Reality-Based Engineering: 2007/04

Tuesday, April 24, 2007

Revenue gap could sink our ship

The unfunded liability for Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security is $70 trillion dollars. The total amount of tax revenue collected since the beginning of the Republic is $45 trillion.

If we aren't going to cut benefits (spending), what is the Democratic plan for solving this problem?

Labels: Entitlements, Spending

Tuesday, April 17, 2007

This article led me to dig a little...

blogger crapped out on me, so I wont type the whole post again. But, the linked article talks about the mayor of Hiroshima, Japan was murdered by handgun by a member of the yakuza. The article had this blurb in it:

Organized crime groups are behind most shootings in Japan, with two-thirds of the country's 53 known shootings last year being gang-related, according to the National Police Agency. Police estimate there are about 84,500 gangsters across Japan.

53 shootings. Look up in the 2005 (latest data available) FBI stats for just murders by guns, and the number is 10,100. Holy fucking shit. 10,100 to 53. And that's still not a fair comparision, since it's only total shootings in Japan and only murders in the USA, meaning there's probably more to be added to 10,100 number to account for all shootings. Japan's population is 127,400,000 people, v. 300,000,000 in the US.

Labels: crime, Japan, murder rates, USA