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http://www.census.gov/main/www/popclock.html

The US census data is delayed by ~70 years so very little info on anything in the past 70 years will come up.

Census records are released 72 years later, to be exact. Also, although the US Census isn't available until then, many state listings of much more recent births, marriages, divorces, and deaths are available.

All of the news outlets except Fox News Special Report received a score to the left of the average member of Congress.

The interesting thing about bias discussions is that you have to consider the baseline of comparison. That is, how do you determine what counts as "bias?" Are you (or the paper, rather...but you seem to be endorsing the study by proxy) really suggesting that the average member of Congress somehow represents "true" America? Should the average member of Congress really be considered the "unbiased" starting point?

Instead, I would posit that the average member of Congress represents the voting populace, not all Americans. For instance, this paper (PDF) finds that older voters routinely favor the older candidate. If we look at U.S. census data (PDF) of voters, we see that the voting populace tends to be older (58% are 45 or older). Demographically, this population tends to be conservative, both socially and fiscally. Consequently, it is plausible that the average member of Congress is more conservative than the average American of legal voting age.

Thus, if we accept the premise that the liberal/conservative make-up of members of Congress is more representative of the voting populace than the U.S. as a whole, we can conclude that the media organizations may have more of a liberal bias than the average voter, but not necessarily the average American. Personally, I believe that this premise is still too generous. Given the necessity of Congress critters having close ties to business (CEOs write bigger donation checks than grocery store cashiers), I would suggest that members of Congress are more conservative than the voting populace. If this is true, it exacerbates the flaws of the original study even more so, as it shows that their baseline is significantly more conservative than the average American.

Here is an interesting critique of some other problems with the paper.

Source?

Also, even if your stats are true, globally 609 dead per month from terrorism in comparison to the global total of 4,680,652 (from http://www.census.gov/cgi-bin/ipc/pcwe) is negligeble. Considering the number of average monthly deaths from smoking alone is over 410000 (http://www.quitsmokingsupport.com/global.htm), I'm not sure how you can justify your statement of "not "quite small"...

Your post reads like a 'back in my day' followed by a 'kids these days'.

You were not deprived in the least if you lived in a two-car home where your parents made you wear a sweater in the winter. None of this is uncommon today.

There are some things today that may be different than yesterday - cultural acceptance of debt is the big one, in my mind. But the ins and outs are complicated, much more so than your sour kveltching.

All that said, to go back to the point, the middle class (and the poor) really had the brown end of the stick for the past while. It turns out that the medina household income (warning: xls) has been mostly stagnent for the middle class, but rising for the rich. In adjusted 2009 dollars, incomes for the following years were

Quartile - 2009 - 1999 - 1989 - 1979
1 ------ - 11k -- 13k -- 12k -- 11k
3 ------ - 49k -- 52k -- 48k -- 45k
5 ------ - 295k - 302k - 230k - 182k

So the poor are making the same now as they did in 1979, while the rich are making almost twice as much. (The income disparity gets much worse as you look at a smaller slice of the rich). The middle, meanwhile, is making about the same they made when the berlin wall fell.

Instead of spending time on useless things like this, they should really focus on making it a legal requirement that cars drive themselves. I think more lives would be saved if human error was removed from the equation. They are talking about saving 292 lines per year? This is a drop in the bucket compared to the number of lives you would save if all cars drove by themselves. According to this link, there are about 100,000 traffic fatalities per year... If you want to make a law, why not focus on ones that might halve the number of traffic fatalities... Saving 292 people who didnt look back when they were putting their car in reverse is such a random useless thing to talk about. Making a law to "fix" this "problem" is ridiculous. If cars were forced to drive by themselves, so many other problems would be solved. DUI would not exist, all the "using a cell phone while driving" laws would immediately become irrelevant.

Closer to 7 billion, and might reach it sometime late next year.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_population
http://www.census.gov/ipc/www/popclockworld.html

Does ANYONE seriously think its China? The US is how many TRILLIONS into debt? Who are we borrowing from? China could practically cripple the US if they wanted to at this point. Most of the money that we spent on the war that we DONT have was borrowed from China. China also manufactures a good proportion of US goods. China also exports a good amount of US goods. http://www.census.gov/foreign-trade/balace/c5700.html#2010

and if you look there, our trade deficit started small in ... 1985 and has just grown EVERY SINGLE YEAR. If they wanted to screw us, economically they could do it and pretty easily.

America most certainly was as such. And you seem to be very confused to those four people while ignoring the fact that the majority of companies in America today were started after WWII and aren't publicly traded. What you generally hear about is publicly traded companies because they has a market listing as well as legislatively mandate reporting and compliance requirements. This throws your entire argument into the trash bin.

Lets explore this a little more. For instance, there are about 2790 companies listed on the New York Stock Exchange. These are medium to large companies. But in the US, there are over 25.4 million companies, the overwhelming majority of which are self-employed persons operating unincorporated businesses. 5.8 million of those companies are regular companies with a payroll (employees other then the owners) and so on. There are about 3,534 firms in the US that employ 2,500 or more people. This is 700 or more companies then everything listed on the NYSE.

