Common Sense Thinkers: February 2013

Monday, February 25, 2013

A Tale of Two Cities and the Cause of Murder

The two Cities - Houston and Chicago

Population

Chicago, IL 2.70 million
Houston, TX 2.15 million

Median HH income

Chicago, IL   $38,600
Houston, TX $37,000

% African-American

Chicago, IL   32.9%
Houston, TX 24.0%

% Hispanic

Chicago, IL   28.9%
Houston, TX 44.0%

% Asian

Chicago, IL   5.5%
Houston, TX 6.0%

% non-Hispanic White

Chicago, IL   31.7%
Houston, TX 26.0%

A reasonably similar match up -until:

Concealed carry gun law

Chicago, IL no
Houston, TX yes

# of gun stores

Chicago, IL 0
Houston, TX 84 dedicated gun shops,
1500 places to buy guns
(Walmart, etc.)

Homicides, 2012

Chicago, IL 506
Houston, TX 207

Homicides per 100k

Chicago, IL 18.4
Houston, TX 9.6

Average January high temp, F

Chicago, IL 31 degrees
Houston, TX 63 degrees

Political Conclusion: cold weather causes murder.

Thursday, February 21, 2013

How much money does the US spend each year?

The US spends about $3,700 billion dollars ($3.7 trillion) annually.

How much money is $3.7 trillion?

Well lets say your spouse had a really serious spending habit of say $10,000 per day. To spend $3.7 trillion dollars at $10,000 per day would take your spouse over 1million years to spend it all!

How much does the US government spend in a day? Approximately $10,136,986,301 per day!

Yet we hear on the news that if we were to cut $85 billion in government spending (less than 10 days worth of spending, the world as we know it will stop spinning, children will starve, planes won't fly and over 800,000 civilian employees of the US military would be fired.

My friends, someone, somewhere is either really poor at math, or is lying to us, or both!