In their piece titled A Responsible Budget, the NYT totally buys into the Democratic narrative of how the world works and what the Federal government’s priorities should be. Even as it runs up an unprecedented fourth year in a row with a $1T+ deficit, they do not question a single thing, except to assert that Obama was too soft on defense and could have found more than a measely $5b in cuts.

As is common in liberal analysis (even analysis of budgets), they use very few numbers or charts. In this case, their write-up contains a grand total of 4 numbers (dollar amounts, percentages, dates, etc.) and no charts at all. You’d think that commenting on such a numerically-driven document would require greater use of figures, but why get bogged down with objective reality? The NYT keeps their focus squarely on the liberal plotline.

Not surprisingly, the WSJ has a completely different take in their piece titled The Amazing Obama Budget. Not surprisingly, they don’t like much of anything about it – and offer solid reasons why. I agree with most of them.

Being more rigorous and quantitatively grounded, they use about 38 numbers in their write-up (dollar amounts and percentages) while citing a dozen or more dates as a basis of comparing this current budget with prior ones. They also include two charts with time-series data going back to 2000 (shown below). They use these numbers to explain to their readers what the budget actually does — what an old-fashioned idea.

I find this difference in the use of numbers striking. I see it over and over again when comparing commentary from left and right. My conclusion: Democrats are drawn to abstract narrative like moths to light and they think that numbers are for a**holes. Republicans are drawn to more rigorous analysis and believe numbers are crucial to comprehension.

This difference is one of the main reasons Republicans and Democrats cannot communicate easily, let alone formulate ‘compromises’. It’s like the idea behind the ‘Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus’ book: the two sides are speaking a different language borne of differences in perception and belief.

I think one big difference there was that a clearer economic argument was made to justify the shift – it was understood by most everyone, including business people, that a tremendous amount of money from private insurance plans was already being funneled off to pay for uninsured residents.

A second big difference was that the focus was on covering the relatively small percentage of the population that was not covered – I seem to recall it was 8% uncovered. Since MA had fairly extremely high coverage rates already, this seemed fairly achievable.

A related third point is that little was said about the coverage offered by private insurers to the 92% of people who had existing coverage. Maybe there are some basic rules about what should be in private policies, but I don’t believe there was any significant mandating of coverage requirements – that’s not something I saw or read about. The more I learn about ObamaCare, the more I see that it will dramatically reshape private policies – hence the controversy now roiling the Catholic Church. I don’t recall anything like that happening in MA about contraception or anything else.

Another big factor is that the MA constitution allows for the state to mandate costs to its residents and the state had already implemented such mandates before. For example, for as long as I can remember everyone with a car has had to carry auto insurance. This meant that creating an additional obligation for health care insurance was not so ground breaking as at the Federal level where it is unprecedented and of questionable legality (we’ll see what the Supreme Court rules on that in the spring).

Of course, it didn’t hurt any that the state is dominated by Democrats.

My own main concern at the time was that the law did not address another key issue: health care costs. At the time and by design, this was put off for a later date. Everyone who was paying attention understood this: coverage now, cost control later.  For myself, I was personally ok with this and I appreciated that it was explicitly discussed and recognized as being both very important and very difficult. The idea of breaking the problem down into component pieces sounded sensible.

One thing I have hugely disliked about ObamaCare is that it conflates coverage and cost. The coverage piece is arguably relatively easy, but the much harder and less well understood part is the cost control. To bind them together on the scale that ObamaCare did, all we could do was say a prayer and hope a cost control solution became apparent.

Then they went even further than this to mandate coverage standards not just for the new people they were going to insure, but for everyone. I did not appreciate the significance of this part until recently as a result of the Catholic Church brouhaha. Now I realize that they intend to reshape all policies – public and private – to meet some set of standards they are defining as they go. To my knowledge, MA law did nothing like this.

At the time when the ObamaCare bill was still in draft form, I read thru the entire thing (or very large parts of it) and was amazed that everywhere it talked about cost control, it was all pure speculation. They clearly had no concrete idea how cost could be controlled – but trust us, we’ll figure it out. Time after time, they’d reference some study that was done somewhere that showed promise about this thing or that thing. But nothing that was actually proven to work and, certainly, nothing done on any scale in real life (like in a state, for instance). It struck me as massively speculative and premature – and we will likely pay for that as time goes by.