Now what you say might be true if you ignored all of the private companies. But that wouldn't be much of a comparison with reality now would it? It also wouldn't be in line with what I said either.

The US trade deficit with India is already over $7B this year through August; heading to top $10B this year. That will be among the highest annual deficits, though Bush/Cheney got deficits as high as $12B+. August 2009 saw the only monthly trade surplus with India in well over 20 years, $34 million; the rest of the months total to something like a quarter $TRILLION more spent on India than India spent on the US. It's obvious that the parallel growth in the US and India leaves the US with less money from our jobs and more money in India for its jobs.

Of course, the corporate profits on all those jobs are not counted in trade stats. The real competition isn't between US labor vs Indian labor. It's between labor in either country, and the corporate owners who run the system, keeping the profits among themselves and their banker partners.

"What business of the federal government is it how many toilets are in my home? And if it wants to know, if it asks nicely I might tell it; if it threatens me with legal sanction for failing to reply, my response is "fuck you, you have neither moral nor Constitutional authority to do so."
--"

You read a LOT of Ayn Rand as a lonely, insecure teenager, didn't you?

As for the Constitutionality of the Census, Article 1, Section 2. I'll wait while you look it up in your copy of the Constitution.

What? You don't have a copy. I do. It's about US$3.00 from the Govt. Printing Office. Ask nicely and your Representative will likely send you one for free.

Thomas Jefferson and a few others who had a hand in creating the US, the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution considered a census vital to the public interest. That'll be Article 1, Section 2, again. That's the first part after the Preamble .

Diverse courts, up to SCOTUS, have affirmed that the Census can ask whatever questions it feels germane to its mission.

There's a pretty good precis at the 2010 Census site.

As for the 'toilet' question. Statistics. Watching trends over the decades are very useful.

If you know how many toilets there are per person in Anytown, USA, you can statistically determine how many toilets there may be in ten, twenty, thirty years, which means that there will be a need for more water, because there will be more people, more houses (Fire Departments LIKE having lots of hydrants about the place. Makes it easier for them to fight fires.) and, potentially, more water treatment plants and sewage treatment plants.

OMG! SOCIALIZED FIRE DEPARTMENTS! SOCIALIZED CLEAN WATER! SOCIALIZED SEWAGE TREATMENT!

TEH HORRORZ!

So, the bottom line is, you just proved yourself to be one of those morons who got their Official Libertarian Panties in a wad over a legitimate question in the Census.

Please! Stop using the Internet, You're getting your stupid ALL OVER everything.

kthnxbai!

A family with three or more children will need to take two vehicles to go on a family vacation if they cannot afford a station wagon/SUV/minivan. That is in no way more efficient than them using a station wagon/SUV/minivan. It is probably significantly less efficient.

What fraction of families in the United States have three or more children? The census data (see Table HH-4) say that in 2009 the average number of people per household was just 2.56. A shade under 10 percent of households contain five or more people (and not all of those will be two parents and their three kids), only about 3.5 percent clock in with six or more people.

Even then -- how often does the two- and three-child family need a large vehicle to move their cargo for a vacation? The family can use a smaller, less-expensive, more-efficient vehicle for their day-to-day lives, and rent a minivan or trailer for a week or two when they need the extra capacity.

This is actually something more of us should be doing right now. Forget saving the planet, for a moment -- we'd all save hundreds or thousands of real dollars buying and operating smaller vehicles and renting the extra capacity on an as-needed basis.

No, it's not that; it's the perception that lawyers are making a bit more than the $48/hr the average person makes. The lawyer worked 6 months, at 40hr/wk that's $340/hr? Of course lawyers work for free: every so often, a lawyer must do volunteer work as a "public defender."

$48/hr? Obviously you don't mean USD, so what currency are you using for that figure?

Going by the US 2005 Census, the mean salary in the US was $43,362 a year. Figuring a 40 hour week that comes out to about $20.85 an hour. Personally I think that number is a bit high.

Living in a household with someone who owns a gun doesn't automatically grant me ownership that person's gun, so you're "simple Google search" didn't prove anything about his claim.

I see that you are both Google-challenged and statistically-challenged, as well.

USA QuickFacts from The US Census Bureau

Population, 2000: 281,424,602
Households, 2000: 105,480,101

The poll was from 2001.

39% of 105,480,101 households is 41,137,239 households.

So, the minimum for gun-owning individuals (one owner per household) was 41,137,239/281,424,602 or 14.6%

That's without considering households that have multiple gun owners, or households in community property states where husband and wife have joint ownership.

It's still 5 times greater than the "estimate" provided by the troll.

Isn't getting 1/10 of that demographic to vote a HUGE improvement over previous years?

1 in 10 would have been much worse than the usual turnout in that age group, but the actual turnout was ~47% in 2004 and ~49% in 2008, which was a significant increase from the ~36% in 2000.

