US meets UK

I love my brother in law for many reasons, including the fact that he makes my sister insanely happy.  But, I really love my brother in law because when he gets an email like the one below. He fact checks it! The red parts are the original email, and the black parts are Jon’s additions.

How many zeros in a billion?

This is too true to be funny.

Too wrong to be true too…

The next time you hear a politician use the 
Word ‘billion’ in a casual manner, think about 
whether you want the ‘politicians’ spending 
YOUR tax money.

A billion is a difficult number to comprehend. But one advertising agency did a good job of 
putting that figure into some perspective in
 one of it’s releases.

A.
 A billion seconds ago it was 1959.

A billion seconds ago was 1978, not 1959.  I have lived almost a billion seconds.  That’s a pretty big error – unless the email was originally written in 1990…

B. 
A billion minutes ago Jesus was alive.

Close, but no.  In 107AD, Trajan was emperor of Rome and Christians were still just one messianic mystery cult among several in Judea.

C.
 A billion hours ago our ancestors were 
Living in the Stone Age.

Well, that’s true, but it’s a pretty big target to hit.

D.
 A billion days ago no-one walked on the earth on two feet.

Well, if you’re a creationist, sure.  No humans.  But there were Hominidae, like orangutans and gorillas.  This isn’t ancient-dinosaurs-ancient, but still pretty long ago.

E. 
A billion dollars ago was only 
8 hours and 20 minutes, 
At the rate our government
Is spending it.

Mostly in Iraq and Afghanistan, so we either have to leave those places or spend the money.  The Republicans have been pushing for more and more troops and war spending.

While this thought is still fresh in our brain…
let’s take a look at  New Orleans  ..
It’s amazing what you can learn with some simple division.

Louisiana Senator,
Mary Landrieu (D) 
Is presently asking Congress for 
250 BILLION DOLLARS
 To rebuild  New Orleans  . Interesting number…
What does it mean?

This was in 2005, right after Katrina, and it got killed in committee.  It was pretty massive pork, really; but there really was that much damage to the city.  And New Orleans is a major oil port, one of the few deep water ports on the gulf coast.  So it is a valuable city to the US — not just for the people, but for the industry we all depend on.  The levees in New Orleans were built on 19th century technology before Katrina, and basically didn’t exist after.  The city needs a ton of money — maybe not $250B, but quite a lot

A.
Well .. If you are one of the 484,674 residents of  New Orleans    
(every man, woman, and child) 
You each get $516,528..
This is simple division.  How did they get 250,000,000,000 / 484,674 wrong, given that they could have used a calculator?  $515,810.63.  But close enough, I suppose, for the author’s point.  Still, how do you get that wrong?

B.
 Or… If you have one of the 188,251 homes in 
New Orleans  , your home gets $1,329,787.

C. 
Or… If you are a family of four…
Your family gets $2,066,012. 

Washington, D.C.

HELLO! 
Are all your calculators broken??

Building Permit Tax CDL License Tax 
Cigarette Tax 
Corporate Income Tax 
Dog License Tax 
Federal Income Tax (Fed)
Federal Unemployment Tax (FU TA) 
Fishing License Tax 
Food License Tax 
Fuel Permit Tax 
Gasoline Tax 
Hunting License Tax 
Inheritance Tax 
Inventory Tax 
IRS Interest Charges (tax on top of tax) 
IRS Penalties (tax on top of tax) 
Liquor Tax 
Luxury Tax 
Marriage License Tax 
Medicare Tax 
Property Tax 
Real Estate Tax 
Service charge taxes 
Social Security Tax 
Road Usage Tax (Truckers) 
Sales Taxes 
Recreational Vehicle Tax
School Tax  
State Income Tax  
State Unemployment Tax (SUTA) 
Telephone Federal Excise Tax 
Telephone Federal Universal Service Fee Tax 
Telephone Federal, State and Local Surcharge Tax 
Telephone Minimum Usage Surcharge Tax
Telephone Recurring and Non-recurring Charges Tax  
Telephone State and Local Tax 
Telephone Usage Charge Tax 
Utility Tax 
Vehicle License Registration T ax 
Vehicle Sales Tax 
Watercraft Registration Tax 
Well Permit Tax 
Workers Compensation Tax

(And to think, we left British Rule to avoid so many taxes) 

STILL THINK THIS IS FUNNY?

Not one of these taxes existed 100 years ago…

Incorrect.  Or a lie, depending on whether the author is uneducated or uninformed:

* To pay for the REVOLUTIONARY WAR Congress, once there was a Congress, levied taxes on several items on that list up there: Tobacco, spirits, sugar, carriages (the first DMV!), and lots of paperwork taxes among others.  George Washington had to deal with the first post-revolution version of grumbly email forwards when some redneck farmers violently opposed the whiskey tax.

* 1861, Revenue Act.  Funded the Civil War.  3% tax on incomes over $800.  1862 added taxes on items like “playing cards, gunpowder, feathers, telegrams, iron, leather, pianos, yachts, billiard tables, drugs, patent medicines, and whiskey” (per the IRS website) and created a tiered tax system with a standard deduction, not unlike what we have now.

* 1899, War Revenue Act.  Funded the Spanish-American War.  Funny how we raised all these taxes to pay for wars…  This one raised taxes on paperwork, trade, even chewing gum.  This is because the Revenue Act of 1861 and 1862 was challenged and defeated.  Wingnuts will tell you it’s because the founders wrote protections against taxes in the constitution, but that’s a crock.

* 1913 (a mere 96 years ago — not 100, just yet), 16th Amendment, allowing for a mass Federal Income Tax (the Civil War taxes were only unconstitutional based on a technicality, not any founder’s intent).  Interesting note:  From 1913 through the Second World War, American taxes were very low for lower- and middle-income Americans and very high for high-income Americans.  In 1918, for example, taxes started at 6% for the poorest, after a standard deduction, and topped out at 77% of income for the high income earners.  During WWII, total income taxes took in 20% of US GDP!

And our nation was the most prosperous in the world.

 We had absolutely no national debt… 
We had the largest middle class in the world… 
And Mom stayed home to raise the kids. 

What happened? 
Can you spell ‘politicians!’

Don’t blame taxes – they’re a lot lower today than they were in 1949 and 1918!

And I still have to 
Press ’1′ 
For English.

Ah, I see…

I hope this goes around the 
U S A 
At least 100 times 

What the heck happened?????

The Gini index, measuring income inequality in the US, has been rising since the “golden age” (not really, but that’s another email) where we had a large middle class after WWII.  1967, it was 39.7, which is about what the Gini index in Europe is right now (The EU Gini index is 39.0, I believe).  In 2007 it peaked at 47.0 in the US (Bush’s legacy?), and has gone down only to something like 46.0 since.  Higher numbers are more inequality (e.g. CEOs and Lawyers and Military Contractors make lots of money where Nurses and Teachers and Police make little money).  Here’s an international comparison, with more fair countries in green and blue, more unequal countries in purple and red:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Gini_Coefficient_World_CIA_Report_2009.png

Some poor countries are uniformly poor, like Mali; some are horribly unequal, like Sierra Leone.  That makes sense.  But some rich countries are more equal: Canada, Norway, Spain, UK…  pretty much all of them.  Two are very unequal:  The US and China.

Have you ever fact checked an email you received? I usually visit factcheck.org, but they often don’t cover emails like this.

This entry was posted on Monday, December 7th, 2009 at 10:53 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.