But back to MA: Until now, I had been under the impression that the cost control piece was not working out that great – it is a very, very tough problem, much tougher than the coverage problem. I recall huge battles as the Governor, Deval Patrick, tried to impose cost escalation limits in insurer policies (a power he has that few other Governors possess). This created a firestorm as insurers complained they could not cut costs at the same time that the people they have to pay (i.e., the hospitals and other providers) were increasing them. Sounded like a tough situation.

I haven’t heard much about it lately since I left the state, but today I came across a piece from NPR that apparently aired recently (yesterday?) that updates me on cost control and other elements of the program. The article is here: Health Care In Massachusetts: ‘Abject Failure’ Or Work In Progress?

There were a few interesting points.

First, the Mass health law is not called RomneyCare in Massachusetts. It is only used at the national level, mostly by his fellow presidential candidates to discredit Romney. I never actually thought of that before, but it is certainly true. He was one of many involved with it.

Second and more important, I am most interested to learn that the cost control piece appears to be working – and not just because the state has forced prices down by fiat to the detriment of quality of care. Sounds like Patrick capping the insurance rate hikes was a ‘turning point’ that shook up the entire health care system and got everyone, including care providers, to start reworking their business models.

One promising shift has been to move a lot of patients from a fee-for-service model to a per patient model. One insurer calls it ‘global payment’. I recall this idea being discussed at the time (and it is mentioned in ObamaCare, too), but it hadn’t really been tried or proven to work in any large scale system in the USA.

The various steps seem to be working to moderate Massachusetts’ historically high health care inflation rates. “We’ve got some more work to do here,” the governor says, “but average premium increases were almost 17 percent two years ago. They are less than 2 percent right now.”

They also note that there is talk of holding health care expenses to a certain percentage of expenses. This seems to me a good idea, but I know liberals tend to dislike anything that tries to manage costs like you would in a business. For instance, they seem completely opposed to any notion that Federal government spending should be x% of the GDP. Any such measure, even if done in some sort of band to account for year-to-year variations, would hamstring their efforts to endlessly expand government. So I am surprised, but pleased to hear such a sensible idea is taking hold in MA in regards to health care. Maybe we’ll get Democrats nationwide to think in terms of fiscal responsibility one day.

Lastly, it sounds like the law is spawning lots of benefits in terms of quality of care: more people are going to the doctor, there are fewer emergency room visits, etc. This is goodness.

I have also read that the costs of the program have been higher than expected and that has created some problems. The topic isn’t mentioned here, so I assume it is getting sorted, but I’d be interested to more on that.

To me, the most remarkable thing is the time-series data that show how the share of Federal household income from government benefits programs has grown over time, especially recently.

1969: 7.8%

1979: 11.2%

1989: 11.5%

1999: 12.6%

2009: 17.6%

Federal benefits as percent household income by year

They don’t really go into this data too much, but the storyline seems to be that everything was fine beforehand and the recent jump is largely a function of the recession and that it does not relate to any permanent underlying changes in programs or economic structure. Count me as skeptical of that – I highly doubt these income levels will drop back to 12%’ish range that existed in the 1990′s and 2000′s.

They have a great chart which shows the distribution of this federal income by region across the country: The Geography of Government Benefits. The print version of this is much better because it uses different colors to highlight the steep regional variations – the online version is shades of brown.

The second thing that is remarkable about the data they use is how rapidly the beneficiaries of Federal aid programs has shifted from the poor to the middle class. They don’t have these graphics on the web that I can find, but the key learning for me is that benefits going to the poor (defined as the lowest quintile) has plummeted from 54% in 1979 to 36% in 2007. Wow!

Benefits to second lowest quintile are pretty stable at 18% – 22%. Benefits to the top 3 quintiles (top 60%) have all grown significantly – even the top quintile.

At least to my ear, Democrats seem mostly to argue that more and more money must be spent to increase benefits to the poorest among us – that there remain many, many severely disadvantaged folks that need help. This is a worthy goal, but the reality of the spending points to a different outcome – or maybe the claim is shifting: now the idea is that everyone (the 99%) is disadvantaged except the rich. We all need and deserve help.

