Geography provides the framework and the tools for understanding our world. More than just teaching students to read maps, it teaches students relationships between people, places, cultures, politics, economies and environments. But some of our nation’s lawmakers don’t seem to think it’s an important subject.
I have been a teacher of World Geography for high school freshmen in Texas for the past five years. I will begin teaching a new subject next year to seniors in the same independent school district — Economics and AP Macroeconomics. Accordingly, I will have an opportunity to be teacher again for many of my former students, this time focusing on a subject that’s a logical extension of the former. I’m excited about this and looking forward to the beginning of the new school year.
What makes this so exciting for me is that I have already watched these young people grow in their understanding and appreciation of the world, a world that includes our own great nation. Now I’ll be able to see them grow even more as they step out to pursue higher educations and begin their careers. These students will benefit from knowing about the world when they start competing for jobs in this increasingly global economy of ours. They will benefit too from knowing about it in helping our nation meet international challenges of the future — challenges from global terrorism, to global warming, to global disease, to global trade, and who knows what next. Naturally, I am an advocate for improving geography education in our schools.
In a recent email message from the National Geographic Society (I can’t even remember when I was not a member of this fine organi- zation and did not receive their monthly magazine), I was invited to help raise awareness within the Congress of the United States about the need to stress the teaching of geography in our schools. Through the society’s My Wonderful World campaign, you too can help if you are willing.
I did not know before receiving the aforementioned message that, of the nine core subjects included in the new No Child Left Behind legislation, geography is the only one without designated federal funding? The Teaching Geography is Fundamental Act (TGIF) will rectify this by funding professional development for educators to ensure all young people acquire the vital geography skills and experience that they will need. Thus far, the Senate version of TGIF (S. 727) has attracted 18 cosponsors, and the House version (H.R. 1228) has 39 cosponsors.
Please consider writing to your Senators and Representatives in Congress urging them to support and cosponsor the pending legislation. National Geographic has made it easy for you to contact your lawmakers to tell them this bill is a priority. Just click on the link and follow the bouncing ball. You can also spread the word and urge your friends, family, and co-workers to notify their law- makers about TGIF.
Thank you in advance for participating in the democratic process.
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We have a tiger by the tail with respect to our War on Terror. Not only do we have a determined enemy spread across most of the world and alienated former allies, but now we have a divided citizenry as well. This is a mess that perhaps only new leadership in the White House can resolve, uniting the people once again in a broader strategy in the greater war effort.
We who do not believe the current strategy in Iraq is the best use of our nation’s resources to combat World Terrorism are not saying that we don’t support our troops who are fighting and dying there. They are, after all, our own sons and daughters. So we do not deserve to be called, “unpatriotic”. But I understand how some could think so, those who are still committed in their hearts and minds to the President’s priorities in this war, thinking that he, as Commander-in-Chief, knows best. However, in my heart and mind, it is one thing to not be in support of the war, as it is being waged, and something else entirely different to not be in support of our troops.
Let’s analyze this issue a bit — see if we can’t find some common ground here. First, we are at war, there’s no denying this. It’s a war unlike any that we’ve ever had imposed upon us before. It’s not a war against another nation-state or a coalition of aggressor states as in all previous wars we’ve had to fight. It’s a war against pan-Islamist hate. We can be against the war if we choose to be. But if we choose not to defend ourselves, we and our way of life, our democratic ideals and capitalism are doomed. Would many of us willingly choose to live in an Islamic Republic? I hardly think so. So, how can we be against the war?
Second, the War on Terrorism is not a war being fought solely in Iraq, although most of our efforts and almost all of our attention is currently “riveted” there. Iraq is but one theater of the war. So, when we speak of “the” war, we should be clear in our minds about this distinction. When we eventually leave Iraq, and we will someday, the war will not be over. Unlike Vietnam, which was a terriorial conflict, Iraq is only part of a much larger conflict.
Third, we should understand the nature of this war. It’s different, one that cannot be won by military force alone, not unless we are willing to annihilate most of the Islamic world then keep the rest of it forcefully contained ever after. This is because, at its core, it is a war of ideas not a war of resources and territorial conquest, as much as our current administration may want to make it one. We know that our ideas are better than their ideas, but they know the same about their ideas. Israel is a microcosm of this reality today and we have seen how successful military force has been in that part of Southwest Asia. The “shooting” war between Israel and her neighbors is perpetual, as so might our own war with al-Qaeda and other terrorist groups become. Accordingly, some with whom I have discussed this believe that there is no option other than to kill everyone in the world who hates us, and then to kill all their sons and daughters who will grow up hating us too because of what we will have done.
This leads me to my final point. The Blue Ribbon Iraq Study Group that met last year submitted 79 proposals to the admini- stration on how we might be more successful there. Their report included a suggestion that we should engage in talks with neigh- boring Syria and Iran to help stabilize strife-ridden Iraq. Presi- dent Bush rejected this, of course, and the Iraqi government certainly isn’t working overtime to do their part to quell the violence either, which was identified by the group as another important part of ultimate success. Now, while some of the study group’s ideas, in hindsight, may not have been as realistic as they sounded to some at the time, the fact that they were made at all illustrates that there are ways to resolve differences other than by killing each other.
Rejecting the idea of killing everyone who hates us, given the two remaining choices of either killing each other slowly but unend- ingly, or surrendering ourselves to the will of Allah, I’m thinking that maybe we need to come up with some new, non-lethal weapons for our nation’s arsenal. Something like goodwill, perhaps? Maybe some improved diplomacy and economic assist- ance in the poorest countries of the Islamic world, places like the Darfur region of Sudan, would help. I’m talking about places that have never before been seen as being in our national interests to be involved. And I don’t mean just throwing money or arms at despotic leaders for their political support, which is what we seem to be doing in Pakistan. I mean rolling up our sleeves and helping the people where they live — helping them secure sources of fresh drinking water, helping them fight diseases, helping them produce more food, helping them discover economic alternatives to growing poppies for the opium trade. “Give a man a fish and he will eat for a day…” Remember?
This is not a new idea. We used to call it the Peace Corps. Maybe it’s time to bring it back, emphasize it more in terms of national service for our young men and women, an alternative to military service. Maybe emphasizing this more than regime change would make a difference in the way that we are perceived by the rest of the world. Maybe, if we were not seen as occupiers exploiting resources and imposing foreign ideas on the people of the Islamic world, moderate Muslims would not be so easily won over to extremism. But changing perceptions will take a long, long time. Better that we should get started now. We have, in my opinion, long neglected our higher calling as a world leader. A good temp- late for this kind of effort on a national level has been provided to us by the William J. Clinton Foundation.
In the meantime, I think that we need to foster an attitude of respect and appreciation for our sons and daughters who have answered our nation’s call to arms.
I recently received an email from a reader who cannot seem to separate in her mind the conflict and the killing in Iraq from our troops who are necessarily part of that killing. She believes that military service attracts the worst in us, while I happen to think that it attracts the best in us. So I answered her email in the following way:
You have obviously been convinced or have somehow convinced yourself that the military attracts the most heinous of human instincts. I reject that idea and wish that I could persuade you someway to think more generously toward our young men and women who are serving to protect and defend us — even if in Iraq they are only making matters worse. Most of them believe in their mission, even if at the same time they doubt the prospects of their efforts to restore the peace there. Don’t you see how heroic that is?
