My thoughts on H.R. 1

I admit I am somewhat confused about H.R. 1, a.k.a. the Economic Recovery Act.

This week my liberal friend sent me this graph from Nancy Pelosi's web site. This graph allegedly clearly explains how desperately we need this spending bill. On the X axis it shows the "Number of Months After Peak Job Month". On the Y Axis it shows "Job Losses Relative to Peak Month". My liberal friend has yet to explain to me what this means, but he points at the green line in horror, and explains that the situation is dire, we are in a crisis, and if we don't spend a trillion dollars the great depression of 1929 is right around the corner.

Over at the Bureau of Labor Statistics they have a wealth of data online. I took four semesters of statistics in college, as my degree is in Economics from Northern Arizona University. If you work long and hard enough, you can find a correlation between just about anything. The keyword in this graph that set off the alarm bells was the word "relative" on the Y axis. This means the graph plots the delta, or difference, between a base number and a series of numbers. Makes a pretty dramatic plot, but does it actually mean anything?

The global economy is a very complex system, with an incomprehensible number of independent variables. Government spending certainly plays a part, and one could argue the net effect of government throwing money at this or that without resolution. Arguing economic theory is akin to discussing what the weather will be like tomorrow, or next week, or a hundred years from now. Nobody really knows with absolute certainty how these complex systems really function.

What I'm worried about is very simple. The cost of H.R. 1 is either just under a trillion dollars, or three trillion, twenty four billion over the next ten years if you believe the opposing political viewpoint over at the Heritage Foundation. They have a lot of pretty graphs over there, too. I confess I'm not entertained by political propaganda from either side and I only gave them a glance.

According to the CIA the population of the United states is 303,824,640. According to Wikipedia the number of people who pay taxes is roughly 138,000,000. That seems about right. A trillion divided by 130 billion comes out to around $7,000.

The choice between giving $7,000 of income to the government, compared to taking a cruise, or fixing up the house, or contributing to my favorite charity is a decision that I prefer to make myself. Do you have an extra $7,000 lying around this year that you want somebody else to spend for you?