Sources: (2004/2008, 2000)

Isn't getting 1/10 of that demographic to vote a HUGE improvement over previous years?

1 in 10 would have been much worse than the usual turnout in that age group, but the actual turnout was ~47% in 2004 and ~49% in 2008, which was a significant increase from the ~36% in 2000.

Sources: (2004/2008, 2000)

In the last US presidential election only about 60% [gmu.edu] of the people eligible to vote, actually did. However, I bet a much greater number of people complained about the president/candidates. I remember reading somewhere that even though Hollywood (Puff Daddy etc..) started the whole "Vote of Die" campaign to get young people (age 18-24) to vote, approximately 1 in 10 actually did.

Wherever you read that is wrong. 18-24 turnout was 49% in 2008, and 47% in 2004. This is (to say the least) quite a bit more than "1 in 10".

I always tell people, if you didn't vote in in the election, don't complain.

The US consistently has very low turnout among advanced democracies, which is well-explained by its electoral system which does not elect governments which are effectively representative of the opinions that motivate voters.

More people would vote if the electoral system produced results that they perceived as being worth the effort of voting.

Are they really a big market for us? Those numbers tell me we DO have the power to hold them accountable.

According to the report, proportionately large increases in income can have a temporary effect on overall happiness.

According to the American Community Surveys report:

Real median household income in the United States fell between the 2007 ACS and the 2008 ACS. Household income decreased 1.2 percent, from $52,673 to $52,029.3

The median household income estimates in the 2008 ACS ranged from a median of $70,545 for Maryland to $37,790 for Mississippi.

Not only are you very rude, but you're also wrong. She filled out as much of the form as possible by your appearance and other available data. I hope you didn't want to be misrepresented!

According to The National Hydrogen Association, this morning there were 72 fully operational battle^H^H^H fueling stations in the United States and Canada. ( I wonder how long it will take them to update their database?)

"U.S. & Canadian
Stations as of 8/26/2010
Operational: 72
Planned: 24"

http://www.hydrogenassociation.org/general/fuelingSearch.asp

If we guess that the mean age is 5 years ( Reasonable since 1/3 growth is currently planned, suggesting rapid expansion) That would be about 360 station years of operating experience. So in a given year a Hydrogen station has about a 1/360 chance of exploding. If there were 1000 stations built (20 per state) then about one a day would explode.

This analysis has the problem of a small sample size. (Was there a 0% failure rate up to now?) Hopefully, this case will be examined and its failure mode eliminated from future operations.

Now to make the comparison for gasoline:

For 2002 the Economic Census Industry Series Report indicates that there were 120,902 gasoline stations (126,889 in 1997)

The Petroleum Equipment Institute has some tracking of fires at stations. From 1992 to 2010 they have reports of approximately 200 fires that appear to be ESD related. 120,000 stations * 18 years > 2 million station years and 200 incidents give about 1/10,000 chance that a station will have an ESD fire event in a given year.

Of course not all fires are ESD related, recent years have had very few, not all fires are big explosions and gasoline stations get used much much more often (this Hydrogen station was reported to be used about once a day)

Example of presumed ESD caused gas station fire.

So if you ignore the fact that gas station could easily be used >100 of times a day instead of once a day, then the risk looks to be only about 30x greater for Hydrogen for an ESD linked fire.

Petroleum Equipment Institute: ESD data

The average lifetime earnings of someone with just a HS diploma is about $1.2M. 1/100th of $40M is $400K.

Remember, Steve Jobs never even attained a Bachelor degree, and how much does he make? Bill Gates? I don't know that either of them participate here on /., but Steve Wozniak does (or at least did within the last two years), and he didn't earn his Bachelor degree until 10 years after founding Apple.

This may be a bit off topic, but you really need to be careful about using absolute, blanket terms, especially when you're trying to argue a point. In general, I agree that CEOs are making a LOT more money than they should. When someone I know very well was laid off from HP a year ago, their severance package didn't come anywhere close to $40M, and that person is absolutely disgusted by this.

95.2% have had an opposite sex partner, 5.7% a same sex sexual contact
10% had 1 contact
8.8% had 2
29.4 had 3 to 6
23.2 had 7 to 14
and 23.8 had 15 or more

Median was 5.9

For Males 30 to 34

97.2% have had an opposite sex partner,
10.7% had 1 contact
6.9% had
28.5 had 3 to 6
21.9 had 7 to 14
and 29.2 had 15 or more

Median was 6.4

There are differences based on race - Latinos have a median of 4.5 and African Americans of 8.3 - and sex: a quick glance at the numbers shows that a much greater percentage of women have had 1 partner (25-29 being 22.5% and 20-24 at 20.5%) than their male peers.

Gods, why can't all the states be that progressive.....