Even though the horrors of battle can do terrible things to the minds of some who have heeded our nation’s call to service, things that might cause a tiny few to do crazy things in the heat of the moment, the vast majority of our soldiers serve with honor and distinction, targeting only “bad guys” and attempting to minimize collateral losses. I truly believe this because I’ve been a soldier myself. Don’t forget too, that the generals did not, by themselves, choose to invade Iraq; most, at the time of decision in the Pentagon, spoke against doing so. Rightly or wrongly, they and their troops were sent there by civilian leaders of our nation to do a job, the President, all the president’s men, and the vast majority of Congress.
It makes me sad to think that, by mentioning him in your message, you perhaps equate our soldiers and their motivations to serve in the military with Cho Seung-Hui and the tragic events that happened at Virginia Tech back in April of this year. That young man was a madman – he was either a psychopath, a schizophrenic, a psychotic, or maybe just an angry depressive. Since he took his own life too, we will never know. But our soldiers in Iraq are nothing like this. They are heroes, not unlike the policemen who rushed to the scene of the Virginia Tech massacre for the sake of the students and facuty there, putting themselves in harm’s way by so doing.
Until we do have new leadership in the White House, and I don’t see anything changing much until we do, we should not blame our troops for the mistakes and miscalculations that have taken place. These belong in the Oval Office, where a past great President once declared, “The Buck Stops Here.”
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With two economic experts, the former and current chiefs of the Federal Reserve Bank of the United States, giving mixed signals, something’s gotta be wrong. Right? Or could it be that nobody really knows for sure where our country’s economy is headed?
Earlier this year, Alan Greenspan, former Fed Chief serving nearly five successive four-year terms since 1987, warned that the U.S. economy could stumble into a recession by year’s end. Markets dipped in response. Then, two days later, they rebounded on soothing words spoken by Greenspan’s successor, Ben Bernanke. Mr. Bernanke, the former chief economic advisor to President Bush, was nominated last year and confirmed by the Senate while it was still controlled by members of the president’s own party.
Hmmm… in light of what has recently taken place, even though the Fed is, by charter, suppose to function completely independent of the executive branch, maybe we’re putting too much stock in what the current administration’s choice for our nation’s head banker is saying.
So, what has taken place recently? You should know by now that the DJIA has tumbled after briefly reaching an all-time high of 14000 earlier this week. The tumble was nothing like the one-day drop that happened on Black Tuesday, October 29, 1929 starting a decline that lasted until 1954. But the loss was enough to send shock waves through Asian Markets on Thursday. According to Market Watch, the Dow industrials closed with a 311.5 point loss and there were big sell-offs for the Nasdaq and the S&P 500 as well. On Friday, the Dow was down another 208.10 points, ending the week down a total of 4.2 percent!
Experts have said that recent postponements of loan deals, weak U.S. housing data, and poor results from home builders are the reason. But I fear the problem could be bigger, maybe much bigger. The good news is that I’m not a real economic expert, so nobody needs to worry too much about what I think.
I expressed concern about the housing market last week while attending a summer institute for teachers of economics. I said I was worried about the effect that it and foreclosures on mortgage loans of sub-prime or second-chance borrowers might have on the broader market. Now we learn that many homebuyers with good credit are defaulting as well. Some of the other teachers seemed to agree that this is a bad sign, while most withheld comment. Others, one in particular who dabbles in real estate, argued that it isn’t that big of a deal. Then I pointed out, with a copy of the morning’s Wall Street Journal in-hand, that despite a sizable gain by the Dow the previous day, most mutual funds showed losses.
Click the run button twice, once to load, the second time to start.
Could Mr. Bernanke have been wrong in his forecast of future economic growth in his semiannual report to the Congress? Of course he could. Economics is not a “hard” science, it’s a “soft” science — black art may be a more appropriate term for it. You see, unlike real scientists who have laboratories in which conditions can be controlled for experiments, economists have to work in the real world, a world where conditions are constantly changing. And real science, as opposed to “pseudo” science, is devoid of any biases such as political influence. Markets respond to what Fed chairmen say about the economy, not so much because they believe what they say as much as they’re trying to anticipate what monetary policies the Fed may adopt based on what the their analysts think the economy needs.
The Fed Chairman based much of his report to the Congress on something called the Real Gross Domestic Product (GDPr), which is the value of all domestic goods and services produced over a certain timeframe, corrected for inflation. The formula for this, using the “Expenditures Approach,” is GDP=C+Ig+G+Xn, where C is consumption (what people are spending their hard earned money on), Ig is gross private investment (business purchases of equipment, tools, construction and changes to inventories), G is government spending, and Xn is net exports (the difference between exports and imports).
Mr. Bernake, in his report to Congress, was talking mostly about the GDPr for the second quarter of 2006. This is because it takes time for the government to collect all the data it needs to calculate this important economic indicator. So his report spoke to what was, not what is.
In addition to the hindsight vs. foresight problem that economists have to deal with when projecting where our economy might be headed (we’re always kind of walking backward — you see), there’s an issue in my mind having to do with data quality (garbage-in/garbage-out)… not that anyone would purposely want to make Americans think that things are better than they really are. But let’s just take a moment to do a little analysis of our own, beginning at the end of the GDP formula and working our way to the front. You can check all of what follows yourself by accessing data at the Bureau of Economic Analysis website.
We all know that the U.S. has a trade deficit. We have had for years. In 2006, according to the BEA, it was a negative $176.8 billion, with an increase in deficit over 2005 being 2.4 percent. The biggest part of this increase is in our ever increasing thirst for foreign oil. So, Xn is a negative factor.
Government spending, despite the Bush-Chaney tax cuts of 2004, was up in 2006 contributing on the positive side to the GDP calculation. It increased 8.5 percent over 2005 spending, which had an increase of 4.6 percent over 2004 spending, which was up 10.9 over 2003 spending. But most of these increases have gone to defense and the War on Terror, with much of it going to Iraq in wasteful efforts to rebuild their infrastructure. Investment in human capital and infrastructure here at home was down. This is in keeping with the current administration’s economic/political philosophy of reducing the size of government. So any growth in the economy based on government’s contribution to it is illusionary.
Growth in Ig (gross private domestic investment) was down for 2006, the increase was 2.7 percent over 2005 spending. Spending for 2005 showed an increase of 5.6 percent over 2004’s spending, which was a 9.7 percent increase over 2003. So, while industry continues to invest in our future, they’re doing so at an increas- ingly diminished rate. So much for the trickle-down theory. This helps to explain why some corporate profits have been in record territory recently with COEs making mega-bucks. Ig, while still in the black mid-way through 2006, is well on it’s way to becoming a negative factor.
