Scientists Prove Federalist No. 10.

 People Aren't Smart Enough for Democracy to Flourish, Scientists Say.  That's funny -- it's taken scientists 225 years to prove what James Madison wrote in Federalist No. 10.  I guess that 17th Amendment really was a terrible idea after all.

Now this is what REAL climate change looks like...

A very interesting new study from NASA on the importance of a planet's axial tilt on its ability to sustain complex life. This may explain the "Cambrian explosion" of complex life on Earth. Evidence suggests that, possibly due to the ancient planetary collision that formed the Moon, primordial Earth had a severe axial tilt. This somehow changed around 540 million years ago, which finally stabilized Earth's seasonal climates and allowed complex life to flourish.

Of course, that's a big "somehow".  If a massive collision with a Mars-sized planet caused the original change in Earth's axial tilt, what could have caused it to change back?

Who won the Orlando GOP debate?

From best to worst, based on who did the most to further their chances to win the nomination:

1. Mitt Romney. HUGE night for him, and he hit it out of the park.  He killed Perry, and for him that counts more than anything else.

2. Herman Cain. His best night so far. In fact, he's been improving dramatically with every debate. He came out of nowhere -- the only real "outsider", who has never held political office, and now he's competitive with any candidate on that stage, and did better than anyone except Romney. No surprise if he surges in the polls after tonight.

3. Gary Johnson. Being the low man on the totem pole, he got shafted with time. But crowd reaction to him was great, and he had the most memorable line of the night. I don't think I've ever laughed so hard at a presidential debate. He came across as a serious, and in my opinion far better, libertarian alternative to Ron Paul. The other networks did our country a great disservice by not including him in the previous debates.

4. Michelle Bachmann. She did very well tonight. Every answer was on target and well thought-out. And she didn't claim that vaccines cause mental retardation. Her best performance yet. She's a serious candidate but still hurt by her lack of executive experience.

5. Rick Santorum. Maybe just because he was given disproportionate time relative to his position in the polls. His attacks against Romney were hard and effective. As were his attacks against Huntsman. He is a consistently good debater, though he gets too emotional at times.  His fumbling answer on DADT was a low point. He had a rehearsed answer, and when the moderators threw him a curve ball, he stumbled big time.

6. Ron Paul. He did relatively well in this debate. No gaffes -- or perceived gaffes, I should say, since he means everything he says 100%. But he did a good job explaining his hard libertarian positions, at least better than he usually does given the limitation to short sound-bites.

7. Newt Gingrich. He's the smartest guy on the stage, and always comes across that way. Nobody dares attack him, and it is beneath him to attack anyone. Every answer is close to perfection, but he sounds academic. Like he's the teacher and the other candidates his students, and his responses sound more like he's giving his opponents advice, rather than trying to win it himself. Newt would make a great President, but I think his destiny lies elsewhere.

8. Jon Huntsman. He basically rehashed his performance from the last debate, when he needed to step up his game big time. He looks presidential. He sounds presidential. He has some good policy positions. But his answers seem to lack substance, and his "America's core is rotten" line was effectively eviscerated by Santorum. Maybe he's coming across as too much of a politician to gain significant support in this election cycle.

9. Who am I forgetting? Oh yeah, Rick Perry. He did not do well at all. In fact, he was forgettable. The attacks against him were more memorable than his responses. His answer on Pakistan made no sense. His answer on Social Security made no sense. He was the only candidate without a specific economic plan, and he admitted it! His answers all boiled down to "look what I did in Texas". Yeah but man, you're not running for Governor of Texas anymore; you're running for President of the USA. That crap is not going to cut it. He's not ready for the big leagues.

Is Google hiding Jon Huntsman's campaign website?

Jon Huntsman's official campaign website (jon2012.com) does not appear anywhere in the first 5 pages of Google search results for "Jon Huntsman 2012". In Bing search, it is the very top hit. Is Google is deliberately hiding Huntsman's website in an attempt to hurt his campaign?

Obama: Return to the spinning wheel to grow our economy

President Obama just blamed our high unemployment rate on "companies learning to become much more efficient".  Apparently we need to be inefficient to save our economy!  We need to roll back industrialization.  Think of all the jobs we'll create if we abandon automation and the assembly line and go back to the days of 100% manual labor!  Sure it'll take a week of labor on the spinning wheel to make that new shirt you want, but wow will it get our economy growing!

