Archive for facts

Your Number’s Up

Guest post by David Garber

numbersdg

I have fun with numbers… sometimes they’re shocking, other times they’re very amusing. I’m not good with them, I just enjoy them. So, with that in mind, here’s a few you might want to use at your next social gathering.

0. The grizzly bear is the official state animal of California but no grizzly bears have been seen there since 1922. Maybe it’s time for a new state animal — The elusive Darryl Issa cretin is my suggestion.

48. That’s the percentage of all Americans who are currently considered to be “low income” or are living in poverty. Remove Mitt Romney and the Koch brothers from the calculations and the number is substantially higher.

600. That’s average number of cans of soda each American consumes in a year. Only 22% of those aluminum cans are recycled. What’s the matter with you people? Cans don’t grow on trees!

2.4. That’s how many times more the average person in the US spends on health care than in the UK. It’s evident that the difference must be in dental preventative hygiene.

3.
Montana has three times as many cows as it does people. That might explain why politics in that state is “udderly” ridiculous.

66. No, not Route 66 — Today, 66% of all Americans are considered to be overweight. Remove Chris Christie and Rush Limbaugh from the equation and it’s down to 47%. Still to high.

25. That’s the percent of all U.S. employees with Internet access who visit pornography websites while they are at work. So next time you go to the office, look around and see who’s smiling — and who’s perspiring.

52. That’s the percentage of children living in Cleveland that are below the poverty level. I guess we should ask Betty White why her show’s called Hot in Cleveland. Doesn’t sound like things are so hot to me.

167,000. According to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, that’s the number of Americans who have more than $200,000 of student loan debt. But don’t worry. The Republicans are trying to pass a bill to double interest rates on student loans. If they’re successful, the average student will be paid off just in time for social security.

16.5
— There are 19 million new cases of syphilis, gonorrhea and chlamydia in the United States every single year. With our US population of 320 million, we’ll all have one of those diseases in 16.5 years.

Okay, hope you had fun with numbers like I did.

For the past 25 years, David Garber has been serving as the show runner and or writer on some of television’s biggest hits… Saved By The Bell, Power Rangers, 227, Bill Cosby Show and many other network series. His writing and producing have also netted David two very prestigious awards:the PRISM AWARD and the TV CRITICS AWARD – TV SPECIAL OF THE YEAR. Currently he’s authoring a short story series called “A Few Minutes With…”

Video- Ron Johnson (R-WI) Gets the Facts Wrong on Social Security

I like Krugman’s “non facts”. I think he means lies. Via.

The poor favor Democrats, minorities do better under Dem administrations than Republican ones

Professor of political science and author Zoltan Hajnal and political science doctoral student Jeremy D. Horowitz wrote an op-ed for the L.A. Times that is chock full o’ common sense conclusions.

They explain why, without question, minorities do better under Democratic administrations than under Republicans, and it’s all backed up by raw data. Facts are facts, Republicans, no matter how you try to ignore or bend them.

Nor does it matter how many times Mitt Romney (who famously said, “It would be helpful to be Latino”) whispers to his donors at secret meetings how President Santa Obama handed out free gifts to all you not-white, not-wealthy, “illegal” people. There’s a reason (or 12) why BigBucks McWrongerson lost the election, and it had nothing to do with socialist, Marxist, Kenyan handouts:

The data we analyzed show unequivocally that minorities fare better under Democratic administrations than under Republican ones. [...]

Under Democratic presidents, the incomes of black families grew by an average of $895 a year, but only by $142 a year under Republicans. Across 26 years of Democratic leadership, unemployment among blacks declined by 7.9%; under 28 years of Republican presidencies, the rate increased by a net of 13.7%. Similarly, the black poverty rate fell by 23.6% under Democratic presidents and rose by 3% under Republicans.

The results for Latinos and Asians, though based on fewer years of data, show the same pattern. [...]

More important, these gains do not come at the expense of whites… These numbers show that economic condition need not be a zero-sum game pitting races and ethnicities against one another.

This also can’t be rationalized by asserting that Democrats just happen to be in power when things are looking up, or because of the fiscal policies of Republicans who preceded them.

Additionally, the longer Democratic administrations are in office, the more minorities experience economic gains, but the opposite is true under Republican presidents. The authors attribute this to education, economic, and immigration policy differences between the two parties that benefit minorities, whose population numbers are growing… one more fact that scares the pants of the GOP.

Please read the whole piece for specifics. In fact, that might be a particularly wise thing for Republicans to do.

Video- Bill Maher Real Time: “Republicans Say F*** Facts”

Video Mid Day Distraction- 5 Historical Misconceptions Rundown

Via Sullivan.

Video- Rachel Maddow Spanks Politifact

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Fewer Jobs, Larger Deficits if Republicans Were in Charge

Of course, the standard technique by the R’s on something like this is to bluster on about how “liberal” Newsweek is, and no matter, they’re going out of business anyway. Never any disputing of the facts… Via Taegan-

Newsweek notes that nothing is apparently more important to Republican politicians these days than jobs and the budget deficit, but there’s a problem with their message: “So far, the things that Republicans have said they want to do won’t actually boost employment or reduce deficits. In fact, much the opposite. By combing through a variety of studies and projections from nonpartisan economic sources, we here at Gaggle headquarters have found that if Republicans were in charge from January 2009 onward — and if they were now given carte blanche to enact the proposals they want to — the projected 2010-2020 deficits would be larger than they are under Obama, and fewer people would probably be employed.”