Today's Quote - Sheep!

People, like sheep, tend to follow a leader - occasionally in the right direction.

Alexander Chase

Feeling Fleeced? The Household Costs of War

Feeling Fleeced? The Household Costs of War, Death and Taxes

"... we will likely pay from $21,000 to $42,000 in taxes per household over the next 30 years as result of the War in Iraq."

April 15, 2008 STAR CITY HARBINGER

By Riley Murray

With some trepidation, I begin my regular writing duties at SCH. My goal is to shine a little light on the important Big Numbers coming our way in the daily media barrage, and sift out the significant data. I’ll be trying to find the “Significant Few” pieces of data in the “Trivial Many,” the so-called Pareto Principle. I hope to add clarity, minimize academic jargon and control the political spin.

My motto … and my marching orders for this journalistic endeavor: “I love ya’ll, but show me the data!” If any of my numbers don’t crunch correctly, let me know, challenge my assumptions, and I will re-run the data (the scientific method is a beautiful thing).

Lately, I’ve been thinking about sheep (don’t get any ideas), wool, and taxes.
On Saturday, I struggled through the annual sheep shearing day on our farm. It is a day that I dread each year, over four hours spent catching and holding each one of our ewes and rams, while their wool is sheared by a professional shearer. The whole process is not unlike trying to get a two year old child to cooperate at the barber shop for a first haircut. After it’s all over, my wife and I stuff the accumulated shearings into large wool bags for sale in the annual county wool pool. Bottom line: we make just enough money from the wool sale to pay for the shearer, if we’re lucky. Fortunately, in our primary farming effort, we do make a reasonable profit on the lambs we raise each year. So the wool shearing process is a necessary evil, because the sheep do have to be sheared each year to ensure a healthy flock. Think what wearing a wool coat would feel like on a hot August day.

Today, I am finishing up what many Americans are also doing, Federal Tax Form 1040. We all must offer up a chunk of our hard-earned income to support the operations of our Federal Government. Usually, I deal with this annual task by resigning myself to the notion that “you get what you pay for.” If I want a government that provides for the common welfare and defense of our nation, it seems entirely reasonable that I have to pay for these services.
With sheep, wool fleeces and taxes on my mind… it reminds me that I am increasingly feeling like I am the one sheep who is “being fleeced.” My begrudgingly supplied taxes are not necessarily being spent effectively for the federal services I want or need. In fact, a huge amount of money is being spent on my “federal credit card” (deficit spending financed via public debt) without my permission. Apparently, neither the Bush Administration nor our Congressional representatives are able to control this fiscal train-wreck.

With General David H. Petraeus’ recent testimony before Congress and President Bush’s latest comments regarding progress in Iraq, I am certainly more energized to put the spotlight on the financial impact of the last five years due to Iraq War, in terms that are more meaningful to each taxpayer in 6th district of Virginia. Hopefully, it will inform your decisions in the November elections.

FULL ARTICLE

Penn State Remembers Va Tech -- 4/16/2007

*** IN HONOR OF VIRGINIA TECH VICTIMS ***

GOVERNOR KAINE CALLS FOR A STATEWIDE DAY OF REMEMBRANCE IN HONOR OF VIRGINIA TECH VICTIMS

RICHMOND – Governor Timothy M. Kaine is calling for a day of remembrance tomorrow, Wednesday, April 16, 2008, to honor those lost one year ago at Virginia Tech. He will order state flags flown at half-staff for the day and asks for a statewide moment of silence at noon followed by a statewide tolling of bells.

Governor Kaine will attend the university convocation tomorrow morning at 10:30 a.m. on the Drillfield at Virginia Tech. The convocation webcast information, as well as a list of other events, is available at

http://www.remembrance.vt.edu/

Party of Fiscal Responsibility - NOT!

$3 TRILLION. Ouch!

Whatever happened to the Red Team's supposed sense of "Fiscal Responsibility"?

I guess the Blue Team will have to be "the adult in the room", apparently the kids from the "Right" , don't know how to manage our money correctly. It's not Monopoly money kids.

Time for some adult leadership in Washington.

Today's Quote - April 15th - Your Taxes at Work?

A billion here, a billion there, sooner or later it adds up to real money.

Sen. Everett Dirkson

No such thing as a free lunch, and there is no such thing as a free war

BRD Spotlight --> COST OF WAR = $3 TRILLION!