Ugh.  I'd say someone really needs to teach Obama basic economics, but with only a year and a half left in his presidency, what's the point?

Here's who to blame for those tuition increases

Administrative bloat is the major driver of rising education costs. Looking at the absurd, dysfunctional administrative bureaucracy here at my university, I'm not surprised. In the private sector, managers who don't control costs get fired. In the public sector, they get a lifetime of employment, a gratuitous pension, and a building named after them.

Finally, something to celebrate

At least here, finally, is something to celebrate. Earth's ecosystem is thanking us for the record levels of CO2, one of the basic building blocks of life, that we are liberating back into the atmosphere after harmful eons-long geological sequestering underground. Who, 100 years ago, would have thought that this would be one of the wonderful unintended beneficial consequences of mankind's industrialization!

Canada: The Last Principled Nation?

Canada has once again become a role model for the world. Responsible fiscal policy, shrinking deficit, rapid economic growth, and the latest, a principled and commanding foreign policy. Prime Minster Stephen Harper: "When Israel, the only country in the world whose very existence is under attack, is consistently and conspicuously singled out for condemnation, I believe we are morally obligated to take a stand."

Yesterday, Canada took a leadership role in the G8 statement regarding the Israel-Palestinian conflict, explicitly opposing President Obama's call for using the 1967 borders as a basis for negotiations. All references to the 1967 borders were removed from the G8 joint statement, at Canada's insistence.

Fracking Vindicated Yet Again

EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson has confirmed there has not been a single case in which the process of "fracking", or hydraulic fracturing, has caused ground water contamination.  The left-wing smear campaign against fracking, including the unscientific documentary Gasland, has once again been proven false.

"Good-will" message beamed to first habitable exoplanet. Alien invasion to follow.

We have discovered a habitable planet, possibly with liquid water oceans, 20 light years away. Shortly after the discovery, we beamed a high-intensity "good-will message" to the planet. Approximately 40 years from now, we can expect to be invaded by space aliens from Gliese 581d. Start preparing now, people.

We should have ended that good will message with "By the way, we have nukes so don't even try it."

Fracking Vindicated

A new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences vindicates the process of hydraulic fracturing or "fracking". The charges and scare tactics against the natural gas industry by so-called environmentalists are shown to be unfounded, including the wildly inaccurate claims made in the anti-industry smear movie Gasland.

In summary, the NAS scientists found no leakage of any chemicals from the fracking process into groundwater. They conclude it is unlikely that methane or any pumping fluids can leak up through the thousands of feet from the gas deposits to the groundwater. They found high levels of methane in shallow drinking water wells, but only when those drinking water wells were within 1,000 meters of active natural gas wells. The conclusion is that some of the well casings are leaking methane. This has nothing to do with the process or technology of fracking. Instead, it means companies must engineer more robust solutions for cementing and casing wells to prevent methane leakage into the immediate surrounding area.

The Death of Bin Laden: Public Relations Vs. National Security

President Obama is being praised for his decision to take out Bin Laden. But seriously, who WOULDN'T make that call? The decisions he's made since the successful raid are the true measures of his leadership.

If I'd been President, I'd have hid the death of Bin Laden for as long as possible. I'd use a cover-story for the raid and implore/threaten the Pakistani government to go along with it. I'd use the intel from Osama's computers to take down the rest of Al-Qaeda before they even knew what hit them. I would not sacrifice national security for a PR event.

Consequences

Bin Laden was killed in a mansion outside of Islamabad. The previous government that harbored him was bombed back into the stone age. But they didn't have nuclear weapons. I wonder if the situation over there just got a little more complicated.

USA Ranked #2 in Internet Freedom (tiny Estonia #1)

The U.S. is essentially the best country in the world when it comes to Internet freedom. Which is why the federal government needs to regulate it, obviously.

How much did your vote for Obama cost you?

In this post I determine how much your vote (or someone else's vote) for Obama will cost you throughout your working career to pay for the interest on Obama's massive deficit spending. The results may astound you. I welcome suggestions and attempts to help refine my calculations. But first, just how massive is Obama's deficit spending? This massive:

To do the following calculations, I assumed you are a college student graduating this year (2011), and you will have a 40 year working career ending in 2051. I also made the safe assumption that between now and 2051 the principal on the federal debt will not be touched, but only the interest payments will be made each year. Why did I include only the interest? You can argue all day about the cost vs. benefit of Obama's deficit spending, but one thing is certain: taxpayers get nothing from paying the interest on the national debt.