Growth in C (consumer consumption) was also down. For 2006 the increase over 2005 was 3.1 percent. The increase for 2005 over 2004 spending was 3.2 percent. The increase for 2004 was 3.6 percent over 2003. So, growth in consumer spending has been declining over the past four years, even though personal income was up 9.1 percent. Keep in mind, the personal income figure is an average. The top 2 percent of Americans could be making half again as much as they did before the Bush-Cheney tax cuts went into effect, while the rest of us are making increasingly less, layoffs, out sourcing, and corporate restructuring all taken into account. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), real wages (the source of most Americans’ income) have not kept pace with the Consumer Price Index (CPI). Here in Texas, the average increase in real wages last month was 0.1 percent, while the CPI grew 0.4 percent. The real wages number is adjusted for inflation while the CPI is inflation. So, while most of us are spending all we make and much that we can borrow, the spending can’t be helping the economy grow. C, while still in the black ink, could really be a negative factor because much of the spending by Americans is with borrowed money.
The new Fed chief also used the current unemployment figure in his projection of continued growth. At 4.5 percent, economists consider this to be “full” employment, a rate at which the economy should be going strong, inflation being our only real concern. But the unemployment number only considers those adults who are able and willing to work. It does not take into account the number of persons recently laid-off who have not been able to find work at a commensurate wage or salary. Many have given up the search and opting instead for early retirement and dropping off the radar screen. Some, in order to keep the wolf from the door, have taken part time jobs, and part time workers are considered by the BLS to be employed. In fact, the lay-off rate has become such an embarrassment to the administration that the BLS no longer publishes percentages of change over previous periods as they do with other data. Layoffs now are reported only in gross numbers by region.
Again I say, I’m no expert on this stuff, but I don’t see anything in these numbers to suggest that the nation’s economy is strong, nor that we can expect “continued” growth for the rest of the year. But then, maybe I’m not holding my mouth exactly right. If Greenspan was right (I hope he’s not, for the country’s sake, despite my back-of-the-envelope analysis) and Bernanke chooses the wrong monetary policy, we could be in for worse than recession. After seven years of bushenomics, stagflation could now be on our nation’s doorstep.
Maybe Greenspan carefully chose his words when he said that the economy could “stumble” into a recession. Maybe he knew we were already in one, but also knew what a panic it would cause for him to say so. After nineteen years as our nation’s top banker, surely he knows the power of his words. Golly, you don’t suppose this is why he retired from the head banker’s job before com- pleting his fifth term? So, anyway, you do whatever you’re comfortable with, my friends, but my retirement portfolio, since last week when the stock market was at it zenith, is considerably less aggressive now.
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A well-known, widely-read author, Jeffrey Zaslow, in a recent article for the Wall Street Journal, helps us to understand the current Entitlement Epidemic, an epidemic that seems to be affecting Americans today.
July 27, 2007 — Mr. Zaslow’s article entitled, “The Entitlement Epidemic: Who’s Really to Blame,” struck a chord with me last week as it did with many others who were attending a summer institute course on teaching advanced placement high school economics. He wrote about the epidemic being evident among our youth. But the problem is not only with them. The problem, we teachers decided, affects all of us. It affects us individually and it affects us collectively.
Our course curriculum was too full for us to spend much time discussing it during class, but several of us had plenty to say about it during our morning and afternoon breaks. We decided that the subject is basic to our understanding of much that is going on in our economy today.
Parents, do any of these statements sound familiar? “Mary has one, why can’t I have one too?” “It’s not fair!” “I just can’t show up without something new to wear.” “I just can’t live without one!” “Ugh! This old thing is a pile of junk, we deserve better.” “It’s not fair!” “Everybody else is doing it.”
Truth be told, our current generation of young people isn’t the first to have an inflated sense of entitlement. But the situation is obviously growing worse in our country. And whose fault is it? Well, more about this later.
When I was very young, my mother and I lived off and on with my grandparents. On my mother’s wages and tips as a waitress, we just couldn’t make it on our own. Anyway, my mother’s younger brother lived with us too, so I very naturally gauged myself against what he, my uncle, was given and what he was allowed to do. I’m not proud of it, but just to make a point here, I clearly remember pitching a fit one Saturday morning when the family was shopping at an Army/Navy surplus center and discount store. My grandparents had bought my uncle a new pair of “engineer” boots, they were much in-vogue then following the Marlon Brando movie, “The Wild One,” and my grandparents were expecting me to be satisfied with a new pair of sneakers. Sneakers!? My self-esteem was crushed. Mammaaa!
One of my own sons, when he was nine or ten I think, got into the BMX biking craze of the late 70s. He raced his bike on Saturday mornings but rarely did he finish with the pack, usually he was well behind it. He cried and whined for weeks on end because his bike was standard equipment – not customized with after-market, carbon-graphic this and chrome-molybdenum that. If only he had a better bike, he argued, he could win. So, we finally caved-in and gave him enough to buy a new, lightweight frame, which he quite literally slept with until I could prioritize enough time to help him build it up with parts from his old bike and a few other components for which he had traded belongings with his friends. Notwith- standing, after the rebuild was finished, he fared no better in subsequent races that he entered. His passion for racing soon ended.
So, what’s different today? Why do I share these personal stories with you? My son and I were certainly no less afflicted with the entitlement bug than the young people of today are, but we both learned something from our bouts with it. Far from immune to want (we are all human after all), we learned as we matured to delay gratification and to invest more of our time and energy into knowledge and skills for a better tomorrow. I don’t see this happening among many of my students today. Neither do I see this happening much among many of our younger friends’ sons and daughters — some, sure. But I just don’t see it as a moral imper- ative in our consumer culture of today that we must earn our keep. What I do see is a rude awakening waiting for many on the horizon… more and more kids choosing easy paths, liberal arts over engineering, basket weaving over calculus, fewer young adults willing to take jobs in construction or learn a trade in plumbing, electricity, or auto mechanics (these jobs are increas- ingly being filled by immigrants upon whom we’ve grown overly dependent). I see more and more young people having to move back in with parents after graduation from college because the good, entry-level jobs in the global economy are all going overseas to those who are better prepared and willing to accept less in compensation.
Why is this happening? Who’s to blame? The list of suspects, according to Mr. Zaslow, is long. It includes the state of California, Mr. Rogers, Burger King, FedEx, MTV, and parents. Mr. Zaslow especially credits over-indulgent parents for the trend. But I think parents are only passing-on the affliction and compounding the problem, one generation to the next. The more things we have, the more we want.
In my opinion, this all started with the birth of modern advertising in the late 40s and early 50s when mass media, especially tele- vision, began creating demand for products that nobody needed and spreading confusion and apathy over the dangers of products like cigarettes and over-the-counter drugs. Patronage, both for products and for politicians, has become a compodity with a price tag. Now we even have marketing aimed at our children for toys manufactured in China, for crying out loud, and nutrition-less breakfast cereals made largely of refined sugar. While Americans get bigger around the waist on fast-food and sugary drinks, corporate America gets bigger around its middle too; mergers and franchises have all but crowded out the little guys. Innovation is gobbled-up by the behemoths and buried if it threatens established business interests.
This is not the “free enterprise” that was envisioned by Adam Smith in his Wealth of Nations.
As parents, our own “wants vs. needs” and our surrender to the consumer culture that many believe fuels our economic growth does set a strong example. Just consider our willingness on average today to bear over $10,000 of credit card debt per household and to pay upwards of 20% interest year-after-year on it. Just consider our willingness to agree to adjustable rate mortgages on oversized homes knowing full well that the day will surely come when we will no longer be able to afford to live in them. Just consider our preference for driving oversized, gas-guzzling vehicles like pickup trucks and Hummers back and forth to distant workplaces, hastening the day when the world’s oil reserves will diminish to a trickle. Just consider our willingness to allow the government to add to the national debt year-after-year, increasing the interest burden our sons and daughters will have to pay so that we might have more disposable income today.