The third remarkable set of stats concern the percentage of households that receive Federal entitlement benefits.

1998 – 37.7%

2006 – 44.5%

2009 – 48.5%

We keep this pace up for another twenty years and we’re looking at 65% – 70% percent of households receiving Federal money by 2030. No idea how one funds a social structure like that – lots of borrowing, probably.

****

In Washington, the Democrats seem intent on continuing these trends indefinitely – perhaps even to accelerate them. I see no appetite from them to even moderate the cost curve, let alone to reverse it in some way. On occasion, there is lip service about restraint, but no passion whatsoever. They are passionate mostly about two things: more benefits for everyone and taxing the rich. They also care a lot about the environment, ensuring more individual rights, and ensuring we are all safe from corporations.

One thing I don’t understand about their program is that even if we taxed the rich into oblivion, that wouldn’t cover the cost of these programs today, let alone in the future (assuming it didn’t destroy the economy in the process). So even in the best case, the majority of the money to cover entitlements has to be borrowed. This approach might feel good for a while, but I don’t see how it can play out with a happy ending . Unlike Greece, there is nobody out there to bail us out – we are simply too large, even for China.

Republicans are at least trying to shift the dynamic – even as they are called heartless and uncaring by the other side. I give them kudos (and my vote) for that.

On future trips, I’d like to be a little more strategic and buy gas in states where the taxes are lower. Here’s a chart showing tax burden for each state.

The range from highest to lowest is pretty significant – more than double. Alaska is the cheapest at 26.4 cents. California has the highest taxes at 67.7 cents.

For the states I’ve been driving thru, the taxes from lowest to highest are:

- New Jersey: 32.9 cents

- South Carolina: 35.2 cents

- Virginia: 38.3 cents

- Massachusetts, Maryland: 41.9 cents

- Georgia: 47.8 cents

- Pennsylvania: 50.7 cents

- Florida: 52.9 cents

- North Carolina: 53.7 cents

- New York: 67.5 cents

- Connecticut: 68.7 cents

So for me, the best states for buying the cheapest gasoline are going to be: New Jersey, South Carolina, and Virginia followed by Maryland and Massachusetts.

The worst states for buying gasoline are New York and Connecticut.

Pilfered from tessarickart.wordpress.com

The memes idea is appealing because it would allow for narrow, but contradictory beliefs to coexist more easily – and for beliefs to shift more fluidly over time in response to events and trends as they obviously do (on both sides).

It also is a more organic way to imagine diverse constellations of human actors to develop collective beliefs – since neither progressives nor conservatives are meeting all at once to ratify grand philosophies, it is really the only possible way for them to develop: piece by piece, bit by bit.

While memes are commonly used as a framework in technology and social media, they don’t seem to have found much of a home in theories of political thought. There are very few citations found when you do a google search. Those that are seem very narrowly focused at the level of specific rumors or facts. Everyone instead seems to be looking for the big, unifying idea when maybe things are not that coherent.

Anyway while doing a bit of googling on this topic, I came across a recent article titled “The liberal meme that regulations don’t cost jobs“. This echoes a comment posted on my blog the other day that left me baffled. I’ll leave the article to speak for itself, but it illustrates the dynamic perfectly.

I especially like his reference to the article in the Wall Street Journal about Italy. I read that same article and had the exact same thought: an obvious example illustrating why and how regulations constrain growth.

Today there was a piece in the New York Times called The Gulf of Morality that tries to get at how and why the two sides think as they do. And who should be the first person they quote, but Professor Lakoff who makes this ridiculous comment:

conservatives believe in individual responsibility alone, not social responsibility. They don’t think government should help its citizens. That is, they don’t think citizens should help each other.

This is absurd on its face – especially given my post earlier today about conservatives giving a lot more of their income to charity, being more likely to devote their own time to charitable causes (volunteerism), and when they do volunteer, to spend almost double the amount of time doing it.

So if this is what this guy thinks about conservatives, how can Dan be recommending him as the font of wisdom? I wanted to know more. Since I’m too lazy to read an entire book, I took a shortcut and listened to a lecture he gave at UC San Diego in 2005 about the topic of his book ‘Moral Politics’. It’s an hour long and I’ve listened carefully to it twice.

