Tag Archives: News by the Numbers

News Perspective by the Numbers

Meaningful perspective on statistics that are often presented as secondary support to an obvious political bias, where the only context a typical viewer extracts is the presentation of the particular “story.” To give perspective, I pause the few minutes required to convert to common units, and use simple arithmetic to compare with historical numbers or compare very large numbers to something similarly large that makes common sense. The result is usually less alarming than the “news” would have you believe, but sometimes the result is actually more alarming and you wonder why they aren’t trumpeting the story even more.

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Big Money

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Consider these numbers to put some current news topics in perspective:

$16.9 trillion = annual US gross domestic product estimate (www.BEA.gov)

$2.7 trillion = total US government annual tax revenue, fiscal year 2013 estimated (http://www.gpo.gov, Fiscal Year 2014, Historical Tables, Table 2.1)

$17.2 trillion = US government national debt (www.treasurydirect.gov)

$3.66 trillion = currency exchange reserves held by the Chinese government as of Oct 2013 (www.blogs.wsj.com)

$3.57 trillion = money supply inflation as of Oct 2013 by the practice of quantitative easing (www.federalreserve.gov with data interpretation help by Wikipedia)

17.2 / 2.7 = 6.4. The US government owes more than 6 times what it brings in annually with taxes. (per my own math)

3.66 / 2.7 = 1.4. the value of China’s foreign exchange reserves are equal to the US government tax revenue for a over year and a quarter.

Check out the links. There is a story behind each of these numbers, but the numbers themselves are generally not disputed.