America, truly, we have mortgaged our future for pleasure, convenience and comfort today. Okay? So, what are we to do about it?
There are remedies that we teachers talked about last week, but only if adults are willing to model good behavior. We need to pull ourselves away from the television and start reading more. In their very popular book, “Freakonomics,” authors and economists Steven D. Levitt and Stephan J. Dubner point out that among the factors that are most strongly correlated with students’ having high test scores in school are whether there are many books in the home. Sure, the most important factor listed is whether the student has highly educated parents who are socially and econom- ically well-off. But nowhere on the list did I see that large collec- tions of DVDs, video games and satellite TV in the home are contributing factors.
Next, I think, we need to start weaning ourselves from credit card debt and taking more interest in people than in things. We need to get back to the way things were before bankruptcy was just a pay day away for many. And we need to find a way to spend more quality time with our kids during their formative years, whatever the cost. These are challenges for economist in each of us to solve.
On a national level, we need to allocate more of our nation’s resources to investments in human capital, public health, infra- structure, and technologies for the future, spending less on current consumption. We need to make conservation a priority again, before the environment becomes unfit for humans and other living things, and we need to restore fairness and equity in our tax code for what used to be a large middle class. Too few these days are reaping too much for doing too little – capitalism has run amok!
We are not all stock owners, but we are all stock holders. This is because high profits today, without a vision for tomorrow, will translate into disaster for us all. Rather than waging wars to ensure the continued flow of oil from the rest of the world, we need to be about the business of developing energy alternatives here at home. The oil’s going to run out sooner or later anyway, and just because we have the biggest appetite for it doesn’t mean that we are entitled to the largest share. This needs to be a national priority, coming to grips with this part of America’s entitlement epidemic, and we need to make sure that our next leaders, at both state- and national levels, are people who understand this.
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“You put your left foot in, you take your left foot out, you put your left foot in and you shake it all about. You do the hokey-pokey and you turn yourself around. That’s what it’s all about.”
Larry LaPrise, Charles Macak and Tafit Baker
DESOTO, TEXAS, JULY 14, 2007 — A small group of like-thinking adults got up early on this Saturday morning to met at a commun- ity coffeehouse. They met to dialogue on the opening chapters of Al Gore’s new book, “The Assault on Reason.” Yours truly found out about it and was invited to attend because an existing member had visited my blog and liked what she found here. When she told me this and invited me to attend, I was flattered so of course I showed up. And, yes, I am glad that I did; I met some very nice people and we had a good time. But we only danced to the one stanza of the Hokey-Pokey song, the “left-foot” stanza. After awhile, the discussion started sounding like echoes in a nearly-empty convention hall. We had no real dialogue because nobody said anything that the rest of us couldn’t readily agree with — sort of like the so-called political debates we’ve been watching on TV lately between contenders for nomination by the same party.
For those of you who are not old enough to remember the rest of the Hokey-Pokey song, it continues with putting right feet in –taking right feet out, etc., etc. According to Wikipedia.org, it became popular in the USA in the 1950s after being created as a novelty dance to entertain ski crowds at Idaho’s Sun Valley resort. But true authorship for the song and dance is something of a mystery because a similar dance was wildly popular with American servicemen and Britons during WWII, only then it was called the “Hokey-Cokey,” a derivative of “hocus pocus” perhaps, the traditional magician’s incantation. Ah well… if you’re interested, you can find out more about the possible origins of the dance by reading the sited Wikipedia page. The point I’m trying to make is this: Discussion among people who can find little or no room for disagreement is not dialogue.
As our “discussion” was winding down, I made the above point and asked if, as a group, we wanted to do more than just discuss the merits of a book we all feel compelled to read because it reinforces our already-held convictions about what is right and what is wrong with our country. There was general agreement that we should expand our number to include persons with other political leanings, Independents and Conservatives too. So we all tried to think of people we knew who are not in our own camp or on the fringes that might want to join us. We all drew a blank — “Probably a birds-of-a-feather thing,” I thought.
In response to the above thought, I drew an analogy for the group to consider, for what it’s worth: birds do not fly with one wing. Even if it were possible for a bird to stay aloft very long with only one wing, whether left or right, it could not fly other than in circles. And in doing so, any real progress would be illusionary. Perhaps this is at least part of what’s wrong with our so-called democracy today; we’ve become so polarized by the arguments of the far-left and the far-right that we don’t want to even do the whole hokey-pokey dance anymore. Most of us sit out the dance altogether.
If you live in the south-Dallas area, do not think of yourself as leaning to the left in terms of political persuasion, and have some time on your hands next Saturday morning, perhaps you’d like to join us. We’d love to listen to what you have to say, and we won’t even insist that you read Al Gore’s book before showing up. Post a comment to volunteer and I’ll be sure to get back to you on the time and place.
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The LORD is my light and my salvation; whom shall I fear? the LORD is the strength of my life; of whom shall I be afraid?
Psalm of David: 27:1
July 12, 2007 — There’s no getting around it, we are living in scary times. The signs are all around us.We are exposed nightly to reports from Iraq and Afghanistan telling of roadside bombings and ever-increasing numbers of both American GIs and civilians being killed. Some want the killing to end, to bring our troops home, but the White House and a shrinking number of Republicans in Congress are saying that if we leave Iraq now, the terrorists will just step up their activities here on American soil.
Hmmmm…
Just last week our British allies were attacked in two separate incidents, one luckily failed altogether, the other caused minimal damage and injury. But, of course, it could have been much worse. Now, while evening news programs are showing us how easy it would be for terrorists to make “dirty” bombs in this country, we’re being told that the administration’s head of Homeland Security has a “gut feeling” that we’re about to be hit again this summer by al Qaeda.
Hmmmm…
On another front, scientists are telling us that our way of life is poisoning the earth’s atmosphere, which in turn, is causing global temperatures to rise, which in turn is causing glaciers, sea ice and continental ice sheets to melt, which in turn will soon flood the earth’s heavily populated coastal areas. Tropical storms will be more severe we’re being told, and the great rivers of the world that sustain agriculture supporting billions of people with food will cease to flow.The White House, of course, denies this.
Hmmmm…
On the other hand, we’re being told that our economy is strong and growing at an impressive rate with low unemployment owing to the President’s tax cuts in 2002. Americans shouldn’t worry.Why, just the other night, ABC News reported (without comment) that the White House is predicting the federal budget deficit to narrow to just $205 billion in the current fiscal year, the smallest shortfall since 2002.The claim is that this is due to an unexpected increase in tax revenues. The Democratically-controlled Congress, however, says that this improvement in tax revenues, at best, is only temporary and that only by raising taxes on the wealthiest of Americans can the gap be closed by 2012 with the government meeting it’s constitutional obligations to the people.
Hmmmm…
Meanwhile, Americans I know are pretty much going about their daily lives, discounting most of the claims and counter claims of doom, failure and disaster.While everybody knows somebody who’s been laid off recently and can’t find work at a commensurate level of compensation, we keep plugging along as if nothing was wrong.We drive by the increasing number of homes in our neighborhoods with for-sale signs on them and think, “Boy, I’m glad I don’t have to move just now.” We’ve become anesthetized to the violence we see and skeptical of the promises and assur- ances from our elected leaders.In short, we’ve lost confidence but are in denial about it.
