “clean energy” jobs grew by 9.1% during the decade ending in 2007, while jobs in the economy as a whole grew by only 3.7%. Seasonally adjusted data found at the Bureau of Labor Statistics tells us that there were 124 million Americans working at the end of 1997 and 138 million at the end of 2007.
A) What was the percentage of job growth in the whole economy during the decade?
B) What does that result do to the claim by the advocacy group that “the number of jobs in America’s emerging clean energy economy grew nearly two and a half times faster than overall jobs between 1998 and 2007″?
The answers will shock and depress you.
But as shown by the stimulus there's a reason the mass media doesn't ask questions like this, and present the uncomfortable answers.
Let's look at the Stimulus when broken down
1) President-elect Obama claims that spending approximately $800 billion will create 3.675 million new jobs. That comes to $217,000 per job. This doesn't sound like a very good value, especially with the national average salary around $40,000. Wouldn't it be cheaper to just mail each of these workers a $40,000 check?
Huh... and right now the stimulus is doing far worse than the White House's prediction if we did nothing.
Similarly with healthcare:
If all of this comes to pass, how much will taxpayers shell out for the average newly insured person per year, even if the expected drop in the number of uninsured occurs immediately?
Answer: $6,250 ($1 trillion ÷ 10 ÷ the 16 million alleged reduction in the uninsured).
So why doesn't the gove just cut a check? It'd be porkish and grossly unfair, but at least it would be cheaper and less liberty-killing.
The real reason, of course, is that neither option allows for as much increase in the government, and their cronies, consolidation of their power and control of your life.
So, is the mass media that weak on basic analysis that they can't question the magnitudes of how much these policies really cost? Or are they being deliberately incurious?
Some simple hand calculations can give basic information on how much a program costs, how effective it is, and so on. It's like these people have never balanced a checkbook, run an experiment, organized a business project, price-compared goods or services, or built anything.
Its like they have no concept of tradeoffs, of weighting the pros and cons, that the variable space is limited (see: speed versus weight versus power). It's almost like they believe their plans will always work and have no downsides. That any naysayers are looking at false choices.
Oh.
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