Science Deniers

Economics is a science, right? A dismal one, but a science all the same?

Related: An article in the Washington Post today discusses the need for a better sense of mathematics among Americans, to lead to a less stupid politics. Of course they want to stat with vaccines, because they want to get buy-in from their readers who largely agree that only dumb people resist vaccines; but then they move to Federal spending. 
Last year [the Federal Government] spent $6.6 trillion. How much is that? Well, if you spent a dollar a second, you would finally spend $6.6 trillion by about 6 p.m. (as of writing) on April 30. Of the year 112,932. (It will be Wednesday, presuming the heat death of the universe has not yet occurred.)
Somehow this ends up being a justification for spending even more money, because we already spend so much that the 'much more' isn't so much by comparison. 

1 comment:

Texan99 said...

Whereas the real message is that we need to slow the government's spending down to a rate of a dollar a second.