“Oh well,” we think, “what difference can I make?”
Hmmmm…
Most of the people I talk to say that they don’t trust politicians in general anymore, regardless of which political party they represent.But, should we be afraid?
Hmmmm…
Franklin Delano Roosevelt, during the height of the Great Depression, told Americans, “We have nothing to fear but fear itself.” As Christians, true Christians, we have nothing to fear but God Himself. But personally, whether we are Christian or not, I think that a little fear can be a healthy thing — that is, if it isn’t unreasonable fear.
“Okay,” you say.“But what fear is unreasonable?”
Hmmmm…
Fear that is based on misinformation and deception is unreason- able fear.Fear that is generated by media pundits based on unsubstantiated claims is unreasonable fear.Fear of the unknown and fear that is fed by emotion alone is unreasonable fear.So, maybe it’s time for us to start digging for some facts on our own.Maybe it’s time for us to start listening to people who have no agenda to advance, people who are neither in government nor in business.And just who might these people be?Certainly not the FDA, the NRC, FCC, the FAA, or the CIA. They all work for the same guy now, not us.
How about journalists?Maybe, but which journalists?There are all kinds now you know, some lean to the left, some lean to the right. And some are now being paid to tell stories the way that others want them told.How about the associations – the AARP, the NAACP, the Sierra Club, the NRA? Nah… they all support special interest groups.
Hmmmm…
Who then? Oh, I know!How about the retired military generals who spoke out against going to war in Iraq?How about the fired judges?We haven’t heard from them yet.How about the past Surgeons General of this and previous administrations and the agency analysts who tried to convince President Bush that Iraq had nothing to do with 9-11?How about the scientists and other academics whose salaries are not paid by the administration, by political action groups, or by industry?
If the data collected and stored by the Bureau of Labor Statistics are not yet completely skewed by the current administration to substantiate government claims, there are plenty of graduate economists out there who can give us unbiased assessments of where we really are economically and where we are likely headed.
No, Americans should not be living in fear. Living in fear consumes us in fear, which paralyzes us into inaction. But, neither should we not be afraid. All the signs suggest that we should be… reasonably afraid. Not of “whom,” but of “what.”
Bad as it was, 9-11 did not defeat us, nor will the next attack. America will survive attacks from without. What we should fear are attacks from within. We should be afraid of too much wealth and too much power concentrated in the hands of too few. We should be afraid of our own complacencies, our own ignorances, our own dogmas (the President refers to these as principles).We should be afraid of falling intellectual prey to other’s convictions and opinions, and afraid too of giving up too much of that which made us who we were.These are not unreasonable fears.
When there is controversy, be open to hearing arguments from all sides because all sides have something to say. Do your civic duty when you’re called upon to serve, and your job to the best of your ability. And, according to your faith persuasion and traditions — pray. This may not reduce the dangers that we face, but it will reduce the fears that we feel.
Yes, you can make a difference. You can help restore democracy to America, but not unless you vote.
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For filing away in your For-What-It’s-Worth department, I recently received an email from someone who had either been directly invited to read my recent posting, “How Dare You, Mr. President,” or had come across it while surfing the net. He chose for some reason not to publish his comment for all to read, which was, “Clinton had oral sex in the White House. What a saint he was.”
I politely responded with a thank-you for this person’s message. In my response I said, “I hope that is an indication of your willingness to dialogue. I hope to hear back from you on this and that you will continue accepting the invitations that I send out to visit my blog.”
I’ve yet to hear back from this person and doubt now that I ever will. Oh well… The rest of my response was as follows:
Democracy in America, I believe, suffers by a polarization of political ideologies and a voting public that is unwilling to discuss their beliefs and opinions with those in the opposite camp. We, all of us, tend to listen only to those who reinforce our already-held persuasions and beliefs. So, over time, our reasoning becomes clouded. Overcoming this, if only in a small way, is the purpose of The World According to Opa. So, please consider posting future comments to my blog so that others might be able to respond as well.
Yes, Bill Clinton did this… “bad thing.” He has since acknowledged it. And though many Americans can find it in their hearts to forgive him (his wife certainly seems to have gotten over it — albeit perhaps for political reasons), many of us like yourself have not been able to. That, I think, is unfortunate. Regardless, I don’t quite understand how you think that it is relevant — how it ameliorates in any way what President Bush may or may not have done while he has been in the White House (a whole new subject of a future posting perhaps).
Remember, Clinton was not impeached by Congress for his extra-marital affair. He was impeached because there was a sufficient number of Representatives and Senators in the Congress at that time who wanted him embarrassed and discredited. He was impeached for partisan reasons. His crime was not adultery, which is not necessarily the same thing as a sin. His crime was lying about it under oath. This, though serious in my book, was not judged by the Congress to be serious enough to put him on trial. The original act, and the lie that followed, did not jeopardize national security, did not put any soldiers in harm’s way, did not cost the taxpayers any money (though it did distract Congress from the business they should have been tending to, and whose fault was that?), did not contribute to the National Debt, did not damage the environment, and did not break any international treaties. It did, however, destroy the reputation of a lovely, very bright young lady who, prior to the media coverage that ensued, nobody had ever heard of, and, since, nobody will ever be able to forget. This, I believe, was the Cardinal sin. And this sin was not Bill Clinton’s.
Recall the words of Jesus according to John 8:7 (NCV), “Anyone here who has never sinned can cast the first stone at her.” The message in this for me is that we are all human, therefore we are all sinners.
There was a time in America when, what went on in the White House stayed in the White House. Would that we could return to that time.
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After watching the video of Keith Olbermann’s July 3d call for both the President and Vice President of the United States to resign (I did not catch the original broadcast on MS-NBC) the title for this post immediately came to mind. It was inspired by dialogue in Tom Clancy’s book and movie, “Clear and Present Danger.” The danger that I see as being clear and present is not so much from some foreign adversary, certainly not from Iraq or even from al Qaeda, but from within our own democracy, a democracy that has atrophied from years of neglect by it’s own citzens.
The Founding Fathers would be truly saddened to see that we have come so far only to loose our way. You’ll fully understand what this means after reading Al Gore’s new book, “The Assault on Reason.”
You may not like what Mr. Olbermann had to say last Tuesday evening. But, after watching the video for yourself, you will almost certainly agree with me that it was journalism the likes of which we have not known since Edward R. Murrow took on Senator Joseph McCarthy on the CBS television news program, See It Now.
(click the run button twice, once to activate and once to view)
“We have met the enemy and he is us.”
(Pogo)
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There has been much talk in Congress and from the White House lately about our overdependence on foreign oil. The President himself has said that we are addicted to it. Well, in the upcoming general elections, I hope that my readers, and all American voters, will consider candidates of both parties as well as Independents who plan to do more than just talk about it. Thus, the topic of this posting — recognizing the problem for what it really is, greed, and resolving to do something about it.