Population 1.32 million

White 95.5%
[25% French-Canadian]
Hispanic 2.6%
Asian 1.9%
Black 1.2%
Native American 0.3%

Women owned business 25%
Minority owned 2.7%

QuickFacts New Hampshire

The Free State Project is a proposal to have 20,000 individuals move to New Hampshire, with the intent of reducing the size and scope of government at the local, state, and federal levels. The Free State Project holds the annual New Hampshire Liberty Forum and the annual Porcupine Freedom Festival, also known as PorcFest New Hampshire
As of August 2010, there were 10,300 participants, 838 of which had moved to New Hampshire. Free State Project

The odds are against you when you start a small business. Therefore nobody should start a small business

I'm sorry, but my head is about to explode. Either you are not in the US or you've no idea HOW our economy works.

http://www.census.gov/epcd/www/smallbus.html

Most jobs in the US are supplied by small businesses.

I am not arguing the numbers; I'm saying the argumentation was LAME! This whole subject requires more research and data than one little, incomplete chart. You might want to start with TSAOUS http://www.census.gov/compendia/statab/cats/births_deaths_marriages_divorces.html and look at the various categories from 106-124. Any almanac has better statistics than what you have shown. We do not have to be experts in order to see that you have a bone to pick and that your argument does not hold water.

No statistics are better than corrupted statistics.

The Census Bureau did the first high detail street mapping of the U.S., I'm pretty sure the mapping companies purchased their data from the Census (or downloaded it for free; Bruce Perens spent quite a bit of effort forcing that issue).

If Google was going to generate their own map data, they would certainly start with the TIGER data:

http://www.census.gov/geo/www/tiger/

I'd be thrilled to find a place here where small, independent businesses are actually thriving, but one doesn't exist.

Maybe where you live small businesses may be hard to find but not where I am. My sister runs her own business as do others I know or knew. I'm hoping to start my own small business. Now I know it's hard in some places, like Europe, but not in the US. Here's the small business stats from the US Census Bureau. The stats are a bit out of date, the latest numbers are from 2004 but I doubt the numbers have changed that much since then. One thing I find revealing is where it says "Since 1997, however, nonemployers have grown faster than employer firms." Nonemployers are the self-employed.

Also remember the vast majority of air travel is for business purposes, and those people are under the impression that they *don't* have a choice to just not fly.

Then they aren't paying attention. There's GoToMeeting as well as other ways to hold meeting online. Why businesses don't even need permanent offices now, they can rent temporary or shared office space now. Need to meet a client? Rent an office for a day. That is if meeting in a restaurant or cafe will not work. These offices even have broadband access, heck Barnes and Noble book stores have free wifi.

Falcon

This election was between two unknowns, one black, the other white in a majority black district.

This is a Senate race. The "district" is the entire state, and South Carolina has a white majority. http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/45000.html

Even since Reagen the real wage of the middle and lower classes has actually *decreased*,

Citation needed

Median individual income by age and sex

Some fun facts about income:
From 1947 to 1974 individual income in 2008 dollars for all age groups and sex on average increased annually.
Ages 15 years and over on average increased annually, males 2.44%, females 1.40%
Ages 25 to 34, males 2.95%, females 2.27%
Ages 35 to 44, males 3.06%, females 1.86%
Ages 45 to 54, males 3.21%, females 2.21%
Ages 55 to 64, males 2.94%, females 2.63%
Ages 65 and older, males 3.25%, females 2.81%

From 1947 to 1974 the GDP averaged 4.23% growth annually.

From 1975 to 2008 individual income in 2008 dollars had negative annual change almost across the board for males but females still managed small increases.
Ages 15 years and over on average increased, males 0.01%, females 1.63%
Ages 25 to 34, males -0.59%, females 1.11%
Ages 35 to 44, males -0.31%, females 1.37%
Ages 45 to 54, males -0.15%, females 1.31%
Ages 55 to 64, males 0.22%, females 1.81%
Ages 65 and older, males 1.01%, females 1.25%

From 1957 to 2008 the GDP averaged 2.68% growth.

There is a reason you hear "Median Household Income" in the media rather than individual income. As the number of households with two working adults has increased in the United States wages themselves have been stagnant. Both adults in a household have to work to survive. With many single adults now living at home what is the next step, include their children in household income to perpetuate the lie about increasing income?

It is unfortunate that people forget that the US economy stagnated during the leftist craze in the 60s and 70s and took off again with the deregulation of the Reagan years

You are seriously mistaken.

I guess you missed the fact that your chart peaks at 1966 before flattening out.

I guess you also failed to notice that the flat spots correlate to wars and oil embargoes. If you can assume that deregulation that started in the 80s and continued through the 90s and 2000s resulted in the upward trend in the stock market then we can also assume that all the regulations and unions that came out of the 30s and 40s resulted in the stock market gains through out the late 1930s, late 1940s, the 50s and the early 60s until the Vietnam war started and the oil embargoes reared their ugly head.

One bit of data that is not in any of these charts or spread sheets is private debt. What many are ignoring today is the fact that since individual income started to stagnate in the mid 1970s personal spending did not and the private debt owed by individuals has soared from about 20% of GDP in the 1940s and earlier to 100%+ of GDP today. Private individuals have been making up for the deficiency in wages by borrowing more.

