More Tricksy Math

Oh dear....

Let me see if I can type this right: $1,470,000,000,000.00 — and that is just the part of the bill that we do not know how to pay. The actual bill for government spending this year is more than twice that. We are borrowing 41 cents of every dollar we spend. We are spending $36,000 per household.

Okay, here is the ritual denunciation: That is the biggest deficit in the history of the United States of America, in gross dollars. For Pete’s sake.

And here is the reality: That is the biggest deficit in the history of the United States of America since World War II, as a portion of GDP. That deficit is about 10 percent of GDP; the Bush-era deficits were typically about 3 percent of GDP.

36k per household per year. Well... looks like big government is going for broke. And way to make Bush look fiscally sane.

Speaking of going for broke.

How do you get 86k applicants for .gov money out of a pool of less than 40k...

That means that the U.S. may be recompensing at least 86,000 African-American farmers for past racial discrimination. But how could that possibly be true if there are only 39,697 African-American farmers in existence nationwide? And if only some subset of them ever applied for a loan and were then unfairly denied a loan?

If someone can explain this to me, I’ll add it in an update to this post. Could it be that there is a constant turnover of African-Americans trying out farming for a few years, and then quickly giving it up, so that although there may be only 40,000 farmers at
any one time, over the years, the total number of different people involved in farming is much larger? If so, is there any evidence for this? Or could there be another explanation?

Clearly, math is racist.

And so there is reluctance to fork over the money. But there also seems to be a reluctance on the part of the Senate to admit why they won’t fund the settlement, because the issue is just too racially charged.

It is a tragedy that victims of institutional discrimination like the legitimately wronged African-American farmers could be denied their payout due to scammers trying to undeservedly grab a piece of the pie. Instead of getting angry at the Senate for hesitating with the funds, we should be angry at the swindlers (and their lawyers) who contaminated an otherwise valid case

Clearly, the solution to all these problems is to give the government more power.

Meh.