Sources:

All my budget data came directly from the Office of Management and Budget's 2010 analysis, or the excellent website usgovernmentspending.com, which aggregates the same OMB data into easily downloadable spreadsheet format. My tax calculations used the 2006 IRS tax brackets, FICA rates, and standard deductions (I wanted to pick a pre-recession tax code) -- in other words, I assumed your actual tax rates will NOT go up any time in the next 40 years, which is a very generous assumption. Nationwide average wage/salary data by occupation came from the Bureau of Labor Statistics database. Inflation rates came from inflationdata.com.

Methodology and analysis:

I calculated the average annual interest rate paid on the national debt from 1980-2010 by dividing the yearly federal interest payment by the gross public debt for each year. That average comes to 5.875%. The 2010 interest rate was very low at 2.19%, but OMB projections have interest rates increasing in the coming years, and given historical trends and the S&P's recent downgrading of the U.S. financial outlook, I think 5-6% interest on our national debt is a good estimate for the next 40 years.

Next I needed to estimate total federal spending from 2011-2051. I did this by taking the OMB estimate for federal outlays from 2012-2016 and extrapolating that trend to 2051. I did the same for federal revenues. The OMB projects both revenues and outlays to increase linearly from 2012-2016, and extrapolating those trends, the federal budget will be balanced in 2029, and from 2030 on revenues will exceed spending. By 2051, revenues will have exceeded spending by a total of $815 billion. Looking at the historical spending and revenues trends back to 1980, I think a linear extrapolation is quite reasonable, and is the most fair and politically balanced estimate -- e.g. it does not include any massive increases or cuts to spending or revenues. By this method, total federal spending from 2011-2051 will be $321,845 billion, or $321.8 trillion. This may seem like a huge number (and it is!), but this was arrived at with a linear spending increase each year, and we can project GDP growth will increase by a constant percent each year -- which means GDP grows exponentially instead of linearly. From 1980-2010 the average rate of GDP growth was 5.68%. Assuming this is the average growth rate from 2011-2051, that $321.8 trillion in federal government spending will account for only 16.6% of the total GDP for that period. At the peak of the US economy in 2000, federal spending was 18.0% of GDP (it is 24.9% in 2011). So the financial outlook from these projections is actually pretty favorable, and in fact may be a little too much so.

Now on to the cost of Obama's deficit spending. I calculated the total public debt added by Obama's deficit spending from 2009-2012 using the OMB data (2011 and 2012 are estimated of course). To be as fair as possible, I subracted from each year the 2008 deficit of $459 billion. Even though the 2008 budget was passed by Democrats when Obama served in the Senate, it cannot be ascribed to him. In other words, $459 billion was the annual deficit "baseline", and I included only the 2008-2012 deficits over that amount in determining the cost of Obama's spending. The total debt from 2009-2012 is $5.45 trillion, and Obama's portion of that is $3.62 trillion.

Next, I used the average annual interest rate of 5.875% to calculate the total cost of the interest payments on the $3.62 trillion in Obama debt. From 2011-2051, interest payments on Obama's 2009-2012 deficit spending will total $8.72 trillion. To look at it another way, when Obama sold us his 2009 "Stimulus" bill at a cost of $1 trillion, he failed to mention its true cost to taxpayers is actually $3.4 trillion ($1 trillion principal + $2.4 trillion in interest over 40 years). When the government is running a deficit, any politician's sales pitch for new spending is a bait-and-switch scam so massive it should be illegal.

We now have enough information to calculate the cost of a vote for Obama. The $8.72 trillion in interest payments on Obama's 2009-2012 deficit spending will account for 2.7% of total federal spending from 2011-2051.

Using IRS data, I calculated the total federal taxes (income tax + Social Security and Medicare taxes) paid by heads of household earning incomes between $10,000 and $240,000. I then matched and interpolated these numbers with Bureau of Labor Statistics data to calculate the average total taxes paid during a 40-year working career for each occupation in the BLS database, and adjusted for an annual inflation rate of 4.1%, which is the historical average rate from 1980-2010. Finally, I calculated the fraction of those tax dollars that will go to pay for the interest on Obama's 2009-2012 deficit spending. The results for various occupations are given in the table below. The first entry, average of all college graduates, assumes a lifetime average salary of $45,000 (in 2010 dollars).

