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.

Public Vs. Private Sector: Not Two Sides of the Same Coin

Somebody asked me this question the other day, with regards to government jobs vs. private sector jobs:

Isn't it two sides of the same coin? Taxes make more gov't jobs and public services, which puts money in the economy. Isn't that the same as investments in corporations who provide jobs, etc...? Do you know why one stimulates the economy better than the other?

Here is my reply:

There are many ways to answer this question.  I'll go with the most simple one.  The private sector involves a feedback loop that incentivizes productivity and efficiency, and punishes waste and inefficiency.  The private sector is centered around making a profit.  And what is a profit?  It is the transformation of things of lesser value into things of greater value.  That is the essence of human progress, and the free market capitalist system quantifies it with money.  If you're doing work and you don't make a profit, it means you've transformed things of greater value into things of lesser value.  Whoever does that in the private sector loses money and eventually goes out of business.  The profit motive is a feedback loop that ensures that activities done by, and money invested in, the private sector will contribute to economic expansion, not economic contraction.

This feedback loop is not present in the government.  Unlike the private sector, the government does not generally have a competitor, and where it does (e.g. the postal service and UPS/FedEx), it does not compete fairly.  The private sector depends on customers making willful choices to buy from them or to buy from someone else who provides a better product or better value, and on investors making willful choices about where they think their money will produce the most value.  The government takes its money by force.  The government can never go out of business.  If it needs more money it simply confiscates it by force.  There is no punishment in the government for the action of taking things of greater value and turning them into things of lesser value; the government can (and does) do this all day, month, and year, ad infinitum, destroying wealth instead of creating it.

Even when it comes to creating jobs, not all jobs are beneficial to the economy.  If I pay somebody $100/hr to dig a hole and then fill it again, nothing will be accomplished by that work and eventually I run out of money.  If I pay somebody to go around breaking everybody's windows in order to create 10,000 new jobs in the window repair business, I haven't done a service to the economy; I have destroyed wealth instead of creating it.  The private sector has that feedback loop that ensures the jobs it hires people to do create wealth and grow the economy, because the private sector will only hire you if your work produces more value than what it costs to pay you; otherwise the company would lose money on your work and lose out to its competitors.  With the government, on the other hand, there is nothing at all stopping it from hiring people to do work that produces less value than the money paid to do it.

That is why money invested in, and jobs created by, the private sector stimulates the economy, and money/jobs in the government do not.

That is not to say that SOME jobs in the government produce value and create wealth.  But the federal government employs more people than the entire manufacturing, construction, and farming industries COMBINED -- and pays its workers significantly more than the private average.  Think of all the value created for our society from those private industries: just about everything you use, eat, wear, and live in every day.  Compare all of that to the things of value you encounter every day that are made or provided by the federal government.... there's really not much of that, is there?  There is no comparison.  We're spending way too much on government and that's a big part of why our economy is struggling.

Canadian "Human Rights Court" Fines Comedian $15,000 for Lesbian Insult

More human rights abuse by the Orwellian "human rights" tribunals in Canada. The tribunal ordered a stand-up comedian to pay $15,000 to a lesbian audience member he insulted at an open-mic night. Canada, you've gotta put an end to these disgusting tribunals and their abuse of basic human rights.


For some background on these Canadian "human rights" courts, check out the story of human rights hero Ezra Levant and watch the videos as he awesomely attacks this abusive legal system.

The Anti Dog-Eat-Dog Rule Becomes Reality

I can't believe it.  It's the "Anti Dog-Eat-Dog Rule" from Atlas Shrugged come to life!  Boeing is building its factory for the new 787 Dreamliner in South Carolina, a "right to work" non forced unionization state.  The Obama Administration is trying to force Boeing to built the factory in Washington instead, where the workforce will be unionized.  Boeing originally wanted to build the plant in Washington, but after long negotiations it was unable to accept the demands of that state's labor unions, and so decided to build the plant elsewhere.

In the words of John Galt, "The removal of a threat is not a payment, the negation of a negative is not a reward, the withdrawal of your armed hoodlums is not an incentive, the offer not to murder me is not a value."

If our nation is ever to recover, we must put an end to this insanity.

Crony Capitalism costs US taxpayers another $11,000,000,000

Our bailout of Government Motors is looking to cost taxpayers at least $11 billion. What a terrible, terrible deal. We should have let that company fail. Here's to 2012 and the end of Crony Capitalism! (If one can be so optimistic.)

Let's give this a try

I might have _just_ enough free time these days to update this blog regularly. We'll see how it goes!