Here are some thoughts:

- He is a very erudite fellow who speaks well and clearly and has a wide ranging scope of knowledge. He spoke for an entire hour without pause, except for one sip of water, and without a note or a slide to guide him. Most impressive.

- The ‘family model’ approach that he uses as a foundation seems somewhat randomly chosen – perhaps it seemed like a promising way to get the outcome he had in mind. Especially after hearing the descriptions thereof, I have a hard time believing that the family model is either determinative or complete as an explanation for how either side thinks in totality. I know for my own family, it obeyed none of the qualities he attributes to people who become conservatives. None of my conservatives friends (save one) seem to fit either. At best, his models are loosely instructive – or maybe all of us are in the ‘other’ bucket where we have elements of both models. I suspect a very, very large number of people are in this middle ground.

- His profiles of conservatives (‘strict father model’) and liberals (‘nuturing parent model’) are highly selective and preferential (he’s a liberal). In particular, he attributes three qualities to ‘progressives’ that seem to me to apply to conservatives quite well or even better. Building off his ‘family’ model where family behavior determines political thought, the three qualities that make for a progressive are:

1. Progressive parents want to protect their kids. That’s why liberals advocate for environmental safety, consumer safety, worker safety, etc. Surely conservatives want their kids to be safe too? Perhaps not in the same way or to the identical degree, but surely not zero.

2. Progressive parents want their kids to be ‘happy and fulfilled’ so they can pursue their dreams. He says liberals want people to be ‘free’ and to have ‘opportunities’ by living in a ‘prosperous’ society. This is motherhood and apple pie. Surely conservatives want happy kids and prosperity, too? I would be shocked if you heard words like ‘freedom’ ‘opportunity’ and ‘prosperity’ spoken more on a channel like MSNBC than on Fox News.

3. Progressive parents want their kids raised in a supportive ‘community’. Who doesn’t? He says that to have a good community you need:

leaders who care about the people in the community and are responsible. And you want community members who care about each other and are responsible to other members of the community and to the community itself. People who do community service.

What kind of community is that? One where there is cooperation. For cooperation you need trust – and for trust, you need honesty and openness.

So this explains why liberals volunteer so much more than conservatives in their local communities. Er, oh, no, actually they don’t do that. So we are to believe that conservatives care nothing at all for community and yet volunteer more of their time in community organizations?

But seriously, do liberals actually believe that conservatives don’t want a supportive community? That they don’t prefer cooperation? That they prefer lying over the truth? That they don’t want prosperity? That they don’t want their kids to be safe? Please. It is ridiculous. Except maybe in the most general of way, these sorts of simplistic academic ideas are not where the communication breakdown between the parties is occurring.

- My takeaway about part one of the talk is that he’s constructed two models that nicely fit into his own preconceptions of what the two sides stand for. He’s offered up some nice bits for his favored progressives – qualities to his liking that he’s apparently plucked out of thin air. Rather than follow the same ‘plucking’ procedure for conservatives, he’s found an objective-sounding basis (Dobson) to build a not entirely flattering portrait of conservatives. He does grant that conservatives are ‘moral’, but he’s framed that morality as self-serving and essentially corrupt at it’s core. It’s not an especially promising foundation for the rest of his lecture, but it does seem to be making his (mostly progressive) audience laugh – and that’s important.

- He observes that Rationalism has had a profound effect on the Democratic party and says that a foundational part of progressive thinking is that

government should be in favor of the material interests of all the people

This is nice to know, but by implication he is suggesting that conservatives are not in favor of the material interests of the people? I guess the unstated point he’s making is that conservative government is for some certain favored parts thereof (the rich, presumably), rather than ‘all’. I expect a lot of conservatives would disagree with this vehemently.

- He asserts that by the Rational model, people should be voting ‘in favor of their self-interest’, but that they often do not and this disappoints him. He laments that progressives put together these long lists of beautifully designed programs that address the voters self-interest, but voters often don’t vote for these programs. Why? Because conservatives are appealing to them on a whole other level to do with frames and metaphors.

This is probably quite so, but could it also be that the programs that progressives think are in the self-interest of people are not actually the programs that the people think are in their self-interest? In my opinion, liberals often think they know what is best for other people, when they don’t have much of a clue. In other words, it might not just be that conservatives sell their programs better, but that they actually craft better programs? The thought doesn’t appear to have crossed his mind.

