Living in Darkness

Life in a small town is opened up by the radio. When I was a kid, in Idaho, late at night I’d listen to radio stations from far away, even Los Angeles, and those programs really were like lights shining on me from the outer world. They were in some sense alive, unlike the static newspapers with their paper pictures and paper stories. It’s like that now, living in a small place, with the radio via the Internet.

The whole world is available to me; what I lack is the ability to understand foreign languages, so I am restricted to English language speakers, but there is plenty of that. This week there was a Christmas pantomime with John Cleese and Peter Cook from the BBC; Jonathan Schwartz and his 4-hour Saturday show of Broadway music (WNYC-FM, 9-1 PST); and reports from Gaza by people who are in Gaza as they report, not pontificating from Washington, D.C. There’s so much stuff available that I have to discipline myself not to keep my headphones on all the time, because if I allow that, I end up kind of dazed, wondering where I’ve been: certainly not in the Pacific Northwest. And also, with headphones, I'm not very good company.

Anyway, the other day, I was listening to some Brit discussing our general inability to understand the numbers that we are fed constantly in the news. That’s been a big issue with me for years with respect to health policy and health research information. People ought to know, e.g., what per capita healthcare spending is in the U.S. just to get a sense of proportion before they start talking about healthcare and its costs. But this guy was talking about numbers more broadly: everything, he said, gets talked about in bigger and bigger numbers and it isn’t that people don’t know enough but that they can’t do anything with those kinds of numbers. Better to get them into some kind of accessible form: otherwise, we’re just living in darkness.

Seemed like good advice, so I put together a few per capita numbers of expenditures that might cast some light. These are all yearly per capita figures (NOT household figures), based upon a U.S. population of 300 million, and total expenditures during 2007 or 2008.

• U.S. Government expenditures, 2007: $9,000 per capita.; 2009, est.: $10,000.
• Total health care spending in the U.S.: $7,000 per capita (Canada, by comparison, is $5,000).
• Health care spending by the U.S. Government: $3,500 per capita.
• U.S. Defense Department budget: $2,200 per capita.
• Social Security: $1,900 per capita.
• Interest on the National Debt: $1,400 per capita.
• Iraq War (average year): $570 per capita.
• Federal aid to education: $200 per capita.
• U.S. Congress: $33 per capita
• Earmarks: $14 per capita
• U.S. Gov’t Military Aid to Israel: $10 per capita.

The news this last year suggested that earmarks were one of the two or three most important problems in our political life. At least they are inexpensive.

The Brit who was being interviewed pointed out that if every American put $1/week in the pot for a year, the pot would hold $15 billion dollars at the end of a year. Thus, anything that cost $15 billion or less was essentially a trivial amount and not really worth worrying about as to cost in the face of much bigger expenditures. Earmarks or military aid to Israel, e.g., could still be an issue of concern, but because of their inherent nature not because of their costs, was his argument. We are transfixed by these small cost items because we can comprehend the amounts.

All this math made me think: If every permanent resident of Point Roberts put $1 each week in that pot, at the end of the year we’d have $78,000. That would go a long ways to funding the Food Bank and Dollars for Scholars and Paws and the Lutheran Church’s emergency generator for its emergency shelter status and some arts and sports projects for kids in the summer. A big gift to the community and a very small donation per capita.

And one other number not in the news today: Gaza is a territory of 25 square miles; it has a population of about 1.5 million people. If Point Roberts were five times bigger and had 1.5 million people instead of 1,500 people, what would life be like if bombs were aimed only at the bad people?

There's a very accessible graph of U.S. Government Agency expenditures here.