It won't end up in the US because the US won't import anything from the DPRK.

http://www.census.gov/foreign-trade/balance/c5790.html#2008

Theres been what, 1.5 million dollars in trade since 2000, those must have something to do with the starvation aid and the process to get them to end the nuclear weapons program.

Well said; thanks for that humanitarian analysis.

According to the US Census Bureau:

"In 2008, 39.8 million [Americans] were in poverty, up from 37.3 million in 2007 -- the second consecutive annual increase in the number of people in poverty." -- Source

YOU FAIL AT HISTORY.

First they fight against outlawing slavery, to the point of nearly destroying the country,

Actually, it's the Republicans who did that. Disgustingly, you talk about it as if were a bad thing.

then they re-enslave millions of blacks with government "benefits" programs

Poverty rates of African American families has gone steadily down since the Civil rights era, from 40.9% in 1966 to 23.1% in 2006. [source]

47 million uninsured people in America =\= 47 million uninsured Americans.

http://www.census.gov/prod/2008pubs/p60-235.pdf

Also note percentage of $75K+ without insurance (~10% - 9.1mil), and percentage of non-native/non-naturalized without insurance (~44% - 9.8mil)(Both stats can be seen on page 30, table 6.)

I'm confused by your statement. Pretty much by definition, you'll find K-12 schools in any metro area where there aren't tumbleweeds rolling down Main street. Other than a few very high cost metro areas, teachers make enough to actually live where they work. However, it's pretty slim pickings when it comes to finding places that can support computer techs making 90K/year. Off the top of my head I'd say you're looking at companies larger than 100, and possibly even larger than 500. The former puts it outside the US definition of "small", and the latter puts it outside the definition of "medium". Employers under 100 employees are 6 times more numerous than 100-499, which in turn are 5 times more numerous than 500+ employee gigs. To put it another way, there are 30 employers with fewer than 100 employees for every employer with 500+ employees. http://www.census.gov/epcd/www/smallbus.html

No Census taker should ever enter your home as part of their job. They do the job from the doorway. Here is the reference:

http://2010.census.gov/2010census/privacy/more-security-topics.php

If one does ask to enter your home, close the door in their face and call the police (or get your shuriken, whatever applies to you).

• I grant that college education has value. I don't grant that universal college education is better than the current partial college education. For example, in the US we're seeing a drop out rate (compare the percent who get some college education to those who get a degree) of almost 50%. While I'm sure some of those are doing so for financial reasons, I doubt that is a majority.
• I think there are a number of pervasive myths about the value of a college education. This thread illustrates a few of them (such as the number of Nobel laureates indicates the quality of a college program for average people or that getting an education will be better for anyone, a sort of one-size-fits-all approach to life).
• The same parties advocating a college education have been overseeing the decline of the K-12 public education system in the US.
• Employers have been complaining about the quality of college graduates. Some of it's pragmatic (they want college graduates with more vocational knowledge) or self-serving (want to show the "need" for more relatively cheap H1-B imports), but there appears to be a real problem of declining quality in college graduates.
• I believe the current student loan programs have had a harmful effect on colleges and their integrity, for example, leading to an increase in student cheating combined with lack of college enforcement (as I see it, colleges get their money no matter what the quality of the student they produce). This is another indication to me that a free tuition approach wouldn't improve the system.
• We haven't demonstrated that free tuition is better than paid tuition from the point of view of the student. I find people value something more, if they have to pay for it.
• We haven't demonstrated that the US can pay for this system.

On this last point, I have this to note. According to the College Board, in 2006-2007 public school students paid $5800 for that year just in tuition while private students (after financial aid) pay $22,000. At a glance, total college cost is over $100k for a degree (that is, money spent by the student not everyone else), public or private (including room and board, "fees"). A free education would cover all these expenses.

Given that there are currently, almost 20 million college students who are US residents, that's an effective cost of near $2 trillion just to educate the current group of students to a degree. This appears to be somewhat less than 60% of total people of this age, so the actual number who could get a degree are about 50% higher, I'd guess. That means our free, universal education now costs somewhere around $3 trillion to educate this estimated group to a degree. Suppose it takes six years to do so (average stay apparently for public college students BTW), then that's $500 billion per year of spending that has to come out of the federal budget. While that may be better than one Iraq war (which this is roughly equivalent to in cost), it's a huge amount of money to burn.