"WIFM" - What's In It For Me - Part 1 - Economic Data

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Linda Bilmes Commentary: The Iraq War Will Cost Us $3 Trillion, and Much More
March 9, 2008
Linda J. Bilmes and Joseph E. Stiglitz
The Washington Post

There is no such thing as a free lunch, and there is no such thing as a free war. The Iraq adventure has seriously weakened the U.S. economy, whose woes now go far beyond loose mortgage lending. You can't spend $3 trillion -- yes, $3 trillion -- on a failed war abroad and not feel the pain at home.

Some people will scoff at that number, but we've done the math. Senior Bush administration aides certainly pooh-poohed worrisome estimates in the run-up to the war. Former White House economic adviser Lawrence Lindsey reckoned that the conflict would cost $100 billion to $200 billion; Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld later called his estimate "baloney." Administration officials insisted that the costs would be more like $50 billion to $60 billion. In April 2003, Andrew S. Natsios, the thoughtful head of the U.S. Agency for International Development, said on "Nightline" that reconstructing Iraq would cost the American taxpayer just $1.7 billion. Ted Koppel, in disbelief, pressed Natsios on the question, but Natsios stuck to his guns. Others in the administration, such as Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz, hoped that U.S. partners would chip in, as they had in the 1991 Persian Gulf War, or that Iraq's oil would pay for the damages. The end result of all this wishful thinking? As we approach the fifth anniversary of the invasion, Iraq is not only the second longest war in U.S. history (after Vietnam), it is also the second most costly -- surpassed only by World War II.

Why doesn't the public understand the staggering scale of our expenditures? In part because the administration talks only about the upfront costs, which are mostly handled by emergency appropriations. (Iraq funding is apparently still an emergency five years after the war began.) These costs, by our calculations, are now running at $12 billion a month -- $16 billion if you include Afghanistan. By the time you add in the costs hidden in the defense budget, the money we'll have to spend to help future veterans, and money to refurbish a military whose equipment and materiel have been greatly depleted, the total tab to the federal government will almost surely exceed $1.5 trillion.

But the costs to our society and economy are far greater. When a young soldier is killed in Iraq or Afghanistan, his or her family will receive a U.S. government check for just $500,000 (combining life insurance with a "death gratuity") -- far less than the typical amount paid by insurance companies for the death of a young person in a car accident.

The stark "budgetary cost" of $500,000 is clearly only a fraction of the total cost society pays for the loss of life -- and no one can ever really compensate the families. Moreover, disability pay seldom provides adequate compensation for wounded troops or their families. Indeed, in one out of five cases of seriously injured soldiers, someone in their family has to give up a job to take care of them. But beyond this is the cost to the already sputtering U.S. economy. All told, the bill for the Iraq war is likely to top $3 trillion. And that's a conservative estimate.

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It's a bleak picture. The total loss from this economic downturn -- measured by the disparity between the economy's actual output and its potential output -- is likely to be the greatest since the Great Depression. That total, itself well in excess of $1 trillion, is not included in our estimated $3 trillion cost of the war.

Others will have to work out the geopolitics, but the economics here are clear. Ending the war, or at least moving rapidly to wind it down, would yield major economic dividends.

As we head toward November, opinion polls say that voters' main worry is now the economy, not the war. But there's no way to disentangle the two. The United States will be paying the price of Iraq for decades to come. The price tag will be all the greater because we tried to ignore the laws of economics -- and the cost will grow the longer we remain.

Linda Bilmes is lecturer in public policy and co-author of, "The Three Trillion Dollar War: The True Cost of the Iraq Conflict."

FULL ARTICLE

Does Dour & Sour = "Bitter" ?, Latest Gallup Poll

Watch for "... dour and sour... " comment at 3:02 in video feed. Maybe voters in Big towns and Small towns are a wee bit "bitter"? Just saying... the data might support that...?

BRD loves the sample size. N > 4000! Now we're talking about a good sampling plan! The folks at Gallup are real statistics pros. BRD says, "I'm not worthy... I'm not worthy"

Special Cause Impact - Obama & Bitter Voters?

We process engineering folks like to watch for "special causes" in our statistical process control (SPC) charts.

It will interesting to see if the new "bitter voters" issue cause a statistical significant shift around long-term Clinton vs. Obama trend line in Pennsylvania.

National media will, "fer sure", comment on the newest data point, we'll do the stats to measure real process change in PA.

Stay tuned...