National Debt as a proportion of GDP

A friend on Facebook suggested that a simplified look at the national debt problem (comparing it to a household budget) circulating the web was left lacking on the full substance of the matter. As one objection, he mentioned that national debt was not being considered as a fraction of the GDP. Also that, by that measure, the national debt was much higher just after WWII.

My first, knee jerk response was, simple models are good. At least this one was OK because it was simply demonstrating the scale of different line items. Sure there are other subtleties, but they need to be discussed as part of a bigger discussion.

Meanwhile, I wanted to understand this statistic myself and so scanned the CYBERSPHERE, by the way - if nobody has claimed to have coined this term (I can't imagine it hasn't already been used) - you heard it first here.  So I found some charts, but not wanting to go from a second reference I used. http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/omb/budget/fy2012/assets/hist07z1.xls
Then created this chart from it

The thing that struck me is that, if you don't have the chart in front of you, saying it was higher just after WWII gives the impression that it has been steadily decreasing ever since. In reality, it WAS decreasing until about 1980 and has been increasing ever since. And now, it is on target to be higher than just after  WWII. Interestingly - that is when Ronald Reagan took office, only to decline in Bill Clinton's second term, grow again under Bush, then zoom up again at the end of Bush and under Obama - well as Emeril Lagasse would say, "let's kick it up a notch".

It would be interesting to analyze these segments separately, but for now we'll let the facts speak for themselves. In closing, the last  6 data points are estimates, including current year's 2011 and 2012 out to 2016. The White House apparently would like to paint a nice rosy picture. Imagine the growing national debt as a doomsday asteroid hurtling towards the earth. The rise in the current years represents inverse of the distance from impact. I think our president fancies himself in a cape zooming skyward and with one hand, man of steel, saving the earth from total destruction. Or perhaps, taking our men home from war will do the trick, possibly dismantling the military-industrial (I am with IKE on this one - but it has morphed) complex will work. Help me figure out this magic trick, please.

The Hub-bub About Paterno

Joe Paterno has passed away. May he rest in peace. But the swirl around him is crazy. I really don't have a lot of time to blog, so I don't know why I am writing this. However, here I can say my piece (ha, I was just proofing this and I cant decide whether to use peace). Look, these days many of us are employed "at will". That means that our employers can let us go at any time, for any reason. However, if we, as workers provide value for our employers, they will continue to employ us.

Joe Paterno was the top man. He was fully responsible for all of the activities occurring under him. That's what he got paid for. He accepted the contract and took full control. He ought to have been prepared, on a daily basis, to be let go for any reason, like the rest of us do.

Nobody in authority accused him of a crime and he was not set to prison nor was he crucified. He was just let go. Simple, no fuss - no muss. You'd think we'd hung all the saints simultaneously. In reality, letting Joe Paterno go was a message. One that a lot of folks didn't like, "It's not THAT important." Your little game, all of the incredible amounts of money flowing through that institution. The institution of college football is not more important than the safeguarding of innocent young people.

So the statement was made. We can admire Mr. Paterno's accomplishments, but that does not mean that we need lie prostrate to the holy alter of sacred college football lest a crowd of people cry, "sacrelige!", that we do not weep at the injustice foisted upon the man.

What is an Armadillo

At the Texas Roadhouse, this New Years Day my daughter looked at a picture on the wall and said, "Look at the pig". My son and I pointed out to her that is was an armadillo. But then he told her an armadillo is a kind of rodent. I said, actually it is a marsupial. Neither of us were correct at that point, but now that I have investigated, I see that I was the least correct.

To my mind, the armadillo was more like an opossum which is a marsupial. But apparently, I was never meant to be a naturalist. So I broke out the Wikipedia, and this is what I discovered ...

It all starts with class Mamilia or mammals, we are all familiar with that, armadillos, rodents, opossums, pigs, platypuses and people are all mammals.  So Mamilia is a class and that is subdivided into two subclasses Theria (live bearing) and Prototheria (egg laying). So here we say goodbye to our friend the platypus and the echidna which I had not yet mentioned as they are both egg laying mammals. This small band is also grouped under the order Monotremata (Monotremes) and can be visited in Australia and New Guinea.

So getting back to sub-class Theria:  armadillos, rodents, opossums, pigs and people. This is again more finely divided into infra-class Eutheria (placental) and Metatheria (marsupial).  Eutheria includes armadillos, rodents, pigs and people. Metatheria includes opossums and kangaroos. So, now I thought I knew what marsupial meant. I knew that the young embryo like joeys crawl up to a nipple to gestate, but you better read for yourself. Seems the reproductive organs are double barreled. Also, the opossum is the one and only marsupial in North America. OK let's shed the opossum.

We are left with armadillos, rodents, pigs and people. Time to cut to the chase, here's where we can put them into separate roughly equivalent categories:

people = order primates
rodents =  order Rodentia (what else)
pigs = order Artiodactyla
armadillos = order Cingulata

the categories on the left are not equivalent as people are a species (H. sapiens) wherease rodents defines the entire order. However, this gives an idea of the split. Fascinating!