We also have to consider that this isn't the only source of cost, since there probably would be other subsidies that would get paid to colleges (eg, the public universities are already subsidized by state and federal governments, traditionally) to cover the additional students under a universal college education policy. There's also the matter that education costs are increasing far faster than the rate of inflation or GDP. Since 1986, inflation doubled, GDP tripled, and education c

• I grant that college education has value. I don't grant that universal college education is better than the current partial college education. For example, in the US we're seeing a drop out rate (compare the percent who get some college education to those who get a degree) of almost 50%. While I'm sure some of those are doing so for financial reasons, I doubt that is a majority.
• I think there are a number of pervasive myths about the value of a college education. This thread illustrates a few of them (such as the number of Nobel laureates indicates the quality of a college program for average people or that getting an education will be better for anyone, a sort of one-size-fits-all approach to life).
• The same parties advocating a college education have been overseeing the decline of the K-12 public education system in the US.
• Employers have been complaining about the quality of college graduates. Some of it's pragmatic (they want college graduates with more vocational knowledge) or self-serving (want to show the "need" for more relatively cheap H1-B imports), but there appears to be a real problem of declining quality in college graduates.
• I believe the current student loan programs have had a harmful effect on colleges and their integrity, for example, leading to an increase in student cheating combined with lack of college enforcement (as I see it, colleges get their money no matter what the quality of the student they produce). This is another indication to me that a free tuition approach wouldn't improve the system.
• We haven't demonstrated that free tuition is better than paid tuition from the point of view of the student. I find people value something more, if they have to pay for it.
• We haven't demonstrated that the US can pay for this system.

On this last point, I have this to note. According to the College Board, in 2006-2007 public school students paid $5800 for that year just in tuition while private students (after financial aid) pay $22,000. At a glance, total college cost is over $100k for a degree (that is, money spent by the student not everyone else), public or private (including room and board, "fees"). A free education would cover all these expenses.

Given that there are currently, almost 20 million college students who are US residents, that's an effective cost of near $2 trillion just to educate the current group of students to a degree. This appears to be somewhat less than 60% of total people of this age, so the actual number who could get a degree are about 50% higher, I'd guess. That means our free, universal education now costs somewhere around $3 trillion to educate this estimated group to a degree. Suppose it takes six years to do so (average stay apparently for public college students BTW), then that's $500 billion per year of spending that has to come out of the federal budget. While that may be better than one Iraq war (which this is roughly equivalent to in cost), it's a huge amount of money to burn.

We also have to consider that this isn't the only source of cost, since there probably would be other subsidies that would get paid to colleges (eg, the public universities are already subsidized by state and federal governments, traditionally) to cover the additional students under a universal college education policy. There's also the matter that education costs are increasing far faster than the rate of inflation or GDP. Since 1986, inflation doubled, GDP tripled, and education c

I don't know about Texas, but I went to the US census site really quickly http://www.census.gov/compendia/statab/cats/population/religion.html.

There's still a great %age of the American adult population that identifies with a religion, mostly Christian. When you look at "other" religions - Buddhism, Muslim, wikkian and non-religious categories, they are increasing. This of course, doesn't account for teenagers who've made a decision about religion and not able to complete the Census survey. There's no way of telling if these younger people are more or less religious.

It depends on whether you believe that even our current population is sustainable over the long run. There's the problem - I think we exceeded long-term stability a few billion people ago - at least if we're talking about having everyone with a first-world standard of living.

Let's look at something that's a bit easier to model - the US deficit. Sure, right now the US is still able to float bond issues ... and as long as interest rates are held artificially low, the deficit is "sort of" manageable. However, once rates go back to their historic norms, the deficit will be impossible to contain without draconian measures. We passed the "long-term sustainable deficit" several years ago, at the $10T mark. It won't be much longer before the US is in the 1:1 deficit/gdp ratio club - and tipping points like that tend to cause sudden changes - just look at Greece.

Same thing with over-population. It only takes a few generations to go from sparse to wayyy-overcrowded.

US Population: 1810: 7,239,881
US Population: 1860: 31,443,321
US Population: 1910: 92,228,496
US Population: 1960: 179,323,175
US Population: 2010: 309,270,235
US Population: 2060: 486,000,000 (estimated).

http://www.census.gov/population/www/popclockus.html

Or, to graph it:
1810: a
1860: abc
1910: abcdefghi
1960: abcdefghijklmnopqr
2010: abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzabcde
2160: abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzabcdefghijklmnopqrst

This is not sustainable. Do you really think that the US can support a domestic population of over a billion in 2089?

SS pays out more from what is collected from the tax than what it collects from the US treasuries. So more of the money coming in pays to the beneficiaries than what the beneficiaries "investments" are paying to them. That is what makes it a pyramid scheme. I stand behind this belief.

It was never designed to have a surplus. It was never designed to be a "real" pension. It was designed to be a zero-principal pension. That anything comes from investment interest is a side effect, not a goal. They could easily have changed it so that it was designed to work at a small surplus until it was fully endowed. But that didn't design it that way. That would have front-loaded the costs to where it couldn't fulfill its immediate demand to stop seniors from starving to death.

It seems to me that you are trying to get an emotionally charged word to fit a program you don't like, not because it's the best word to describe it, but because you want to "taint" SS with the bad word.

Currently the birth rate in the US stands at 2.1%, which is exactly the replacement rate according to most anthropologists. In 2008, 1,046,539 individuals were naturalized as US citizens. In 2009, the population was estimated to be 307 million, going by those figures we have an addition to the population of 0.3% from immigration each year, which is insignificant and doesn't truly change the figure of the birth rate. I based by opinion from these figures which shows our population to be at the replacement stage right now. A drop in birthrate would mean, according to my understanding, that more people would end up dying than would be replaced over the long term, which eventually in this scenario, would end up with more people leaving the work force than would be in it. Trends point to this being the case. Just because I interpret the data this way doesn't mean I'm a liar. I believe my interpretation to be correct.