According to these results, the average college student graduating this year will pay $25,941 just to cover the interest on Obama's deficit spending. Many students will pay much more. If you voted for Obama, that 30-minute trip to the polling station was probably the most expensive 30 minutes of your life.



Table: Scroll down to find your occupation and see how much your vote (or someone else's vote) for Obama cost you.

Your occupation	Your vote for Obama cost you	Days of lost income to pay for it
Average of all college graduates	$25,941	89
College professors	$53,189	97
Kindergarten teachers	$34,038	94
Elementary school teachers	$34,447	94
Middle school teachers	$34,506	95
Secondary school teachers	$34,743	95
Chief executives	$137,415	122
Sales managers	$88,514	114
Engineering managers	$98,317	116
Education administrators	$61,797	108
Social and community service managers	$43,215	100
Financial analysts	$61,585	108
Loan officers	$43,464	100
Tax examiners, collectors, and revenue agents	$34,543	95
Computer programmers	$52,600	105
Mathematicians	$70,379	110
Architects, except landscape and naval	$53,065	105
Aerospace engineers	$70,588	110
Biomedical engineers	$61,320	107
Chemical engineers	$70,180	110
Civil engineers	$61,185	107
Computer hardware engineers	$79,091	112
Electrical engineers	$61,684	108
Environmental engineers	$61,142	107
Materials engineers	$61,626	108
Mechanical engineers	$61,126	107
Microbiologists	$52,300	104
Astronomers	$79,198	112
Physicists	$88,489	114
Chemists	$52,384	104
Economists	$70,592	110
Sociologists	$52,767	105
Anthropologists and archeologists	$35,050	96
Historians	$34,920	95
Political scientists	$79,062	112
Community and social services occupations	$25,648	89
Child, family, and school social workers	$25,751	89
Lawyers	$98,780	116
Paralegals and legal assistants	$33,993	94
Librarians	$34,819	95
Art directors	$70,167	110
Fine artists	$34,075	94
Multi-media artists and animators	$43,413	100
Fashion designers	$52,569	105
Graphic designers	$26,310	90
Interior designers	$34,276	94
Reporters and correspondents	$25,715	89
Broadcast news analysts	$44,069	101
Technical writers	$43,768	101
Writers and authors	$43,635	101
Sound engineering technicians	$34,564	95
Chiropractors	$61,107	107
Dentists, general	$127,700	121
Orthodontists	$180,268	129
Optometrists	$79,538	112
Pharmacists	$79,512	112
Anesthesiologists	$191,092	130
Family and general practitioners	$137,487	122
Obstetricians and gynecologists	$180,178	129
Pediatricians, general	$137,081	122
Psychiatrists	$137,209	122
Surgeons	$191,494	130
Physician assistants	$61,544	108
Podiatrists	$107,960	118
Registered nurses	$43,885	101
Audiologists	$43,925	101
Physical therapists	$52,770	105
Radiation therapists	$52,894	105
Recreational therapists	$25,454	88
Respiratory therapists	$34,602	95
Speech-language pathologists	$44,115	101
Veterinarians	$70,042	110
Dental hygienists	$44,053	101
Radiologic technologists and technicians	$34,599	95
Emergency medical technicians and paramedics	$18,991	86
Pharmacy technicians	$13,698	89
Massage therapists	$20,031	90
Fire fighters	$26,238	90
Police and sheriff's patrol officers	$34,747	95
Private detectives and investigators	$26,220	90
Chefs and head cooks	$25,842	89
Janitors and cleaners	$12,709	84
Hairdressers, hairstylists, and cosmetologists	$13,314	87
Flight attendants	$25,726	89
Sales representatives, technical and scientific products	$61,203	107
Real estate brokers	$53,007	105
Real estate sales agents	$34,440	94
Executive secretaries and administrative assistants	$25,812	89
Legal secretaries	$25,672	89
Carpenters	$25,764	89
Electricians	$34,107	94
Plumbers, pipefitters, and steamfitters	$26,577	91
Structural iron and steel workers	$26,395	90
HVAC mechanics and installers	$25,768	89
Commercial divers	$35,173	96
Airline pilots, copilots, and flight engineers	$88,943	114
Air traffic controllers	$79,541	112
Truck drivers, heavy and tractor-trailer	$19,951	90

Note: my original post contained some errors in the interest and inflation rate calculations, which have been corrected now.