Buy American?—Tougher Than You Think!

I followed a big van yesterday that bore a bumper-sticker saying, BUY AMERICAN—SECURE YOUR FUTURE. That got me thinking about the messy facts behind the notion that products sold by American companies are really MADE IN THE  U.S.A. What follows is a glimpse at some details.

He Who Pays the Piper…

I invite you to contemplate the following figures that I obtained from the Campaign Finance Institute website, and particularly from this tabulation. CFI is a non-profit, non-partisan institute affiliated with George Washington University. In 2006 the cost of winning a Congressional election was $1,260,000. Going back a decade, the cost in constant dollars was $888,000, [...]

A Nice Little Tool

Brigitte was reading the paper and noting that new recruits serving in the U.S. Army are paid $16,794 a year. She wondered what I’d earned when I went into the Army back in 1956. I remembered it as $130 per month, but closer checking revealed that to be wrong. I actually made $83.20 a month [...]

“Content Provider”

In the 1990s or thereabouts a new meaning of the word content suddenly appeared. I was then very active in the publishing business, and I’m sure that I was among the first to hear the word used to mean “that which publishers sell and that which media use to attract viewers and listeners.” In this [...]

Health Care Numbers

The following block of numbers comes from this publication of the Census Bureau. The data are, except as noted, for the year 2006:

Number of people without health insurance in 2006: 47.0 million.
Number who were uninsured in 1987: 31.0 million.
Annual rate of growth of uninsured population (1987-2006): 2.2% a year.
Number of people with income at the poverty [...]

The Mystery of Advertising

I assume, as a general rule of thumb, that advertising messages directed to a prequalified potential buyer are easiest to measure by effectiveness. A good example of such an ad is one placed in the Want Ads section of a newspaper or a coupon printed in the paper giving a discount on some merchandise. Responses [...]

Patrolling the Economy

Let’s patrol the borders of our economy and check on a number of trouble spots. An exercise like that tends to introduce a sobering sort of mood. The numbers show what’s really going on—but in some kind of context. Today I want to look at Employment, Housing, and Autos through the lenses provided by the [...]

Twitterpated Media

If Mir Hossein Moussavi ultimately becomes the leader of Iran, our Media will say that Twitter did it all; if, however, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad succeeds in holding on to his old job, the fault will lie with the inability of the Obama administration in putting on the pressure, failing to unleash Israel to bomb, or in [...]

Manager Sickness

The word I really have in mind is the German, Managerkrankheit. It entered the German language in the 1950s; we were in Germany then for a spell and picked it up in its native habitat. Checking on it now I discover that both in German- and in English-language sources it is rendered as a medical [...]

The Working Level

In another post elsewhere, talking about history as a lens on our own times, I contrasted the panorama of historical events and life at the working level. On further reflection, it occurs to me that there is only one level were life actually takes place, and it is at the working level. That which we [...]