I understand what you are saying. But I do simpler things and look at the total population over time and I see very very straight lines. We are no longer growing exponentially as some of the 3rd world still is, but I see nothing that indicates there is any drop in population any time in the future, and if there was, there are millions that would move to the US if we let them in.
Source: http://www.google.com/publicdata?ds=uspopulation&met=population&tdim=true&dl=en&hl=en&q=us+population

You have been the first person to have called me a liar in my adult life.

You use a non-standard definition of pyramid, then pretend like it's the standard one. You use a subset of the population's rate of change to indicate a population trend that is contradictory to the actual trend, and you meet my arguments with accusations of my being a troll and ignoring anything I said about the weaknesses in your statements. When you say things that give them impression that's the opposite of reality with the deliberate goal of misleading, that's a lie. From the dismissal, I took that to be a recognition that you were purposeful in your statements. If you were not (and this time you responded more verbosely) then it wasn't a lie, just an error.

Can you see how looking at the constant, level graph on Google I linked to indicates steady growth, regardless of any metric someone may choose to look at? http://www.census.gov/population/www/popclockus.html There's a net gain of one person ever 12 seconds. That's more than 2.5 million a year. That's not a danger of shrinkage. Even if we stopped births, we could just triple migration and fix the problem (and given the number of people denied entry to the US, I don't think tripling immigration would be hard).

Y2K Census data if you take the data for metro areas (this is conservative) sort by density, then compute the cumulative population, you find that:

1. 40 million people live in metro areas with density exceeding 2000 per square mile
2. the next 20 million, 1395 to 2000 per square mile (60M)
3. the next 20 million, 1200 to 1395 per square mile (80M)
4. the next 40 million, 1032 to 1200 per square mile (120M)
5. the next 40 million, 777 to 1032 per square mile (160M)

Out of the Y2K total of 281 million people, about 20% (60 million) live in metro areas more dense than 2000 people per square mile. Over half live in places denser than 777/square mile, which may not be dense enough. To make the case that we're not like Europe, we'd need similar numbers, but it seems safe to say that an awful lot of people live in decently dense places (note that Atlanta metro (692/mi^2) did not make the top half -- they are at the 176M cumulative mark)

Because these are metro areas, there is still room for tighter and looser clustering -- so for example, there are surely parts of the SF/Oakland Metro area that are too spread out for commuting (there is the small matter of the Bay Bridge), but there are also tight clusters within less-dense metro areas -- for example, the Boston Metro area is at the 143 million mark (last 40 million above) at 926 ppl per square mile, but I start my commute in one town of 4900/mi^2, cross a town of 7900/mi^2, cross a town of 1800/mi^2, and end in a town of 2100/mi^2. This suggests that metro areas may be too granular, but it also suggests that what matters more than density, is distance to work; I would not be surprised to discover that there's a higher percentage of people working-from-home in some of interesting, very-low-density places.

The median commute distance in the US (as near as I can tell, it is hard to determine exactly) is somewhere around 11 miles. This may be a more important number than mere density, because some of the big metro areas have expensive housing and long-distance commutes (SF/Oakland, in particular, as well as NY, and Boston, for that matter). But, a 10-mile commute is doable by bike -- in particular, doable by an old fat guy on a cargo bike. I knew this when I started, because I used to ride 10-mile time trials as a kid and they were no big deal.

What a lot of people are missing about this is that the Hispanics citizens in the state of Arizona largely support this law. Arizona is about 60% Caucasian, and about 30% Hispanic [source]. Rasmussen shows that this law has about a 70% approval rate within the state [source]. That means that is *every* Caucasian person in the state was in favor of this law (which is obviously not true), then more than one in three Hispanic citizen would also favor the law.

In reality, a strong majority of Hispanic citizens in Arizona support this legislation. That's because your skin color doesn't have to be one color to feel the negative effects of illegal aliens in the workforce. In fact, one could argue that the influx of illegals, who are almost entirely Hispanic, has created an expectation that Hispanics are willing to work for less money, thereby hurting the Hispanic citizens of Arizona disproportionately.

Note also that there is a fairly high level of concern over the rights of US citizens -- that's because, contrary to popular belief, the right is composed of lots of libertarians, and libertarian thinking is a part of the Republican party base. That means that effectively, the voters are indeed concerned about negative effects of this law, but feel they will be outweighed by the positive results. If it is abused, those same voters are likely to swing to the other side, and repeal the law.

Your analysis rests on GDP per capita, as if that's how much workers mak, but it's not. GDP per capita might be $48,000 in the US, but it's not shared evenly by everyone. The median personal income is only about $32,100. Chinese median personal income is hard to find cited, but in 2003 urban median household income was about $900. In 2007, the US median household income was about $50,000. The American median is about 56x the Chinese urban median (rural China's large and poor population would make the difference even bigger, but they're not competing with Americans for factory jobs).

