The Daily Cannibal |
| How Much Mideast Oil Do We Use? Posted: 26 Apr 2012 12:04 AM PDT  How expensive is gas, actually? Some interesting information from our friend Russ out on the left coast that I bet will surprise you: ■ "Most of what Americans spend their money on is made in China." Not so. Just 2.7 percent of personal consumption expenditures go to Chinese-made goods and services. 88.5 percent of consumer spending is on American-made goods and services. According to The Bureau of Labor Statistics, Americans in 2010 spent 34 percent of their income on housing, 13 percent on food, 11 percent on insurance and pensions, 7 percent on health care, and 2 percent on education. Most of those services and goods are made in America. Only 7 percent of food is imported, according to the USDA. The truth, surprising to many, is that real manufacturing output today is near an all-time high. What’s dropped precipitously in recent decades is manufacturing employment. Technology and automation has allowed American manufacturers to build more stuff with far fewer workers than in the past ■ "We owe most of our debt to China." Another "ain't so." China owns 7.6 percent of U.S. government debt.The largest holder of (the $14.9 trillion) debt is the federal government itself. Various government trust funds like the Social Security trust fund own about $4.4 trillion worth of Treasury securities. The Federal Reserve owns another $1.6 trillion. The rest of our debt is owned by state and local governments ($700 billion), private domestic investors ($3.1 trillion), and other non-Chinese foreign investors ($3.5 trillion) — mostly Japan and the United Kingdom. ■ "We get most of our oil from the Middle East." Uh-uh. Just 9.8 percent of oil consumed in the U.S. comes from the Middle East. It is true that 51 percent of the oil we use is imported, but most comes from Canada and Mexico. ■ "Gasoline prices are outrageously expensive compared with what our parents and grandparents paid." I researched this one myself. It is true that in 1918 gasoline sold for 25 cents a gallon and didn't rise above 50 cents a gallon until 1974. But adjusted for inflation, the 1918 price was the equivalent of $3.75 a gallon in 2011 dollars. The 1974 price was equivalent to a little over $2 a gallon. In terms of 2011 dollars, gasoline has never been higher than that 1918 price. It has taken 94 years, and we are just now entering record territory. The information is from http://inflationdata.com.  |
| Posted: 25 Apr 2012 03:36 PM PDT  Walking Against Walker in Wisconsin Blaming “outside agitators” for populist opposition is a standard tactic of tyrants and demagogues. Syria’s Assad government peddles conspiracy theories that foreign agitators are stoking the uprising there, and the dictators who’ve already fallen before the wave of the Arab Spring did the same in their countries. During the civil rights movement’s Freedom Rides in 1961, Alabama’s white supremacist governor John Patterson began his declaration of martial law thus: “Whereas, as a result of outside agitators coming into Alabama to violate our laws and customs…” (quote from Freedom Riders by Raymond Arsenault, p. 239). He even leveled the charge against federal authorities: When the Kennedy Administration sent federal marshals to help control KKK-incited rioting, Patterson said, “We consider you interlopers here, and we feel that your presence here will only serve to agitate and provoke the racial situation.” (ibid p. 228). You don’t have to travel to distant lands or the previous century to observe the phenomenon. This year, Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker, fighting a recall drive by activists protesting his anti-union measures, told The New Yorker, “We’ve always had a kind of Spirit of Wisconsin…And I think a lot of that kind of changed when the money and the bodies came in from outside of Wisconsin.” Opponents of an Oklahoma plan to eliminate a state income tax have gone so far as to criticize Oklahoma’s governor for consulting Arthur Laffer, a prominent economist who has the gall to not be from Oklahoma. It gets even more local than that; just last week, for example, the Santa Monica Daily Press used the term “outside agitators” in reporting a fight over a tuition rise at a local college. And so on. This tendency to unfairly fix blame away from ourselves not only corrupts us as moral beings but can have awful consequences for whole populations. Yet Western culture as a whole has a problem with taking responsibility. Senator Jeff Sessions picked at this scab just the other day when, according to an AP report, he told reporters that President Obama needs to take responsibility for the Secret Service, GSA and Solyndra scandals, but that “I don’t sense that this president has shown that kind of managerial leadership.” There’s no easier way to denigrate someone than to accuse him of abdicating responsibility, and if you’re a national leader, whether Barack Obama or Bashar al-Assad, you’ve got an awful lot of it you could abdicate. It’s a deadly squeeze, isn’t it? Anxious to save our reputations, we’re prone to shifting blame away from ourselves, either onto some variety of “outside agitators” or, in other contexts, onto our political opponents. But we look pretty bad when we’re called on it – or, as in the possible case of Scott Walker, recalled on it.  |
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