Doing the Math
My greatest disappointment with the Left is that thirty years after the advent of inexpensive calculators, twenty years after the availability of powerful computer spreadsheets, and two years after 9/11, they refuse to do the math. There are extreme complexities in the world that are not readily approachable with inexpensive computing devices and simple accounting methods. The variables of global economies and climate, for instance, are so profoundly complex that they challenge the human capacity for understanding with any tool, method, or philosophy. The motivations of the brutal, the ignorant, and the rapacious are not a complexity of this order, however.
It is a shame that so few people on the Left will do more than roll their eyes up at the next paragraph. Literally, peoples who wish to make a coherent point that is worth talking about should be ashamed for unwillingness or inability to pay serious attention to verifiable facts. Those who wish to compel the world and the leadership of the nation to follow their policy should be able to coherently understand simple math. Criticizing numbers without a willingness to discuss the import of those numbers is despicable.
The
Gross Domestic Policy (GDP) of the United States in 2002 was ten point four trillion dollars ($10,400,000,000,000). The per capita (per person share) of that was $36,700) Last year was a bad one and the US GDP only grew at a rate of two point four five percent (2.45%), increasing our GDP roughly $254,000,000,000. The GDP for Syria was fifty-nine point four billion (59,400,000,000), with a per capita GDP of $3,500. Iraq's GDP last year was fifty-eight billion (58,000,000,000), with a per capita of $2,400.
While economics is a complex study with many exceptions and often outright lies, there are certain basic assertions that can be made. An order of magnitude is a significant indicator, when something is ten times larger than another thing there is a substantial difference. The average person in the US is more than ten times more productive than a person in Syria or Iraq. On the basis of the above figures, it appears that being a fascist and exporting terror is not very good business. Furthermore, asking a nation burdened with the poison legacy of fascism and a terrorist campaign to accept ruinous loans is churlish and indefensible.
If you would like to dispute my conclusions and assert your own, it will give me great joy to check your sums.