- He goes on to talk about Reagan, Goldwater, and various historical events in the conservative movement and concludes that conservatives:

have a deeper understanding of how the mind actually works [than progressives do]

Finally, something I actually agree with – full stop. And I’d go further and say that not only do they better understand how the mind works, they better understand how the physical world (i.e., reality) works than do progressives – this is a contributing factor to why people vote for their programs. But that’s for another episode.

- This leads him to a lengthy bit about conservatives banding together and getting extremely organized: endowing centers in universities, creating think tanks, magazines, and book publishers, and buying up media properties. He speaks of this partly in a tone of respect that they were so clever and disciplined, but also somewhat derisively since clearly these ideas are wrong-headed and destructive. He observes that what you have is a ‘right wing idea factory and messaging machine’ that is pushing ideas into the public sphere. Part of this is very reasonable, he opines, but part of it is ‘lies’. Lies being where these idea factory folks are using language to overcome weaknesses in or absences of fact.

Throughout this bit, he repeatedly asserts or implies that progressives are driven by rational thought and facts. That in the fight for hearts and minds, they are hampered by their determination and in-borne nature to be pure truth tellers. This part doesn’t really work for me because a) since when did we start giving demerits to people or groups for being too organized and disciplined? and b) it is nonsense to believe that liberals are data-driven truth tellers.

On this second point, I continually notice that liberal opinion pieces cite data much less frequently than do conservative pieces. A few years back when I was reading both the WSJ and the NYT daily, I did an informal tally each day for a month or so of the number of citations of numbers (excluding dates and the like) in the opinion pieces. Conservative columns, including conservative columns in NYT, were much more likely to use data than liberal columns (all these think tanks are busy generating data, so why not use it?). I would also add that when I do posts for this blog, I am often looking for data (especially nice charts) to understand issues and illustrate points. It is not very often that I find data coming from liberal sources. It isn’t just that I don’t pick the liberal version of the data – it simply doesn’t exist. So, in my view and contrary to Lakoff’s point, progressives are not driven by ‘facts’ and certainly are not driven by facts to a higher degree than are conservatives.

- The lecture sort of peters out in terms of valuable commentary until the end when he offers up a gem of a closing point using Hurricane Katrina. Here he articulates that Katrina was not so much caused by nature, but by man. Why? Because research into global warming proved that category 5 hurricanes were an inevitable result of global warming and that the particular disaster in New Orleans was caused by Republican budget cuts of FEMA and of the funds to build the levies as well as poor policy choices on how to run FEMA (i.e., it should not be first responder).

Parts of this are probably true, but the main premise is absurd. We ‘knew in advance’ that Katrina would hit and destroy the levies, etc.? That category 5 storms were an inevitable human-caused menance? I don’t think even hours before it hit did anyone know what was going to happen. I also checked the records of Category 5 storms throughout history. 2005 was the worst year in history with 4 storms, so that’s something, but there have been only 2 since then and there were only 2 in the 1990′s. Perhaps there is a trend in there, but it is far from ‘known’ in the general case, let alone that a storm would hit New Orleans specifically where it would cause this type of damage.

If remote possibilities like this are ‘known’ and must be protected against, we are looking at trillions of dollars in investments to shore up all sorts of things against all sorts of remote risks. Clearly, liberals want to do this, but it is not affordable even under the most generous of budget regimes. So a lot of this is messaging and positioning on his part to make his case for the progressive agenda – which is all well and fine, but it isn’t fact.

I also think that the budget fights over the levy had been going on for decades through any number of presidencies and congresses (and are still going on even after the Dems controlled all branches of government a few years ago). By this logic, if Republicans are solely responsible for the Katrina damage, then Democrats are solely responsible for the mortgage crisis because they were the strongest advocates for loosening mortgage qualifications to increase home ownership in low income areas which was the starting point of the unraveling.

—-

Overall, I don’t think I am feeling a whole lot wiser about the underlying reasons why conservatives and liberals think like they do – especially in the particulars. Well, that’s not quite right: I do understand that a lot of liberals have been influenced by what Lakoff has said and written, however flawed it may be, and as a result, this is what a lot of liberals think that conservatives think. I don’t think it is a terribly accurate portrayal, but it is out there and it is well articulated and it is entertaining to listen to.