Sometimes people choose to respond to my blog postings off-line, and that’s alright. I understand how some might not want to go world-wide with their views. I had several contrary responses to my recent article on Big Oil, how I believe that they are an oligopoly in the U.S. Great! That’s what The World According to Opa is for — the free excange of ideas, call it part of the great market place of ideas. But all of the contrarian comments I’ve receive have been private. Interesting — I must be doing something wrong.
What follows, fully protecting the confidence of a fellow thinker, is based on my private response to his off-line comments.
In a private email, my fellow thinker said that he thought the Federal Government is the true monopoly, not Big Oil… hmmm. This probably means that he’s a Republican. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, most of my friends here in Texas are — Republicans that is — used to be one myself.
Texas, you know, actually collects more than the Federal government does in gasoline taxes: 20 cents per gallon, whereas the federal government takes 18.4 cents. Notice that these are a flat rates, not percentages. They are rates that haven’t changed for years (1997 for the federal tax) despite the recent increase in prices. Further, the oil companies don’t pay these taxes, consumers do. Since the demand of gasoline and other fuels is very inelastic, the effect of taxes on these products minimally effect how much we buy of them.
Sort term supply in response to a new or increased tax will shift leftward, but it usually doesn’t take long for supply to recover so as to meet demand at a new equalibrium price. Also, governments don’t profit from the taxes, which we more liberal thinkers consider to be user fees rather than true taxes. This is because much of this money is hypothecated (dedicated) to transportation. All but one cent per gallon of federal gas tax is dedicated to highways and mass transit, infrastructure without which there would be little market for oil companies’ products. Neither are gas taxes a factor in figuring corporate profits, as my fellow thinker suggested in his comment. This is because they really aren’t part of their costs of doing business.
My fellow thinker said that he didn’t begrudge Exxon Mobil from making a profit, and I responded that I don’t either. I don’t begrudge any business from making a profit; that’s what we do in a free market economy. And Exxon Mobil’s reported profit of 10.6 percent for 2006 is low compared to other large corportations like Microsoft, WalMart and Starbucks. But, I said, remember that profit is the difference between accounting cost and total revenue, so it’s whatever a company says it is. Lots of things can be counted as accounting costs. Factor-in how much Exxon Mobil paid out to shareholders last year, to foreign governments for exploration and drilling rights, to corporate executives and to political action groups, and I would have to conclude that their accountants do a better job than most in “cooking the books.” Less civic-minded corporations, I learned obtaining my MBA, sometimes do this so as to minimize corporate taxes.
My fellow thinker pointed out that there have been no new refineries built in years, and he was quite right. But, as I pointed out, if they are to be built, oil companies will have to have an economic incentive to do so. I agreed with my fellow thinker that there is plenty of oil, but only in the near term “pipeline”. I’m not comfortable with projections made by some that there’s not a problem with future supplies. True, we have not yet found all of Mother Nature’s oil, but no new discoveries are easy-to-get-at oil. Which means that the cost of future discovery and recovery can only go up, and all these costs will be passed on to consumers.
Petroleum reserves are limited. Petroleum is not a renewable resource and production cannot continue to increase indefinitely. A day of reckoning will come sometime in the future. When? Ah, that’s the question. But the point at which production can no longer keep up with an increasing demand will mean a radical and painful readjustment globally.
According to a U.S. Geological Survey Report, as of 1996, OPEC’s proven and undiscovered reserves amounted to about 853 billion barrels, while similar non-OPEC reserves were 769 billion barrels. I doubt that this ratio has changed much since then. So, based on actual production patterns in many non-OPEC oil producing countries, output can increase until there remains between 10 and 20 years of proven plus undiscovered reserves. At this point, depending on the reserve growth that is actually available, a production plateau or decline will set in. Now, given that non-OPEC production rates are nearly twice as great as OPEC rates, and assuming stable prices and a modest 2 percent per year market growth, non-OPEC production has been projected to reach a maximum sometime between 2010 and 2018 based on resource limitations alone (assuming complete cooperation of producers and that all undiscovered oil is actually found and produced as rapidly as needed). Once this happens, OPEC will control the market completely, and it is unlikely that production will increase much after that to meet the growing demand which, as my fellow thinker pointed out, includes the counties of India, China, and Russia.
My fellow thinker suggested the following Free Market remedies:
Buiding new refinineries in the US and refining permian sweet crude rather than Saudia sour crude.
Going to one formulation.
Expanding exploration off shore and in Alaska.
Keeping on the offensive in the war on terror so as to prevent others’ control of the world market.
Expanding alternative fuel research.
I agree with all of these ideas. However, only the last, expanding alternative fuel research, has great potential in the long term. But this is something Exxon Mobil and the other majors have declined to get invloved in. So, who do we suppose is going to do it, three or four smart guys in a backyard garage workshop? Maybe so. But if and when they do, lets hope that Big Oil doesn’t “make ’em an offer they can’t refuse” before they get their ideas to market — as in the mythical 150-mile-per-gallon carbeurator.
CLICK THE CARTOON ABOVE TO SEE SOME GREAT ENERGY INNOVATION IDEAS, then please hit your browser’s return arrow to finish reading this article.
Since industry is disinclined to develop any serious alternatives for their products, which are currently very profitable, I modestly suggest that government is going to have to play a much bigger role, and pretty darned quick. Alhough my fellow thinker will vehemently disagree, as well as my Libertarian son who thinks I’m nuts, perhaps raising taxes should be considered as a way to reduce consumption and help pay for the needed research on alternatives.
Actually, I consider myself to more moderate politically than this idea suggests. But these are critical and dangerours times for America — indeed, for mankind. We must not be limited in our response by ideology, not if we are to survive.
I’ll be interested in reading your comments on this.
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It boggles my mind — why anyone would oppose a reasonable, bipartisan state bill that would protect kids from unnecessarily high levels of noxious diesel fuel pollution generated by idling school buses, and do it at a net cost savings for school districts and taxpayers.
That’s the question Environmental Defense is asking Texas Governor Rick Perry in the wake of his outrageous veto of HB 3457. Click here to read his lame excuse for it. Hmmm, could the real reason be that a major campaign reelection contributor has him on a short leash?
With crude oil supplies at an all time high, why are many refineries in America sitting idle long after the normal spring maintenance period? Could this be an indicator of price manipulation by the major oil companies doing business in our country?
When I heard on NPR while driving home yesterday that oil supplies are at an all time high in America, it seemed inconsistent with the Laws of Supply and Demand — prices for gasoline being so high. Then the commentator said that a large number of refineries are still shut down long after the usual spring maintenance closings. Ah ha! Now it made sense to me. Reacting to projections about Americans planning shorter vacations closer to home this summer, or not traveling at all, oil companies are limiting production to sustain prices at artificially high levels. Is this price fixing, or is it just smart business? I believe that it’s the former and, in a free market econ- omy like we’re suppose to have in this country, it shouldn’t happen (recent Houston Chronical business article on gasoline prices).
As a teacher of World Geography for the past five years, and now Economics, I tell my high school students that it’s impossible to separate government from economics even though they are taught as separate subjects. This is because the state of our economy is a major concern for voters, even if they don’t understand it; they feel the consequences of its ups and downs. Accordingly, the politicians who run things in Washington want to keep things on an even keel. Better yet, they want to be able to claim credit for measures taken to stabilize the economy when it’s their time to get re-elected. Even better, they want to be able to claim credit for improving the economy.