The GDP per capita is an average that includes all the money made by the few richest. All the profits on labor taken by corporations and investors. In America that disparity is pretty large, but in China it's larger.

In NC we have the highest taxes in the southeast.

Florida is no longer part of the southeast?

In NC we have the highest taxes in the southeast. We still don't have decent schools and we have some of the most dangerous bridges in the country (our roads are no picnic either). NC used to be called the "good roads state" but that no longer applies... This is just another money grab by Raleigh since they spent like drunken sailors during the dot com boom and are now broke (just like a drunken sailor).

OK

http://www.census.gov/geo/www/tiger/tigermap.html

You can already get much of that data pretty easily from the federal government, e.g. your hypothetical racial map for Chicago.

I do think there are probably bad things one can do with demographic data as opposed to good ones, but I'm not sure you can do much by simply hiding the data. De-facto racial segregation in housing exists long after the eradication of de-jure segregation, and even if you hid the data, people who live in a city are going to notice that neighborhoods have different demographics, and if they were going to avoid neighborhoods with races they don't like, they can (and do) already do it without the app.

Perhaps 6.8ish - at least at the time of this posting. World population clock FTW And since we could fit them all in the United States alone with roughly the same population density of Connecticut, I think we are covered in terms of living space and crops. In fact, if we went to factory farms in Asia and Africa and cleaned out the populations to live Connecticut-style, we'd be covered (~750 people / sq. mile). Since that won't ever happen, we can still comfortably fit everyone with the same population density as Tennessee (which doesn't strike me as a very urban state) using everything but Australia and Antarctica - with lots of room for farms and such on each continent (especially Australia, which I emptied with my calculator).

Could it eventually become a problem? Anything is possible. Is it a problem now? No. Should more be done to educate rapid-growth societies of potential harm? Many think so. I am in favor of reasonable education towards all ends but I don't appreciate some of the tactics taken towards some individuals. Planned Parenthood started out as a racist organization (I have no current input and do not speculate about present policies) that sought to diminish minorities and lower income groups as a form of social eugenics. Any education needs to focus on good stewardship of the resources available rather than seeking to keep one group in control over another (since Rhodesia, Rwanda and others have shown how well that works).

His point is that if we stop spending so much money on wars in far away lands and put that money into out school systems, our own people and nation will be much better off in the long run.

I have to concur with this view
All our national wealth is spent on military industrial complex while the nation is slipping away into 3rd world status.

Fist of all, we do not have the money we are using to fight the wars. It would be impossible to spend it on education unless we are going to continue to spend money we don't have. Until recently, the wars have been funded off budget which stops congress from just re-spending the money after the war doesn't need it. It's hard to say what will happen when the war is over but it appears that trillion dollar deficits aren't all that startling any more. Eventually this deficit spending will backfire then all of the tax revenue is used for paying our debts instead of financing the programs we shouldn't be having in the first place.

Second, the money for wars is spend at a federal level, the states are primarily responsible for their school funding so nothing is stopping the state from raising taxes and spending more. Certainly the federal taxes haven't been raised to account for the war spending outside of tax cuts being stopped. What the mayor is really asking for is money from outside the state because his own constituents do not agree with his logic.

Finally, the amount of money we are talking about is a misnomer. It's actually less then $1 per student per year increase in funding. There are 52,935,996 school aged children from 5-17 years of age as estimated in 2008. Now this estimate doesn't include students starting school before age 5 or students over 18 in school. It also doesn't guarantee all of the population referenced is in school but it's a decent place to start. Anyways, it works out to just over $3,000 per kid if you divert all funding from Iraq and Afghanistan to the schools but do not count the fact that members of the military are normally stationed elsewhere so part of that funding is going to not be accessible. Currently, there are about 2,284,856 student aged children in Illinois (same source). So an increase of $6,854,568,000 would be seen if that money was diverted. Illinois already spends something like $51.6 trillion dollars (as of 2008) per year, that would be around a 13% increase in spending but why should it come from the feds and not the citizens of Illinois? It's not like the feds are already taking it, hell- it's already not paid for.

Illinois is currently fighting a 13 billion dollar budget deficit because they failed to do proper spending and federal government requirements for program mandates. Do you really think that 6 billion would go to the students? Even if you passed a law mandating it would, they would just pull other funding from the schools to make a run about look legal. It's happened many times before and happens in almost any state when they receive federal funding.

The majority of Americans are morons that still believe Saddam was behind 9/11. Education can fix this ..

I believe this too. However, I do not limit my beliefs to 9/11 issues.

We need to redirect our priorities sooner than later. The longer we continue to dick around not dealing with our social problems, the worse things will become. Improving our school system is a great place to begin

I think the problem is sort of like you not seeing the forest for the trees. The problem is actually dicking around with social problems in the first place. The federal government shouldn't be involve in most of them and the state should delegate most of the issues down stream to localities within their control so that the money or programs are more effective.