But when you get right down to it, do I understand why liberals so strongly oppose domestic energy development any better now than I did when I woke up this morning? No. And I think this is where the problems emerge from his generic models. If I look at the issue of domestic energy and I wanted what Lakoff says progressives want: ‘prosperity’ for my children, not to mention ‘safety’ and to be part of a supportive community, then I would want there to be a lot more domestic energy production. It would keep us out of wars, create huge numbers of jobs here, and generate massive tax revenues for funding all sorts of liberal programs, among other benefits. In the largest sense of community, it could also be viewed as being a good world citizen by increasing supply of a limited resource which drops global prices and enables peoples the world over access to many things they cannot now afford. But no, absolutely, positively not. Not now, not ever. For all his insistence that liberals are, above all else, excessively rationale, this appears to be an irrational position to hold.

My conclusion is that this position on oil, among others, arises from some other dynamic which is not contained in his explanation. In this sense, Lakoff’s ideas are a disappointment.

Source: The World Top Incomes Database

Like other similar charts I’ve posted have shown, it shows a sharp change wealth held by the top 1% in the past 25 years or so. I’ve been wondering about the causal mechanics behind this.

What I never realized before is how sharply it changes in a particular year – 1987 – and carries on from there. At that point, the USA started to diverge significantly from other countries.

So the obvious question is: why? What happened in that year? I don’t really know.

Liberals will surely point out that that’s when some Reagan tax cuts went into effect and that top rates have stayed relatively low since then – and maybe they’d be right.

However, I am generally of the opinion that much of the wealth among the top 1% accrues not primarily because of lucrative jobs (i.e., compensation subject to income tax), but because of returns on capital (subject to capital gains tax). I like the capital-driven theory because it would have a multiplicative effect vs. a largely linear one (although one can surely argue that compensation for top performers has exploded in all fields, so it is faster than linear). But the problem there is that the capital gains tax actually went up significantly at that same time income taxes went down (bottom chart) – though they, too, have since come down as well.

Perhaps when you put the various rates together over time and you combine with other policies (like severe restrictions on capital investing by the non-rich), you can get the necessary result. Hard to know, but if it is causal, it argues for maintaining progressive taxation (vs. currently popular flat tax ideas) and probably even to make the top rate higher. Warren Buffet would like that.

The key thing would be to pick a threshold that is actually genuinely ‘rich’ vs. merely affluent, particularly when cost of living variations are taken into account. Something like $1M per year in combined income (compensation + capital gains) seems about right. And it needs to have an effective indexing mechanism so it doesn’t become another Alternative Minimum Tax (AMT) in 30 years by slowly growing to encompass an ever larger percentage of taxpayers.

An alternative approach is a wealth tax along the lines of what Spain just reintroduced. France has a similar thing. This type of tax is based on total assets held whether they are earning or not earning. I’m not sure if this sort of thing actually yields enough revenue to fix much of anything, but perhaps worth considering.

Source: The Occidental Quarterly

Pulled from: SEIU Local 1984 website

]]> http://johnsbytes.com/2011/11/14/comparison-of-top-1/feed/ 1 webbizgeek Income inequality by year and by country USA marginal tax rates by year Top tax rates 1952-2008 http://johnsbytes.com/2011/11/14/conservatives-are-selfish-people-not/ http://johnsbytes.com/2011/11/14/conservatives-are-selfish-people-not/#comments Mon, 14 Nov 2011 16:57:28 +0000 John Kenney http://johnsbytes.com/?p=463 ]]> I make a point to read the New York Times every day, especially the OpEd pieces. I very often disagree with the OpEd pieces, but what are often even more remarkable are the comments. One from a piece today was especially remarkable for its concise and utterly unsupportable point.

The piece is titled The Gulf of Morality and it speaks to an issue that I’ve been thinking about a lot lately which is why/how liberals and conservatives can’t communicate.

I plan to post on the piece itself shortly, but the comment that got me is this from Stephen in New Haven (boldface by me):

Conservatives are a psychological and human anomaly. Although they like to think they pulled themselves up by their bootstraps, all they really do is climb over other people on the way up. To put it bluntly: Conservatives are selfish people.