Things like our current trade deficit, inflation, interest rates, the value and supply of the dollar compared to foreign currencies, the unem- ployment rate, government spending, and consumer confidence, all of these are vital aspects of our nation’s economic health.But Politians don’t always listen to the economists that they hire to analyze trends and forecast the results of fiscal and monetary policies.Case in point — the1999 merger of the Exxon and Mobil oil companies.
Claiming that the merger would enhance our nation’s ability to effectively compete in a volatile industry and an increasingly competitive world economy, the chairmen and chief executive officers of Exxon and Mobil signed an agreement to merge and form a new company called Exxon Mobil Corporation. This occurred after months and months of negotiations to obtain shareholder, U.S., and international regulatory approvals. Today this corporation is the largest publicly-held company in the world, both in terms of proven oil and gas reserves and revenue produced.Although the largest among corporate oil producers, it’s still eclipsed by several foreign, state-owned petroleum producers.
You can learn all you might want to know about Exxon Mobile, as I did, from http://www.exxonmobil.com/corporate/, the corporation’s own website, and from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exxon_Mobil. The Wikipedia address is particularly revealing in details about Exxon Mobil’s foreign business practices, it’s human rights contro- versies, it’s record of contributions to Republican Party candidates and organizations critical of climate change science, and it’s slow response to the Valdez oil spill disaster of 1989. What I have not been able to find, although I’m sure the information is out there somewhere, is what share of the U.S. energy market Exxon Mobil controls.So, suffice for now to hazard a guess… forty percent maybe?
In my book, when a company gets the size of Exxon Mobil it has too much power, economic power to influence prices and supplies for critical resources, and political power in terms of its ability to influence government decision makers through political contributions and political action groups (PACs).Exxon Mobil isn’t a monopoly, which is defined as a single supplier of a good or service.But, big as it is, it does have the power to easily form a cartel or oligopoly with the remaining number of smaller suppliers. When this happens, the group can control supply to maximize profit for all of its members, which is easy enough to do when the product or service has a relatively inelastic demand such as gasoline and fuel oils.Without getting into a lesson on economics here, elasticity has to do with demand or supply responsiveness to changes in price.
“But wait a minute,” you say, “what about the Sherman Antitrust Act?Doesn’t that prevent companies in America from growing too big and having too much control over things?” The answer is — yes and no.It does give the government the power to prevent trusts, which, by one definition, are agreements between large companies that limit free trade.Government has the power to prevent mergers, but the law does not compel the government to restrict trusts or other- wise prevent companies from merging to form larger and larger companies. Government does what government wants to do, even in America, or so it seems latelyLearn more about this at Wikipedia.com.
Mulling all this over after hearing the NPR news report, I began to wonder at the logic of allowing Exxon and Mobil to merge. So I decided to discuss this with an economics professor friend of mine, Dr. Christopher Wreh. Knowing that the U.S. Department of Justice rules on merger requests like this one, I asked Dr. Wreh what model economists working for the government use to determine whether large companies should be allowed to merge. The answer was the Herfindahl index, also known as Herfindahl-Hirschman Index or HHI.It’s a measure of the size of firms in relationship to the industry and an indicator of the amount of competition among them. It is an economic concept but one that is widely applied in competition law and antitrust. Here’s the formula:
It works like this… the higher the HHI, the closer a market is to being a monopoly (the higher the market’s concentration and the lower its competition). If, for example, there were only one firm in an industry, that firm would have 100% market share, and the HHI would equal 10,000 It is calculated by squaring the market share of each firm competing in a market, and then summing the resulting numbers. The HHI number can range from close to zero to 10,000.
Typically, the U.S. Department of Justice considers a market with a result of less than 1,000 to be a competitive marketplace; a result of 1,000-1,800 to be a moderately concentrated marketplace; and a result of 1,800 or greater to be a highly concentrated marketplace. As a general rule, mergers that increase the HHI by more than 100 points in concentrated markets raise antitrust concerns.
If I had the market share information from back in 1998/99, I think I could plug-in the numbers and see whether, at that time, it made economic sense for Exxon and Mobil to merge, but I don’t need to do the research.Dr. Wher has already done it.As a doctorial candidate at Utah State University at the time, the issue challenged him to do the study.The number he said he came up with, after checking the result many times, was 2300.In other words, the HHI for a combined Exxon Mobile corporation was nearly twice what the Justice Department would normally approve for merger requests.
So, what have I learned from all this?I’ve learned that economic decisions, whether they turn out to be right or wrong, always need to make sense and they always need to be based on some rational relationship of factual data.Political decisions? Well, maybe they don’t need to make sense at all.I’ve also learned that busi- nesses listen to their economists even if government doesn’t, and that maybe the checks and balances that we learned about in high school don’t work as well today as our Founders intended.
The U.S. Senate is currently considering the Ten-in-Ten Fuel Economy Bill (S-357), which includes a provision to preclude Big Oil from “price gouging.” This Bill would require U.S. auto makers to improve fuel economy by an average of ten miles per gallon across model types over ten years, thus reducing our dependency on foreign oil along with greenhouse gas emissions. But of course, we can expect Big Oil to lobby furiously against the passage of this Bill in it’s present form. Learn more about this Bill here.
Do us all a favor, contact your congressional representatives to express support for this Bill, and make certain to mention how important the provision against price gouging is. It could one day lead to breaking up this mega-corporation and the cartel that they seem to be leading. This, I believe, would help to restore democracy and free enterprise in America. Who represents Me?
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The War in Iraq has become the Grand Old Party’s “Achilles heel”. But there’s still a year and a half left for 2008 presidential campaigns. So maybe there’s enough time for things there to turn around. Republican Party hopefuls all must certainly hope so.
I am heartened by the news that there is more consensus among voting-aged Americans today on what the issues are and, I suspect, on what should be done about them than at anytime in recent history. Now, if only our representatives in the Congress would do their job’s and represent us…
The Gallop Organization recently conducted a poll to determine which party we most trust to handle today’s issues (click here to read the entire report). At first glance, the results appear divided with nearly equal percentages (about one-third each) saying that they trust either the Republican Party or the Democratic Party, and about one-quarter saying that their trust in the parties varies by issue. However, when the swing group is pushed to name a preference, the Democrats come out with a considerable advantage — 48% to 39%.
Overwhelmingly, the number one issue is the war in Iraq. No surprise there, right? The biggest disparity in concerns expressed between Democrats and Republicans is still the old “Beans vs. Bullets” issue — Healthcare/Insurance vs. Homeland Security/ Defense. But the wedge issues that have divided Americans right down the middle for so long, abortion, gun control, taxes, and Christian values (AKA, gay rights), promise to be less divisive in 2008.
When independents’ concerns about healthcare/insurance are combined with Democrates’ concern about this, and independ- ents’ concerns about homeland security/defense are combined with that of Republicans, the beans only slightly edge out the bullets. But, with the release of Michael Moore’s new movie, “Sicko” (click here to read about this movie), this month and Democratic candidates highlighting their healthcare/ insurance proposals, I look for this to become the second most important issue on Americans’ minds as they go to the polls.
