Gov't Spending: Lies, Damned Lies & Statistics

This op-ed piece on Forbes has been making the rounds recently, featuring the following graph which "says it all":

Now, if you're the kind of person like me who sometimes thinks about numbers/math, your alarm bells should already be going off. What exactly are we looking at here -- nominal percentages, or have these been adjusted for inflation?

And the next logical thought, of course, is... even if the numbers are real, what do they mean? Only that every President in the last 30 years has spent more money than the guy before him, with some increasing the amount more than others.

Well, that makes sense -- our population has increased, our economy expanded*... if only there were some way to factor all that growth into the equation, some sort of "gross domestic product," if you will.

Luckily, the White House keeps track of all this stuff, so it isn't hard to find. Here I present my graph (based on the President's own data) that puts federal spending into context by expressing it in terms of GDP:

Source: U.S. Office of Management & Budget
http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/omb/budget/fy2013/assets/hist01z2.xls

Uh-oh! Looks like Obama is the biggest spender after all, followed by Reagan, Bush I, Bush II, and finally Clinton.

I humbly accept your gratitude for restoring the universe in which Reaganomics defeated the Russians by out-spending them, Clinton was a fiscal conservative, Bush II took us back to the Kissinger days, and Obama took us all the way back to FDR and Keynes.

Conservatives: If you truly consider yourselves anti-big-gov't-spending, the republicans' track record over the last three decades CLEARLY shows that you voted for the wrong guys!

Liberals: C'mon -- I expect better of you than this sort of deceptive counter-propaganda spin. But if it fools people into voting for you, I guess shame on them, right?

--Dan Colgate

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* Actually, if you take a look at this chart, you'll see that GDP tanked from 2008 - 2009 and has been climbing out of the hole ever since. Let's face it, George W handed Barack the keys to a busted-up car, and Obama would've had to reduce spending pretty drastically just to break even with his predecessor on my graph. The point I'm trying to make is it's dishonest to praise Obama for "low spending." Big spending is one of the many things democrats and republicans share in common.

Q & A: Religiolitics

QUESTION:

I'm confused as to how the Republicans have co-opted Christianity. Christ said help the poor; Republicans want to give tax breaks to the rich, put more burden on the poor and cut social programs. Christ cured the sick; Republicans vow to kill universal healthcare. Christ said, "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you"; Republicans want to deny equal rights to gays. So, an honest question to my Christian Republican friends -- what of Christ's teachings do you feel the Republican party is following/espousing?

ANSWER:

The biggest one you haven't mentioned is that Christ EXPLICITLY advocates the separation of religion and politics in Matthew 22:21.

At the time (30-ish AD) such an attitude stood out in sharp contrast to the Jewish expectation for a Messiah as a political figure (such as the allegorical Daniel or the actual Judas Maccabee), considering much of post-Alexander Jewish messianic lit was primarily concerned with the re-creation of an independent, autonomous Jewish-religious state as the best solution to oppressive Helenization policies.

While Matthew does attempt to imply the fulfillment of this expectation by tracing Joseph's lineage back to David, the synoptic authors all go out of their way to show Jesus getting effectively acquitted during his only significant interaction with the Roman state, and unlike the other great messianic heroes, Jesus not only fails to defend the Jewish religious establishment from the gentile conquerors, he attacks it constantly and ends up getting murdered by it.

All this becomes evident when you look exigetically at a passage like John 2:19, "Destroy this temple and I will raise it again in three days." More than just a prophesy of the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 AD and/or his own resurrection, an exigetical reading reveals Jesus downplaying the importance of the Jewish theocracy as symbolized by the Temple and asserting himself as the new mediator of a personal encounter with God. (See also the bits about the Temple Veil being rent at the time of his death and the entire Epistle to the Hebrews).

Suffice it to say that "Christian" politicians, be they democrats, republicans, or otherwise, are "not true Scotsmen" because they obviously don't understand the intent of their own stated religion.

--Dan Colgate

The Bible Isn't Anti-Gay, It's Anti-Sex

I was recently exposed to a pro-gay-marriage argument along the following lines: St. Paul was anti-gay, but St. Paul said a lot of other things that we don't generally agree with anymore. Since we're already in the habit of picking and choosing from his teachings, we might as well toss out all of his anti-gay stuff along with the anti-women stuff.

Even though I may agree with the conclusion, the argument itself is crap. It's time to set the record "straight" (ha ha) about St. Paul and the Bible's stance on gayness.

Much of Paul's bad rap as a mysogynist is rooted in one particular statement from the first letter to Timothy.

A woman should learn in quietness and full submission. I do not permit a woman to teach or to assume authority over a man; she must be quiet.
--1 Timothy 2:11-12

Although attributed to St. Paul, most modern scholars agree that both Timothies were probably written by someone else after Paul's martyrdom (perhaps as late as the mid-2nd century). It was common practice in ancient times to attribute authorship in this way to establish alignment with a particular school of thought.

St. Paul himself was actually opposed to ALL marriage (gay, straight, or otherwise):

Now to the unmarried and the widows I say: It is good for them to stay unmarried, as I do.
--1 Corinthians 7:8

It is speculated that Paul was gay and that homosexuality is the "thorn in my flesh" he refers to in 2 Corinthians 12:7. Fanciful interpretations go so far as to blame homosexuality for Paul's "misogyny," although, once again, a clear distinction between his authentic writings vs. the attributed ones reveals he wasn't hardly a mysoginist at all -- see http://pmrb.net/essays/st_paul_women.html

What it really comes down to is that the Bible doesn't make much of an effort to separate homosexuality and heterosexuality. The Egyptians, Babylonians, Greeks, and (later) Romans all lived in what we today would perceive as highly SEXUAL societies, in which heterosexuality and homosexuality were both widely practiced and even encouraged. In contrast, a key part of the ancient Jewish identity was that they distinguished themselves as being ANTI-SEXUAL, labeling all extra-marital sexuality as "fornication" and avoiding it like bacon.

So any argument that the Bible is pro-hetero and anti-homo just doesn't hold water. What the Bible really says is that ALL lust and fornication is a sin; that EVERYONE is guilty of that sin, and that we all deserve to suffer eternally in hell for it; but that we all have a "get out of hell free" card with our name on it (if we want it) because Christ loves us so much he was willing to suffer in our stead.

--Dan Colgate