This behavior is completely at odds with human development. Selfishness does not help the group survive. We evolved to live in social groups who look after one another.

Over the many years I lived in Massachusetts, I often heard statements like this and they seemed at odds with reality as I knew it. In other words, if I looked at actual Republicans I knew were they more selfish than the Democrats I knew? No, generally not. Plenty of Democrats are selfish – possibly even more so.

Nevertheless, Democrats rarely pass up an opportunity to profess undying concern for others, but do they do more than Republicans to actually improve the lives of those people? In particular, do they personally do things? Answer: no. I could share specific anecdotes, but won’t.

You can see this in study after study of charitable giving and time spent volunteering for charities or good works. The Blue States (Democrats) systematically give less to charity – and have for years and years since I first became aware of this type of data. The Blue states consistently show up at the bottom of the charitable giving rankings. The Red States are generally towards the top. Of course, the correlation isn’t perfect, but it’s pretty darn strong.

This phenomenon is well documented by multiple studies by multiple entities. Here is 2008 piece by Nicholas Kristol, who’s about as liberal as they come, sharing the bad news. He cites studies by Arthur Brooks and Google that showed a “30%” and “nearly double” edge to Republican households over Democrat households in charitable giving.

A quick google search also yielded this excellent analysis of some of the data Kristol used to draw his conclusions done by a company called GeoIQ (they found a way to use the geo skills to enhance the data with some great charts).

Some newer data can be found here: Frasier Institute. See table below for actual data from this report. As I’ve seen before, this data shows that my beloved home state of MA which is stuffed to the gills with liberals finishes 40th (out of 50) in percentage of income given to charity. In past years, it was even worse. I think it used to be 46th or something. California is 30th out of 50.

Here’s a chart from the GeoIQ post (big version) that captures this visually. The orange states voted Republican in 2008 (aka the Red States). Blue voted Democrat (aka the Blue States). The larger the dot, the higher the charitable giving for that state as measured by the ‘Generosity Index Ranking’ – a metric compiled by the Catalogue for Philanthropy (or maybe now the Frasier Institute?).

Source: GeoIQ

Tables below from Generosity in Canada and the United States: The 2010 Generosity Index. They are hard to read here, so please click images to see them in a larger size.

US debt: US debt levels have jumped sharply in recent years and are rapidly approaching 100%.

Source: FutureTimeline.net

Worldwide debt levels as a percent of GDP: Debt levels have skyrocketed worldwide since the recession began. Many developed countries now have debt levels well above 80% of GDP. I’m not sure what the ‘right’ amount of debt is, but it is surely a whole lot less than the current levels.

Source: Chartsbin.com (if you visit their site, you will find an interactive version of this chart which is very cool)

Source: Wikipedia

Worldwide debt levels per capita: Debt levels per capita are growing very quickly. US per capita debt has grown by about 50% since 2007 and is projected to grow by another 50% by 2015 to give us the 2nd highest in the world.

Source: Brookings Institute

Source: Brookings Institute

Brookings credits IMF Fiscal Monitor, May 2010; IMF WEO, April 2010 as the sources of their data.

Brookings also has some related charts that show per capita debt per working age person in 2007, 2010, and 2015. They project about $80,000 per person in 2015. That’s a pile to have on each person’s shoulders – and this is not even actual workers, but simply people of that age range.

The chart tracks households across two year – 1996 and 2005 – to see how much people moved from one quintile to another. It isn’t too surprising to see that there is a lot of stickyness at the top and bottom.

• At the top end, 61% of workers that were in the top quintile in 1996 were still there in 2005
• At the low end, 55% of workers that were in the bottom quintile in ’96 were still there in ’05

Source: Wall Street Journal

Apparently the analysis shows that income mobility has declined in recent years. I guess that is bad.

In a related thought, I’d like to see an analysis of the composition of the top 1% – e.g., a tally by profession. Based on how the Occupy and other folks talk, everyone seems to assume that the list would be 99.9% would be a greedy corporate baron. But won’t the list also have piles of actors, media personalities, and athletes? How about doctors and lawyers? Are these folks bad, too? Perhaps I’ll dig into this and see if there’s any data around.