The most important issues by party affiliation are as follows (note, the percentages add to more than 100% due to multiple answers):
Most Important Issues to Vote on in 2008 Results by Party Affiliation April 13-15, 2007
Reps.
Inds.
Dems.
%
%
%
War issues in Iraq
31
44
51
The economy
12
16
12
Healthcare/health insurance
4
12
14
Homeland security/military defense
15
6
1
Education
6
4
7
Illegal immigration
8
4
4
Honesty/integrity/credibility of candidate
6
6
3
International/foreign affairs
5
3
4
Taxes
3
6
2
Among those who say that Iraq will be the most important issue in deciding for whom to vote in next year’s presidential election, just about half (49%) say they trust the Democrats on all issues, while just 20% trust the Republicans, and 24% have mixed views.
The war in Iraq is the dominant issue for Republicans, Democrats and independents. But Democrats, according to the Gallop report, mention the war much more frequently. Roughly half of Democrats polled, 51%, say that the war in Iraq will be the most important issue that they will take into account when deciding for whom to vote in next year’s presidential election. This compares to 31% of Republicans and 44% of independents saying the same thing.
I think it is well worth noting that Democrats (14%) mention healthcare issues more often than Republicans (4%), while Republicans (15%) are more likely than Democrats (1%) to mention homeland security. Taxes, the big issue in the 2002 election that won the White House for Bush et. al., was near the bottom of the list while, most surprising to me, concern for the environment was even farther down.
Results of the poll are based on telephone interviews with 1,007 national adults, aged 18 and older, conducted on April 13-15, 2007. For results based on the total sample of national adults, Gallop says that they are 95% confident that the maximum margin of sampling error is within 3 percentage points.
To post a comment, click on the tiny COMMENTS word below, else,click the more below for an aggregate listing of all concerns expressed by those polled.
I have added a new book to my summer reading list: “Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me)” by Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson. The book sheds light on a question that I’ve had for some time — namely, why some of the most intelligent people I know absolutely refuse to budge or even admit that they might be wrong when they are confronted with new data.
Love him or hate him, one simply must give Al Gore his due. He has raised the level of concern over global warming in this country to dizzying heights and has gained the adulation of many who never before considered themselves to be environmentalists. No, Al Gore is not the subject of this posting, human nature is. How- ever, one of my favorite quotes from Gore’s book and DVD, An Inconvenient Truth, speaks to human nature and to the biases in thinking that seem to be built into the way that we all tend to process information. The quote I like so much is this: “It’s not what we don’t know that gets us in trouble. It’s what we know for sure that just ain’t so.”
Based on recent neurological research cited in the “Mistakes Were Made” book, it seems that we’re all hard-wired to resist questioning our initial logic. This may explain why I have been known to drive on for miles, ignoring all the clues telling me that I’m headed the wrong direction. This may also help to explain why our President refuses to accept reality with respect to our prospects for a military solution to the violence ongoing in Iraq and why he ignored the advice of so much expert opinion on likely outcomes before starting this war (see my earlier posting on this, Iraq — an al Qaeda Tar Baby for Us). Al Gore didn’t originate the earlier quote, by the way. Mark Twain, did, proving that Twain, not Gore necessarily, was a man way ahead of his time in terms of under- standing human nature.
The following is an excerpt from the Tavris and Aronson book: “In a study of people who were being monitored by magnetic resonance imaging while they were trying to process dissonant or consonant information about George Bush or Jon Kerry, researchers found that the reasoning areas of the brain virtually shut down when participants were confronted with dissonant information. The emotion circuits of the brain lit up happily when consonance was restored.” This, the authors say in their book, was true regardless of the participants’ political affiliation.
Some time back I actually bought several copies of the Inconvenient Truth DVD and gave them to friends and family members who had sided with the prevailing conservative view on the global warming issue in conversations with me. Obviously I am strongly in favor of taking steps to curb human causes for global warming. One of my friends actually asked, handing the DVD back to me, “Why would I want to watch this?” Yes, this person is still my friend, but I was dumbfounded by his question. Why would he not want to try to understand something that is so important to me? Interesting. Turns out that his question was totally consistent with what the Tavris and Aronson authors say in their book. They report that researchers have discovered that when we read information that goes against our point of view, it can actually make us all the more convinced that we were right in the first place.
Being right, it seems, is not so important to us as not being proven wrong. So there’s a neurological basis for the old saying, “Don’t confuse me with the facts, my mind’s already made up.”
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Appealing to a broader base of believing Americans, Clinton, Obama and Edwards all say that God and religion are important in their individual lives. They also say that their faith will serve to guide their performance as President should they be elected.
Reported on ABC’s morning news program today and published on-line in more detail by the Washington Post, the three leading Democratic presidential candidates talked about how faith influences both their politics and their personal lives. Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton responded to a question about her husband’s infidelity by saying, “I’m not sure I would have gotten through it without my faith.” She also said to a crowd of more than a 1,000 attending the forum at George Washington University, “I’ve had a grounding in faith that gave me the courage and the strength to do what I thought was right, regardless of what the world thought.”
The forum was organized by Sojourners, a liberal evangelical group based in Washington, D.C. Each candidate stood on stage separately for 15 minutes to answer questions posed by a group of ministers and religious leaders and from the forum’s moderator, Soledad O’Brien of CNN.
None of the candidates, according to the Washington Post, offered answers that strayed far from Democratic Party orthodoxy, but their frankness in talking about their faith was unusual. Recall how during the 2004 presidential election, Democratic candidates steered clear of the subject altogether with John Kerry saying only that he was not one to wear his religion on his sleeve.
Former Senator John Edwards and Clinton both said that they pray daily with Edwards adding that prayer helped him handle the death of his 16-year-old son, Wade in 1996, and most recently the diagnosis of a recurrence of breast cancer in his wife, Elizabeth.
The candidates all responded to different questions, and Sen. Barack Obama, who of the three has been most outspoken about his faith in recent campaign appearances, said the least about his religion in this forum. He instead discussed his belief that evil exists in the world and that there is a moral element to his view that pay for corporate chief executives has become excessive and that more should be done to rehabilitate lawbreakers who are caught, tried and sent to prison. He repeatedly invoked the Biblical phrase, “I am my brother’s keeper.”
Since religion and politics seem now and forevermore to be inseparable, I am personally glad that the topic has finally been expanded on the national stage beyond the two hinge issues of abortion and gay marriage. After all, whether we are Christian, Jew, Muslim, or Buddhist, we can agree or disagree on these issues. But can we not all agree that democratic governments have an obligation to be morally consistent with all of their citizens, as well as the rest of the world?
Yesterday’s forum, according to the Washington Post, underscored an unusual turn of events in this presidential campaign. This time around, the Democratic candidates are more eager to discuss religion and their personal beliefs than the Republican front-runners are. On the Republican side, former New York mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani and Sen. John McCain (Ariz.) rarely discuss their faith publicly, while former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney‘s Mormonism makes many religious conservatives uneasy.
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I have been a teacher of World Geography for high school freshmen in Texas for the past five years. I will begin teaching a new subject next year to seniors in the same independent school district — Economics and AP Macroeconomics. Accordingly, I will have an opportunity to be teacher again for many of my former students, this time focusing on a subject that’s a logical extension of the former. I’m excited about this and looking forward to the beginning of the new school year.
The World According to Opa 
